🗺️ Places Mentioned
Tania’s memoir moves through five countries and close to a century of shifting borders. Many of the towns she names as a child were part of the Russian Empire, then interwar Poland or the Soviet Union, and are today in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia — sometimes under a different name entirely. This table lists the places named in the Russian text (and its English / Spanish translations), with their modern name, present-day country, approximate coordinates, and the role each place plays in the story. Coordinates are approximate town/city centers, not exact addresses, except where noted.
| As named in the memoir | Modern name / country | Approx. coordinates | Context |
|---|---|---|---|
| Слуцк (Slutsk) | Slutsk, Minsk Region, Belarus | 53.02° N, 27.55° E | Tania’s hometown, where pages 2–35 take place: the Wolfson house, the Sluch riverbank, the Peretz club, her school years. |
| река Случь (the Sluch River) | Sluch River, still runs through Slutsk, Belarus | 53.02° N, 27.55° E | The river that “split the town in half” — the site of swimming, laundry, and childhood freedom described at length in pages 12–14. |
| Садовая улица (Sadovaya Street) | A street in Slutsk, Belarus (exact modern name unconfirmed) | 53.02° N, 27.55° E | The family’s street before and after the fire that destroyed most of it. |
| Остров (Ostrov) | A village/outskirts near Slutsk, Minsk Region, Belarus | ~53.0° N, 27.5° E (approximate) | Where her maternal grandfather Nakhman Borukhovich and grandmother Pesya lived, on the outskirts of Slutsk. |
| Несвиж (Nesvizh) | Nyasvizh, Minsk Region, Belarus | 53.22° N, 26.69° E | Birthplace/home village of paternal grandmother Khaya, near the Polish border of the time. |
| Уречье (Urechye) | Urechcha (Урэчча), Slutsk District, Belarus | ~53.13° N, 27.85° E (approximate) | Summer home of Aunt Etl and Uncle Samuil Reznik; described fondly in pages 34 and 20. |
| Бобруйск (Bobruisk) | Babruysk, Mogilev Region, Belarus | 53.13° N, 29.22° E | Birthplace of cousin Enta Moiseevna; also where Aunt Malka worked as an education inspector. |
| Минск (Minsk) | Minsk, Belarus (capital) | 53.90° N, 27.57° E | Regional hub throughout — her first love’s pedagogical college, a train transfer point, the Belorussian Commissariat of Education where her uncle worked. |
| Витебск (Vitebsk) | Vitebsk, Belarus | 55.19° N, 30.20° E | Where her grandfather and Aunt Malka moved; Tania’s last vacation before her final year in Moscow, and where her son Nyusenka’s sibling episode takes place. |
| Великие Луки (Velikiye Luki) | Velikiye Luki, Pskov Region, Russia | 56.35° N, 30.52° E | Where the family later lived, mentioned in connection with cousin Enta Moiseevna and Klara’s move to Leningrad. |
| Ленинград (Leningrad) | St. Petersburg, Russia | 59.93° N, 30.34° E | Where her uncle Mikhail studied medicine and married against his family’s wishes; where cousin Klara went to study. |
| Москва (Moscow) | Moscow, Russia (capital) | 55.75° N, 37.62° E | The center of pages 36–45: her arrival in 1926, the Timiryazev Horticultural College, her expulsion and reinstatement, her mother’s 1930 visit before emigrating. |
| Одесса (Odessa) | Odesa, Ukraine | 46.48° N, 30.73° E | Where her first love went to study theater, and where, years later, she unexpectedly saw him perform with a touring drama troupe. |
| Осиповичи (Osipovichi) | Asipovichy, Mogilev Region, Belarus | 53.32° N, 28.63° E | A transfer stop on her first train journey from Slutsk to Moscow, 1926. |
| Смоленск (Smolensk) | Smolensk, Russia | 54.78° N, 32.05° E | Another transfer stop on the same journey. |
| станция Бица (Bitsa station) | Now part of Moscow (Bitsa/Bitsevsky area), Russia | ~55.57° N, 37.57° E | Site of the seed-growing technical college she briefly attended before transferring to Timiryazev. |
| Пронский район, Рязанская область (Pronsk District, Ryazan Province) | Pronsky District, Ryazan Region, Russia | 53.85° N, 39.58° E | Where she was sent for collectivization fieldwork in spring 1929. |
| Пенза (Penza) | Penza, Russia | 53.20° N, 45.00° E | Where a cousin of Aunt Yakhna’s settled after marrying a Russian man, and where Aunt Malka’s family later took refuge during evacuation in WWII. |
| Миссисипи (Mississippi) | Mississippi, USA | 32.7° N, 89.7° W (state, approximate) | Where her father and his brothers first emigrated as young men around the turn of the century, working as peddlers. |
| Хабаровск (Khabarovsk) | Khabarovsk, Russia (Far East) | 48.48° N, 135.08° E | Where she arrived in February 1931 to begin her assignment as an agronomist. |
| Покровка (Pokrovka) | Pokrovka, Khabarovsk Krai, Russia (near Khabarovsk) | ~48.3° N, 135.2° E (approximate) | Her first posting, a state-farm training stop before Birobidzhan. |
| станция Тихонькая (Tikhonkaya station) | Birobidzhan, Russia — renamed in 1931 when it became the seat of the new Jewish Autonomous Region | 48.79° N, 132.93° E | The station where she arrived to join the “Valdheim” kolkhoz; soon after, the settlement was renamed Birobidzhan. |
| колхоз «Валдгейм» (Valdheim kolkhoz) | Valdgeym (Вальдгейм), Jewish Autonomous Region, Russia | ~48.7° N, 132.7° E (approximate) | The Jewish resettlement collective farm where the memoir’s final surviving pages leave her, working as an agronomist under two Chinese market gardeners. |
| Крымский совхоз (Crimean state farm) | Somewhere in Crimea (exact farm unidentified) | 45.0° N, 34.1° E (peninsula, approximate) | Where the state-farm director Finkelstein had previously worked before Pokrovka. |
| Браславское гетто (Braslav ghetto) | Braslaw, Vitebsk Region, Belarus | 55.63° N, 27.03° E | Named only in the foreword — where the author’s relatives were killed in 1942. |
| Нью-Йорк (New York) | New York City, USA | 40.71° N, 74.01° W | Where Khanele, daughter of Luba (Uncle David and Aunt Lipke’s daughter), later settled. |
| Мехико (Mexico City) | Mexico City, Mexico | 19.43° N, 99.13° W | Where Tania’s parents and eldest brother emigrated in the late 1920s, and where both her parents are buried in the Jewish cemetery. |
A note on precision
Most of these coordinates mark the modern town or city center, not the specific house, street, or farm the memoir describes — for small villages like Ostrov, Urechye, and Valdheim, exact coordinates aren’t readily available, and are marked approximate above. Where a place’s name or administrative status has changed (Tikhonkaya → Birobidzhan, Leningrad → St. Petersburg), the table lists the memoir’s original name alongside the name it would be found under on a map today.