Response to Gabriel Giffords

I WRITE this from a small village in central Ukraine, not unlike the one my great-grandfather left about 100 years ago in search of some far-off paradise called America.

News doesn’t travel too fast here. I only get two Russian TV channels, and I speak Ukrainian. My Internet only works when the wind isn’t blowing and precipitation isn’t falling, so the Ukrainian winter isn’t exactly the best time. So my friend Ben felt he had to call me to tell me about the events in Arizona on Jan. 8: a heroic and brave congresswoman, a crazed gunman and a bright-eyed 9-year-old girl who will never get the same chance I did to get inspired by the footsteps of her ancestors.

I grew up proud of my Jewish roots. But it was Washington, D.C., that was my city on a hill. I used to get emotional seeing the Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the Library of Congress. This was where the world was different, I felt. This is why I am here. This is where I belong.

And yet the more time I spent in D.C., the more I felt disillusioned by its self-promoting love affair. Every conversation I had with anyone I met in Washington quickly progressed to whom the person worked for and, even more important, what names were contacts in his or her phones and, later, Facebook friends. Washington was not a city where one made friends: It was a city where one built networks, created connections and brutally took down the opposition. It was a city at war.

Most of my politically active friends often debate in terms of winning or losing. How can we wedge this issue? How can we make the other side look like bigots or socialists? How can we demonize our enemies, who also happen to be our fellow Americans?

Rather than join the flock of my friends headed to the district, I decided to avoid that battlefield. I joined the Peace Corps and went to Ukraine to learn more about where my family came from and to serve America, my country, in as apolitical a way as I possibly could.

I used to dream of becoming a congressman; now, that dream is a nightmare. Not because of the shooting — if anything, the events of Tucson have reignited a passion to be the first to stand up in the line of hate’s fire. Rather, it is because too many of our members of Congress today are fighting a fight in which I don’t care to take part.

In the aftermath of the events in Tucson, Democrats will blame Republicans for loose gun laws and inciting violence, and Republicans will blame Democrats for politicizing a national tragedy. Both will be right and both will be wrong. I, however, blame them both — for fanning the flames of this debate, for refusing to compromise, for seeing only the worst in others and only the best of themselves.

The village I live in is a lot like the one my great-grandfather came from. It used to be 20 percent Jewish as well, before World War II. Now, I am its Jewish population.

While researching the history of this lost Jewish community, I found the names of Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis in slaughtering the local Jews. One of the men listed is the great-grandfather of one of my best students. She is a bright-eyed girl of 10, precocious, and loves learning English. She wants to be a doctor some day, because she heard that it is easy for doctors to move to America and make for themselves a better life.

Recently, I have been teaching her the difference between the present continuous tense and the present perfect tense of the English language, the difference between "I am forgiving" and "I have forgiven." The former denotes we are still in the process, the latter denotes a completed action. I don’t know where exactly I stand.

Sometimes, I still think about her great-grandfather and my great-grandfather and the hatred each must have surely held for the other. But I do know that if we allow all this hatred to continue, our country will remain far more imperfect than my ancestors imagined it to be.