“My grandmother, Shoshana, was Ukrainian, and her husband, my grandfather, Peretz, was Russian. The two first arrived in Israel in the 1920s.” Atalia Katz was shocked by the war that began in Ukraine in February 2022, generating her need to show that this war is driven by government, money, and power. In Vladivostok, a city in eastern Russia near the coast of Japan, where Katz visited in 2019, there is no water in the homes, no sewage system, the houses are crumbling, and a sense of gloom and fear dominates. Katz seeks to underscore the other side, that of Russians living under conditions of hardship and poverty, emphasizing that the politics driving this war are far from them, reminding us that it does not represent Russia’s residents in entirety.
