The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken

If you have been following the invasion of Ukraine by Putin's Russian army, you may find this to be a very interesting and compelling story, even though the events take place in 1930s Ukraine. The story introduces readers to Katya in 1929, 15 and surrounded by a loving family, and a future husband name Pavlo she is passionately in love with, and a table filled with an abundance of wonderful Ukrainian food, breads (Ukraine is, after all, the breadbasket of Europe). and delicacies. 

Six months later, in January 1930, Joseph Stalin begins his invasion of Ukraine, which was already part of the Soviet Union, but his goal is to get rid of the Ukrainians by starving them to death. Stalin's activists encourage the people to join them and become part of their collective farming scheme, but Katya's family resists. Those not joining the collective have high taxes inflicted on them, then their food, farming equipment, and farm animals are taken in lieu of the tax money the Russians know they don't have. The resisters begin to disappear. As things become worse, Katya's father is arrested. And it is decided she will marry Pavlo, and her sister Alina will marry his brother Kolya. But when Pavlo hears that a resistance movement is being put together in the next village, he decides he must go and fight.

Flash forward seventy years to Illinois. Cassie, a widow who lost her husband a year earlier in a car accident while take their daughter out for ice cream, has all but withdrawn from life. But then her mother convinces her to move in with her Ukrainian grandmother, whom she calls Bobby, because of her age and her recent odd behavior. Cassie hears her taking to herself, and then begins to find food hidden all around the house and yard. She also finds a diary her grandmother has been writing in, but it is in Ukrainian. Luckily, there is an unattached, handsome man named Nick living down the street who is friends with her grandmother and who knows Ukrainian. Eventually, her grandmother decides that her story needs to be told and gives Cassie permission to work on it with Nick. 

Ultimately, the two stories, told in alternating chapters, come together, and I don't think you will be very surprised to hear that Katya and Bobby are the same person. If I sound like I am making light of this novel, I am not, I just don't want to give too much away, and there is a lot going on. I found myself so drawn to young Katya's story, but some of the details were really difficult to read. I knew that Stalin was cruel, but I didn't know that he had committed genocide through starvation in Ukraine (the Ukrainian word for this is the Holodomor). I felt exactly like Cassie when she learned what her grandmother had survived "How did I not know about this?" And it certainly compelled me to do some research of my own to find out more about the Holodomor.

On the other hand, I have to be honest and say I wasn't particularly interested in Cassie's story. As soon as I read about Nick, I knew where things where going to go. So yeah, that part was predictable. But she was a good vehicle for adding more information about Bobby into the story. Trauma just doesn't go away and Bobby's life after she left Ukraine up to the present needed to be included.

The Memory Keeper of Kyiv is a book that I definitely recommend and I believe it will appeal to history geeks like myself, to anyone who have been following events in present day Ukraine, and there is even enough romance for fans of that genre.

Thank you, NetGalley and Boldwood Books for granting me a review copy of this book. 

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis by Susan Hood with Greg Dawson

When her 13-year-old granddaughter Aimée wrote her a letter asking about what life was like for her when she was the same age in 1940, Zhanna Arshanskaya Dawson didn't know how to answer her. There was so many long-buried horrors, so much humiliation, so much running to escape capture by the Nazis. But a granddaughter has a right to know and so that part of her family's history unfolds in this gripping free verse biography. 

Ukrainian born Zhanna was a headstrong little girl who used to love wandering the streets of Berdyansk, a resort town on the Sea of Azoz. One day, while wandering, she heard a small band playing music in a funeral procession and fell in love with what she heard. But the Arshanskaya home was already filled with the music of, among others, Rossini, Vizet and Tchaikovsky. Because Zhanna was so headstrong about wandering the streets, her father decided maybe piano lessons would rein her in. Soon the five year old was playing Chopin, Brahms and Beethoven. It didn't take long to realize that Zhanna had a true gift for music. 

But Joseph Stalin, the ruthless dictator of the Soviet Union, had a plan to modernize Ukraine and get rid of the old ways through starvation - in what was the "breadbasket of Europe" people were starving to death as part of Stalin's Five-Year Plan. When Zhanna was eight and her sister Frina was six, the family, having hit hard times, was forced to leave Berdyansk to live in Karkov. Yet, despite now living in poverty, their father had high hopes that both Zhanna and Frina could audition for two spots with scholarships at a renowned music conservatory. Both musically gifted girls were immediately accepted and it was here that Zhanna found her signature piece, Chopin's Fantaisie-Impromptu. This piece of sheet music became her most prized possession, carried all through WWII.

Musically things improved for the family, but financially things got worse and then, in 1941, the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union and the country was officially at war. The Germans wanted all of the Soviet Union, but without its Jews. Shortly after arriving in Kharkov, the Nazis order Jews to gather in the center of town to prepare for evacuation. In snow and numbing cold, the Jews, now prisoners of the Nazis, were marched through the streets to an abandoned tractor factory. After a few weeks of living in abysmal conditions, the prisoners were rounded up and march to Drobitsky Yar. Suspecting what was about to happen, Zhanna's father bribed a young guard to let her escape. When the guard looked away, her father whispered "I don't care what you do. Just live." It was the last time Zhanna saw her parents, but not her sister. 

Finding refuge at a friend's home, Zhanna was reunited with her sister. But Frina refused to talk about how she had gotten away and what happened to their family. Now, the sisters were on their own, and they could be easily recognized by the people in Kharkov who had been to their concerts. What they needed were new names and identity papers. But to get the papers, they would have to be admitted into an orphanage. It was easy to become Anna Morozova and her younger sister Marina, finding places in an orphanage was not so easy. But first, they had to get out of Kharkov. 

Could the sisters survive the war, running and hiding from the cold-blooded Nazis and collaborating Ukrainians, doing what needed to be done to "just live" as their father had said?

Susan Hood has a way of making a person's history come to life in her lyrical, well-researched verse biographies (see Lifeboat 12) Reader's come away knowing not just Zhanna and Frina's struggles and how they were able to survive, but also some needed background history of the Ukraine under Stalin and later, Hitler.  

Interwoven throughout the poems are quotes from Zhanna herself, taken from her oral history recorded by the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, as well as from interviews with her son, Greg Dawson. Other quotes used are well-documented in Hood's copious Back Matter. Most of Zhanna's story is written in free verse, I liked that Hood also included various poetic techniques and poetic forms, which always adds a certain level of energy and richness to a work written in verse that mirrors the musicality of the two talented sisters.   

And, of course, there are recent events in Ukraine that make us realize that the past is never past. The attempted invasion of the independent state of Ukraine by Russia has brought not just the geography of this nation to the fore, but also some of its history dating back to World War II when the Nazis invaded. For example, knowing that the Russians had bombed Ukraine's Holocaust memorial at Drobitsky Yar and reading about it in this book made me that much more aware of the dangers of greedy dictators (Stalin, Hitler and Putin) and the 16,000 Jews who were murdered in that ravine, including Zhanna and Frina's family, where the now damaged memorial stands in Kharkiv. 

Alias Anna: A True Story of Outwitting the Nazis is a true testament to the courage, cleverness, persistence, talent and strong will to survive of both Zhanna and Frina. And perhaps a warning from the past for us all to heed.