In 1978, when I was five years old, my parents and I spent part of the summer in Zaporozhye, a city in Ukraine where we had relatives. One day we went to a nearby beach on the Dneiper River. An adult stranger asked what my name was. I told him that it was Ilya. “What an excellent Russian name,” he said.
My mother had recently told me that “Ilya” was a Jewish name from the Bible (it is in fact a Russified version of the biblical “Eliahu”). I started to explain this to the Ukrainian man.
My mother overheard this little etymological discourse, and quickly pulled me away. She then instructed me in no uncertain terms that I was not to tell anyone in Ukraine that I was Jewish or had a Jewish name. The Ukrainians, I later learned, were considered to be even more anti-Semitic than the Russians. Ironically, thirty years later I married the granddaughter of a Ukrainian nationalist who had fled to America in 1919.