Elsewhere this week: books about Ukraine (a novel and a memoir) and a garage story
Reviewing a novel, a war memoir, and considering what's in your garage
No, it’s not Saturday yet, but you’re getting an extra newsletter this week.
It turned out to be an unusually full week of publications, and I wanted to share them.
A novel about Ukraine: from the Holocaust to the present
I reviewed journalist Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel, Your Presence is Mandatory for Plough. A taste from my reflections on this powerful story:
…when the novel opens in 2007, the reader witnesses one elderly man’s mostly peaceful final journey out of this life and the secrets his departure unexpectedly reveals to his unsuspecting family. He is Yefim Shulman, a World War II veteran, loving husband and father. An ordinary man, boring even. But following Yefim’s death, his wife and daughter discover a packet of papers – a written confession of his, addressed to the KGB, telling of the secret he had hidden from everyone else for over sixty years, of what really happened to him during the war.
For Vasilyuk herself, this novel is a dirge, a song of mourning and sorrow expressing her despair that earthly redemption for Ukrainians cannot come from Ukraine. An unspoken longing hangs in the air at the novel’s conclusion.
If the ending feels at first glance unsatisfying, abrupt even, it is because the history of the region is. Indeed, Vasilyuk is an acclaimed journalist, but in this novel, she is first and foremost a sensitive, lyrical storyteller, who brings attention to the tragic history of Ukraine that began decades before the earliest events in the book and is yet unfolding.
A Ukrainian journalist’s memoir on the current war
For Law and Liberty, I reviewed a wartime memoir of a Ukrainian journalist who, unlike Sasha Vasilyuk, did not immigrate, but has spent his lifetime in post-Soviet Ukraine. A taste:
It is difficult to speculate: Just what exactly was Putin thinking in late 2021 and early 2022, as he was plotting this invasion? It seems that he genuinely was expecting a swift surrender, used as he is to ruling people who have not known freedom, and who, therefore, do not resist or fight back. But perhaps the lessons of the Maidan Revolution a decade ago should have taught Putin to know better. When it comes to Ukraine, Ponomarenko suggests: “We grew up hearing phrases like ‘Euro-Atlantic integration.’ In high schools and universities, we were engrossed in reading Montesquieu and soaked up tantalizing concepts like the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.”
These lessons clearly sank in. Instead of surrendering to Russia, Ponomarenko’s generation stood in queues for hours on end in those early days of the war, just to enlist in the Ukrainian military. And those who didn’t formally enlist simply brought their own weapons and volunteered in various capacities.
Cleaning out your garage for spring?
Over at Front Porch Republic: “What’s in Your Garage?” where I think about our cluttered modern lives (seriously, so much clutter in the garage!) theologically. The garage and its clutter is yet another result of the Fall.
It seemed particularly timely for this essay to run this Monday, right as my city’s spring cleanup crew picked up large trash items from our curb. So, my garage is in better shape going into the weekend than it has been since we moved here in July!