100 years ago this last July my (adopted) grandmother and her family fled Ukraine via the port of Odessa. Allegedly just on a round-trip summer cruise to Athens, once in Greece they jumped ship and went to America. They left Ukraine for a bunch of major reasons: 1. They knew that WWI was just about to break out and they wanted to get out of Europe before all hell broke loose, 2. They were fairly wealthy department store owners who saw the writing on the wall as far as the coming communist revolution, and 3. Her family was of a mixed race/religion/nationalities (Ukrainian Jewish father, Scottish Presbyterian mother) which means pretty much everyone hated and harassed them for being one or the other – or not being one or the other.