Otherland

My daughter was always the non-optional part of this trip.

I needed her to come with me, for better or for worse, not simply because I wanted her to know where her mother and grandmother came from, but because I wanted her to feel, alongside me, the pull of our family history, to size up for herself the true measurements of our past, or perhaps of any past - its depth, its reach and its towering presence in the present.

For years Maria Tumarkin wanted to travel with her daughter to Russia and Ukraine - the dynamically changing place where her family came from and which she left at the age of fifteen. More than anything, she wanted to bring together her mother's and her daughter's worlds and the different continents, histories and experiences they encompassed. Before they set off, Maria wistfully imagined her and her daughter's hearts beating in unison, forging a nearly superhuman bond. And it is not that stifling Metro crowds, language barriers and mind-numbing bureaucracy could ultimately stand in the way of such a reckoning, but, in Maria's case, the past was not simply another country, but one that no longer existed.

A six-week trip traversing three generations, three lifetimes and three profoundly different but profoundly interconnected stories of mothers and daughters.