Anna Desnitskaya is the author-illustrator of On the Edge of the World, The Apartment: A Century of Russian History, and other books for young readers. Her new picture book, A Star Shines Through, is inspired in part by her experience leaving her longtime home in Moscow with her family amid the current turmoil in Russia.
I was born and raised in Moscow. My family has been living in Moscow since 1917. Before the Russian Revolution, Jews couldn’t live in big cities, and as soon as it became possible, my great-great-grandfather Abram, with his young pregnant wife Revekka, oved to the capital, where my great-grandmother was born.
I always felt that this city was mine: the alleys in the city center, the small courtyards, the view from the hill where five generations of our family lived, the red bell tower of the monastery, the long northern summer days and the short winter ones (by four in the afternoon in December, it was already dark, and the gray sky hung very low), the snow-covered houses after a snowfall, and the completely empty city on the morning of January first. And then the smells: the scent of poplar buds, the wet hot asphalt after the rain, the warm March wind, the Metro, the first snow, the lilacs, the railroad, old wooden houses. It was all mine.
You could say that everything changed on February 24, 2022, when at six in the morning I held my phone in my trembling hands and read the news: “Russia has begun the invasion of Ukraine.” “Russia is shelling Kyiv with ballistic missiles.” “Russian troops have landed in Odessa.” It was as if the air was being subtly siphoned out, as if a terrible black cloud was creeping over my beloved country and my beloved city.
My husband and I knew we could no longer stay in Russia, and immediately after the war started, we—with our three children, a cat, and a dog—left for Israel. In Israel, we were surrounded by incredible care. We received so much support from friends and strangers—but it felt like we had flown to Mars. Everything was absolutely incomprehensible and foreign—the letters (we couldn’t even read a pizza sign!), the food, the weather, the architecture, the holidays, even the weekends (I still couldn’t get used to Sunday being a working day).
It was very hard for both my husband and me and our children because we no longer had a home, because there was nothing to cling to in this completely foreign and incomprehensible country.
Then we rented our first apartment (tiny, uncomfortable, completely unlike our beloved Moscow home) and went to Ikea to buy some little things for it. It was absolutely incredible—exactly like the Ikea in Moscow. It seemed like if you looked out the window, you would see not scorching Haifa, but Moscow. We bought a paper star—just like the one we had on our window at home in Moscow, and when I lit the star and put it on the balcony, this foreign place became a little more like home.
Gradually, we settled into the apartment, learned to read the signs, and even speak a little Hebrew, and the world around us started to look less like Mars. No, it still wasn’t home—but it was a world where our star shone.
One day, in a Hebrew lesson, it occurred to me that this could become a book, and right in the middle of the lesson, in my phone notes, I wrote a manuscript. It was very difficult to draw this book; I felt internal resistance all the time. But when I finished, I realized that this was also part of the healing process. And I hope that this book can help children from different countries who have lost their homes to start loving the place where they were forced to be.
We never really settled in Israel; now we live in Montenegro, and I don’t know where we will end up next. But wherever we go, we will take our star with us.
For all two and a half years of the war, I have thought a lot about my great-great-grandfather Abram and great-great-grandmother Revekka. What was it like for them to leave their beloved hometown and move to distant, cold Moscow? What was it like for them to be without their relatives in a foreign city? The city they left, after the division of the Russian Empire, ended up in another country, and because of the Iron Curtain, they could no longer see their relatives who remained there. During World War II, all their relatives perished in the Holocaust.
I don’t know if my great-great-grandfather regretted leaving his hometown, but I am so grateful to him for giving me mine. And I hope that someday the darkness will pass, and we will be able to return home.
A Star Shines Through by Anna Desnitskaya. Eerdmans, $18.99 Aug. 20 ISBN 978-0-8028-5631-9
