BOOK NOTES: Book recounts "one woman's journey into the country of her past" (05/28/00)

BOOK NOTES

Book recounts "one woman's journey into the country of her past"

"Return to Ukraine" by Ania Savage. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press: Eastern European Studies, No. 12, 2000, 272 pp., $29.95 (cloth).

by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak

Billed as "one woman's journey to the country of her past," Ania Savage's "Return to Ukraine" is memoir literature on the contemporary period.

Three books are enfolded into this elegant and readable volume. One is a first-hand account of the very first months of Ukraine's existence as an independent state upon the collapse of the USSR. The other is an amusing travelogue through Crimea and the Caucasian coast of the Black Sea. The third is the personal story of a daughter-mother relationship - made all the more poignant by the onset of the mother's Alzheimer disease.

Ms. Savage, an American journalist born during World War II in Ukraine, which her parents fled before the arrival of Soviet forces, is invited by the still existing Soviet Ukrainian government to teach a course on American journalism. She arrives in Ukraine in 1991 - two days after the aborted putsch put an end to the existence of the USSR.

Accompanied for a few weeks by her ill mother. as well as by her spry octogenarian aunt, Ms. Savage begins the Ukrainian travels in Slavsk, a Carpathian village that has just begun exhuming the remains of soldiers of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

A seasoned journalist, Ms. Savage weaves together the complex story of the fate of Ukrainians during the second world war and the Soviet takeover in a way that engages the reader new to the topic without in any way simplifying the story.

As she captures the tentativeness of the first post-putsch days, Ms. Savage is able to recreate the terror of the population at the time of the execution of the UPA men and women. Later in the story we learn that a child's skeleton also was exhumed.

As she wends her way through Lviv and on to Kyiv, and eventually to Donetsk, Odesa and other cities, Ms. Savage is the consummate journalist, blending with the population and eliciting their reactions. She ends up teaching and living in Kyiv at what had been the Higher Communist Party School, and also teaches journalism at Kyiv State University.

What makes the book courageous within the Ukrainian American setting is the injection of the personal story, especially the relationship of Ms. Savage with her mother, Anna Bojcun. That personal aspect makes the experiences in Ukraine come alive for the American reader. Although the Ukraine described in this book is almost a decade old, the people, the feelings and the events remain vibrant on each page. What's more, this book provides a wonderful introduction for those not familiar with Ukraine and with the intricacies of being a Ukrainian American.

The book is must reading for all ages - and an excellent gift for non-Ukrainians.

"... Going back became one of the highlights of my life," Ms. Savage writes. "I was lucky to be in Ukraine during a time history will remember. I saw centuries of history being relived, re-examined and reordered. Men and women on the streets walked, smiling and elated, rejoicing at the end of tyranny."

She describes her work in Kyiv and speculates on how her Ukrainian heritage and American youth and education influence her view of the people and places she encounters in Ukraine.

Ms. Savage is a journalist who has taught at the University of Denver and the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Her writings have appeared in such national publications as The New York Times and USA Today.

"Return to Ukraine" is available at stores or direct from Texas A&M University Press (800-826-8911); secure online ordering at www.tamu.edu/upress.

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