From Ukraine to Jerusalem, looking for Spring

Yesterday I went to get my nails done. There was a storm outside. Rain and hail, and the streets were empty.

I was the only one in the salon, except for the manicurist — a woman with luminous blue eyes and the highest cheekbones I’ve ever seen. She looked like she’d stepped out of a painting, maybe Ukrainian folk art, maybe Soviet realism, something both soft and severe. I guessed she was in her fifties, but there was a tremor in her hand that made me wonder if she was older than she looked.

“I am from Ukraine,” she told me, in halting English. “Come two year ago. Because War.”

Her Hebrew, she added, was worse. Our conversation was a symphony of brokenness — her fractured English and Hebrew, my broken Hebrew and non-existent Russian, hand gestures doing half the work. We were immigrants from opposite sides of the world, orbiting each other with cautious goodwill, trying our best.

I was being very particular about the color. I wanted this exact shade of coral pink, the one that reminds me of spring. Aviv, I said in Hebrew… vesna? I asked on Russian. I was hoping to bridge the space between us.

She nodded. “Yes. Spring. In Russia is vesná …But… how say in Ukraine? I don’t know. I not good with languages. I grow up in USSR, in Russia. In Ukraine also, yes, but… we speak Russian.”

She paused. “My husband — he speak many language. Ukrainian, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, English, French, Spanish, Italian…” She counted on her fingers, laughing. “Me, I just Russian. In my job back in Ukraine, that is enough.”

I asked what she used to do.

“I have degree in medicine,” she said, lifting a nail polish bottle. “But I am nuclear physicist.”

She said it casually, as if telling me she used to work at the post office. Maybe I misunderstood. But I don’t think I did.

We kept talking — or trying to. Between the layers of language, I understood that she believed Putin was KGB, and Trump too. That Ukraine had problems, but they were its problems. “Not perfect, but is ours mess,” she said. “Russia now makes big big mess.”

And I thought about Israel. This place is also a mess — a big, beautiful, aching mess — but it’s our mess. I said this to her and she nodded, the understanding deep between us now.

“You feel that about Israel?” I asked. “That it’s yours too?”

“Of course,” she said. “I am Jew. I know what is totalitarian. I worry here. But yes. Mine.”

She told me her son is a classical composer. Her parents were both doctors. She commutes every day from the south to Jerusalem — “Because I love,” she said. “Not religious. But… Jerusalem…” and she fluttered her fingers, like she was trying to catch a word in the air.

And I thought of myself, when I first came here. Of the ache of not being fully seen. Of being a stranger. Until I found my people. Until I found a way to belong.

“I watch… every day… rockets fall back in Ukraine. Boom, boom. Close. Too close.” She didn’t look up, just kept t cutting my cuticles. “This is why I come. Was in middle of War.” Her voice was calm, almost detached — the way people speak when a story is too big to carry all at once.

She came to Israel for safety, for shelter, she said. But then she looked up at me and half-smiled, rueful. “And then… few months, here — again. War again. Always war. And where I live, the ground is always shaking .” She said it like an old truth. Not bitter, just tired.

And we sat with that. The symmetry of our lives. The irony of fleeing one war only to land in another. The knowledge that safety is never guaranteed — not here, not there, not anywhere, not for people like us. And yet, we stay.

And she told me she actually wants to go back to Ukraine to one of the universities to deliver a paper she wrote on nuclear physics that was recently published. “I go after war,” she said.

“Which war?” I asked.

She gave me a weary, but wry smile.

“Yes.”

“ But I like job here. My mother also DOCTOR!!! and I sometimes give medical pedicure, so I am used to human body And like to help feel good. I like to meet people when I do gel, nail polish, pedicure. I like people happy Because you make me unhappy, I try to be happy.”

She found the coral pink, eventually. I thanked her. Profusely.

She smiled:

“I am happy. Together, we find spring.”