May 1, 2013. St. Petersburg, Russia — St. Petersburg, Russia, is now on my list of favorite cities, along with New York, Paris, Vancouver, and Hong Kong, to mention just a few.

After just one day, I’ve fallen in love with this city. Sidewalk cafes, wide boulevards, canals and rivers, low-rise classic architecture, and eminently walkable streets dripping with history.  For three hours Katherine and I walked around with Nikolai, our guide from Peter’s Walking Tours (www.peterswalk.com), through the historic heart of St. Petersburg.

Talk about a small world! Nickolai was wearing a baseball cap from a motorcycle shop only a few blocks from our house in Venice Beach, California. He and his American wife lived around the corner from us just a few years ago.

Our timing was perfect – the sun was shining, it was almost warm, and it was too early in the season for the hordes of cruise ship tourists who pack the city from mid May on. Best of all it was May Day. No tanks and missiles, but lots of people walking on the streets, many closed to vehicular traffic, and even a parade, including a small contingent of die-hard communists.

But it was the historical sites that ruled the day. Nikolai is clearly a fan of Dostoevsky. We saw the legendary writer’s dorm room at the military engineering college he briefly attended (from the outside), the apartment he moved to when he got fed up with the dorms (also from the outside), and the apartment in which he died (ditto). We walked along Nevsky prospekt, St Petersburg’s version of Fifth Ave., visited a market (with the largest selection of smoked fish I’ve seen outside of Zabar’s in Manhattan), and the Winter Palace.

The place that had the biggest impact on me was the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood. With several onion shaped domes of different colors, it‘s a stunner, well deserving its dramatic name.

But it’s the history of the spot, not the church that stands on it, that really grabbed me. On that spot in 1881 the popular, reformist czar Alexander II was assassinated by anarchists after several unsuccessful attempts. According to Nikolai, the discovery that a couple of the assassins were Jewish led to the pograms that drove millions of Jews to flee Russia and emigrate to the United States in the late 1880s and beyond.

Now I’m not sure that his analysis tells the whole story. But there was no denying the potential personal impact of the historical event. Both my wife and I are descended from Russian Jews who emigrated to the US during the pograms. Unfortunately, I did not pay much attention to the few stories of my family’s history in Russia that I heard while I was growing up, and there is no one left alive who might know those stories. But I do remember mention of St. Petersburg as one of the places where the Mankins (or Aptekmans, my mother’s family) might have come from.

So I couldn’t help but think that: 1) I was possibly walking in the footsteps of my ancestors, and 2) what might have been had my grandparents not felt compelled to leave Russia 120 or so years ago. I’m glad they did. In any case, that mere hint of a possible ancestral history, all that is now possible, has whetted my appetite for more.

Tomorrow the Hermitage and in another search for my ephemeral roots, a visit to the Grand Choral Synagogue.