Best of
Ukraine

2009

Tevye the Milkman


Sholom Aleichem - 2009
    Included are "Tevye the Dairyman, " his masterpiece and the basis for Fiddler on the Roof, and all 21 Railroad Stories, in which human nature and the various shocks of modernity are perceived by men and women riding the trains from shtetl to shtetl.

The Museum of Abandoned Secrets


Oksana Zabuzhko - 2009
    At its center: three women linked by the abandoned secrets of the past—secrets that refuse to remain hidden.While researching a story, journalist Daryna unearths a worn photograph of Olena Dovgan, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army killed in 1947 by Stalin’s secret police. Intrigued, Daryna sets out to make a documentary about the extraordinary woman—and unwittingly opens a door to the past that will change the course of the future. For even as she delves into the secrets of Olena’s life, Daryna grapples with the suspicious death of a painter who just may be the latest victim of a corrupt political power play.From the dim days of World War II to the eve of Orange Revolution, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets is an “epic of enlightening force” that explores the enduring power of the dead over the living.

The Veselka Cookbook: Recipes and Stories from the Landmark Restaurant in New York's East Village


Tom Birchard - 2009
    Veselka (rainbow in Ukrainian) has grown from a simple newsstand serving soup and sandwiches into a twenty-four-hour gathering place, without ever leaving its original location on the corner of East Ninth Street and Second Avenue. Veselka is, quite simply, an institution.The Veselka Cookbook contains more than 150 recipes, covering everything from Ukrainian classics (potato pierogi, five kinds of borscht, grilled kielbasa, and poppy seed cake) to dozens of different sandwiches, to breakfast fare (including Veselka's renowned pancakes), to the many elements of a traditional Ukrainian Christmas Eve feast.Veselka owner Tom Birchard shares stories about Veselka's celebrity customers, the local artists who have adopted it as a second home, and the restaurant's other lesser-known, but no less important, longtime fans, and he offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to serve five thousand gallons of borscht a year and to craft three thousand pierogi daily---all by hand.The Veselka Cookbook will delight anyone with an interest in Ukrainian culture, New York City's vibrant downtown, and the pleasures of simple, good food.

Klotsvog


Margarita Khemlin - 2009
    Maya Abramovna Klotsvog has had quite a life, and she wants you to know all about it. Selfish, garrulous, and thoroughly entertaining, she tells us where she came from, who she didn't get along with, and what became of all her husbands and lovers.In Klotsvog, Margarita Khemlin creates a first-person narrator who is both deeply self-absorbed and deeply compelling. From Maya's perspective, Khemlin unfurls a retelling of the Soviet Jewish experience that integrates the historical and the personal into her protagonist's vividly drawn inner and outer lives. Maya's life story flows as a long monologue, told in unfussy language dense with Khemlin's magnificently manipulated Soviet clich�s and matter-of-fact descriptions of Soviet life. Born in a center of Jewish life in Ukraine, she spent the war in evacuation in Kazakhstan. She has few friends but several husbands, and her relationships with her relatives are strained at best. The war looms over Klotsvog, and the trauma runs deep, as do the ambiguities and ambivalences of Jewish identity. Lisa Hayden's masterful translation brings this compelling character study full of dark, sly humor and new perspectives on Jewish heritage and survival to an English-speaking audience.

The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew


Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern - 2009
    Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern focuses on five writers and poets of Jewish descent whose literary activities span the 1880s to the 1990s. Unlike their East European contemporaries who disparaged the culture of Ukraine as second-rate, stateless, and colonial, these individuals embraced the Russian- and Soviet-dominated Ukrainian community, incorporating their Jewish concerns in their Ukrainian-language writings. The author argues that the marginality of these literati as Jews fuelled their sympathy toward Ukrainians and their national cause. Providing extensive historical background, biographical detail, and analysis of each writer’s poetry and prose, Petrovsky-Shtern shows how a Ukrainian-Jewish literary tradition emerged. Along the way, he challenges assumptions about modern Jewish acculturation and Ukrainian-Jewish relations.

Scratches on a Prison Wall: A Wartime Memoir


Luba Komar - 2009
    Throughout, Luba retains her dignity and manifests a quiet heroism-convincingly demonstrating that totalitarianism is ultimately powerless in the face of individuals with the spiritual courage to speak the truth." -Alexander J. Motyl, Rutgers University-Newark, Author of "Who Killed Andrei Warhol" Ukraine is suffering under Soviet domination in 1940 as World War II begins. Luba Komar, a politically active student at a Ukrainian university, finds herself whisked away in the middle of the night by the Soviet Secret Police. She is tortured, imprisoned and then sentenced to death in a secret Soviet trial.Fortunately, her death sentence is commuted to exile. With other prisoners, she's loaded onto a train headed to the dreaded Siberian concentration camps.Luckily, Luba never reaches Siberia. As Nazi bombers approach overhead, the Soviets divert the train to another prison. There, the inmates courageously stage a prison break, risking their lives.Luba is witness to the dramatic events that shaped Ukrainian and Soviet history both during and after WWII. In recording her ordeal, she brings to life the stories of her fellow prisoners, and recounts her eventual escape to the West. Scratches on a Prison Wall is a powerful testament to its author and the times in which she lived.

Babi Yar


Frederic P. Miller - 2009
    The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Friedrich Eberhardt, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by combined forces of SS, SD and SiPo.

The Lost World of Old Europe: The Danube Valley, 5000-3500 BC


David W. Anthony - 2009
    Its inhabitants lived in prosperous agricultural towns. The ubiquitous goddess figurines found in their houses and shrines have triggered intense debates about women's roles. The Lost World of Old Europe is the accompanying catalog for an exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. This superb volume features essays by leading archaeologists as well as breathtaking color photographs cataloguing the objects, some illustrated here for the first time.The heart of Old Europe was in the lower Danube valley, in contemporary Bulgaria and Romania. Old European coppersmiths were the most advanced metal artisans in the world. Their intense interest in acquiring copper, Aegean shells, and other rare valuables gave rise to far-reaching trading networks. In their graves, the bodies of Old European chieftains were adorned with pounds of gold and copper ornaments. Their funerals were without parallel in the Near East or Egypt. The exhibition represents the first time these rare objects have appeared in the United States.An unparalleled introduction to Old Europe's cultural, technological, and artistic legacy, The Lost World of Old Europe includes essays by Douglass Bailey, John Chapman, Cornelia-Magda Lazarovici, Ioan Opris and Catalin Bem, Ernst Pernicka, Dragomir Nicolae Popovici, Michel S�f�riad�s, and Vladimir Slavchev.

Holodomor: The Great Famine in Ukraine 1932-1933


Diana Bojko - 2009
    It presents documents on the famine in Ukraine in the first half of the 1930's, documents created by the Soviet special services, as well as Polish military intelligence and diplomatic services. The volume also holds documents of the Polish police and local government administration reporting on the reactions of Ukrainians living in Poland with respect to the information on the tragic events in Soviet Ukraine.

Hunger by Design: The Great Ukrainian Famine and Its Soviet Context


Halyna Hryn - 2009
    The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the anniversary with a symposium in October 2003 titled The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932 1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project. This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov s large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; Niccolo Pianciola s description of the denomadization famine in Kazakhstan from 1931 to 1933; and Gijs Kessler s study of events in the Urals region from the same period. Also included in this volume are Andrea Graziosi s remarks on the present state of Famine scholarship and how it addresses the question of genocide, Hennadii Boriak s assessment of the current state of source material, and an essay by George Grabowicz on the legacy of the Famine in Ukraine today.