Ukrainian author Irene Zabytko publishes new book (08/31/03)

Ukrainian author Irene Zabytko publishes new book

"When Luba Leaves Home" by Irene Zabytko. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill: 2003. 240 pp., $21.95.

Ukrainian American author Irene Zabytko has recently published a collection of stories called "When Luba Leaves Home." The book contains 10 short stories that follow the development of the main character, Luba, and, in so doing, examine the struggle of first-generation Ukrainian Americans to come to terms with their mixed national identity.

The book is set in 1968 in the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago, and Luba is a 19-year-old college student. Luba has a burning desire to escape from the Ukrainian Village and find her own identity as a "real" American. She even Americanizes her name, enrolling at her college as Linda, rather than Luba.

Luba tries to achieve a new sense of freedom from her immediate surroundings by buying a used car. However, her attempt at freedom from the Ukrainian community only results in a closer connection to it. Since she owns a car, the people in the Ukrainian Village come to rely on her for rides. Luba ends up driving her father to the doctor, driving the widow of a Ukrainian poet to a church banquet in her honor, and giving her friends from the community rides to school.

In the end, Luba comes to terms with her dual identity as a Ukrainian American, learning to be both Ukrainian and American. In the course of her narrative, Luba also provides a portrait of life in an urban Ukrainian American community in the 1960s, when World War II refugees were still relatively recent immigrants.

Like the character Luba, Irene Zabytko is a first-generation Ukrainian American from the Ukrainian Village in Chicago. For her writing, she has received the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award and has appeared on National Public Radio's "The Sound of Writing."

Ms. Zabytko is also the author of "The Sky Unwashed," a novel about elderly Ukrainian women who moved back into their homes near the Chornobyl power plant not long after the disastrous explosion. "The Sky Unwashed" was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers title, a Book Sense 76 selection and a New England Booksellers Association Discovery selection.

The book was recently reviewed in the Chicago Tribune. Writing in the paper's May 25 issue, Julie Parson-Nesbitt noted that "Irene Zabytko brings this place [the Ukrainian Village section of Chicago] and time vividly to life with insight, affection and humor" and that she "provides an engaging and perceptive look into a community rarely portrayed in American literature."

The reviewer also wrote that Ms. Zabytko "has a gift for bringing her characters to life by showing their weaknesses" and "has a sharp ear for language." Ms. Parson-Nesbitt added that "Chicago readers will catch the in jokes and sly references: Western Avenue becomes Eastern Avenue, and the University of Illinois at Chicago is thinly disguised as Loop University."

" 'When Luba Leaves Home' adds to the enduring literature of American immigrant stories told through the compelling voices of its crucial first-generation daughters," the review concludes.

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