In October 1989 I and 80 Americans and Canadians along with an equal number of Soviets participated in a Peace Walk through the Ukraine. We walked and bussed from Usgarod on the Hungarian border, along the northern border of Rumania, then up through Kamenets Poldolsk, through Vinitsa and on to Kiev. This route took us within a few miles of Ostropol, the place where my family had come from about one hundred years ago.
I went to Ostropol in 2006 in connection with my book, A Russian Jew of Bloomsbury: The Life and Times of Samuel Koteliansky (McGill UP, 2011). I went there because the subject of my book, Samuel Koteliansky, a Russian-English literary translator and a close friend of Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, and H.G. Wells, among others, came from Ostropol.
My husband, Tom Levy, and I travelled to Ukraine from July 21 to 28, 2008, in order to visit the shtetls of my parents: Ostropol, the ancestral home of the Echenbergs, my maternal family, and Koretz, the birthplace of my father.
Father Ken Nowakowski, president of Caritas Ukraine and Rabbi Reuben Azman, of the Great Synagogue of Kyiv, arranged for my visit to the Echenberg homeland.