HOMECOMING: Author Irene Zabytko lectures in Chicago (09/03/00)

HOMECOMING: Author Irene Zabytko lectures in Chicago

by Irene Antonovych

CHICAGO - A bouquet of velvety bluish-green wormwood rested in a large ceramic vase on the floor by a small table with books ready for signing. The author arrived with a cheerful smile, just like the one in her photo on the jacket of her new novel "The Sky Unwashed."

Irene Zabytko had returned to Chicago, her birthplace.

She had left the city in the 1970s as a young student in search of her future; on July 9 she came back to the Ukrainian Village neighborhood a celebrity.

Every seat in the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art was filled as Ms. Zabytko came to the lecture and began with a reading of Taras Shevchenko's poem.

* * *

The sky is unwashed, and the waves are sleepy,
And beyond the shore, far, far away,
The reeds as though drunk,
Sway without wind. Merciful Lord!
How much longer do I have
In this open prison,
This useless sea,
This tedious world...

* * *

This poem, with which the book opens, sets the pace and the mood of Ms. Zabytko's novel. It is immediately followed by a quote from Revelations 8:10-11 referring to "Chornobyl," or wormwood (artemisia vulgaris): "... and there fell a great star from heaven, and the name of the star is called Wormwood; and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter."

From the start, one can feel the uneasy calm before the storm. It is a counterpoint to the explosion that is to reverberate throughout the planet from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant on April 26, 1986.

However, before the explosion, there is a prologue - a pastoral scene of citizens working on the hilltop and cows grazing in the fertile grasslands. In a few words Ms. Zabytko describes the Communist promise and then the apathy and disillusionment of the promises unkept. "Near the fields, wild red-orange poppies" prepare us for the color of the explosion soon to come.

There is a premonition of disaster when Paraskevia notes that "The storks had not returned to nest on her thatched roof ... [they] had always returned just when the thick long icicles under the eves melted and dripped like a death knell." The introduction creates an underlying dramatic tension throughout the story as Ms. Zabytko describes events in the everyday life of the villagers.

The novel is written simply - in the manner of a folk tale. As are many children's stories, it is set in a village called Starylis (meaning old forest). There is a "baba yaha" character ("When Marusia first saw her [Lazorska] she felt sure she was a witch or a gypsy ..."), and there is a terrible evil that lurks nearby (Chornobyl's nuclear power plant). The role of the redeemer comes not in the figure of a prince, but in the person of Marusia, the grandmother - the "berehynia," or protectress. It is she who at the end of the story offers to take upon herself the sins of another. Marusia says to the dying Lazorska, "Listen to me - I will take it on my soul. Let me end your suffering like I promised. Let me help you face God."

As the effects of the fallout take their toll, Marusia continues to ring the church bells every day so that someone will know she still exists. The Christmas and Easter traditions link the group of women to their past and unite the survivors to each other in the celebration of life amidst death.

"The Sky Unwashed" was inspired by a true life account of the return of elderly people to the village of Opachychi, written by Marta Kolomayets for The Ukrainian Weekly (April 21, 1996).

After many rejections from both publishers and agents, Ms. Zabytko found an editor at Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, N.C., a division of Workman Publishing in New York, who became interested in the story. A year later, Ms. Zabytko found herself on a book-signing tour that brought her back to her hometown.

At the book-singing and reading none of Ms. Zabytko's classmates from grade school were present. Ms. Zabytko recalled her days at St. Nicholas Catholic School, where she felt different, not because she didn't know how to speak English, but because her Ukrainian was not perfect.

Nonetheless, the author has used her Ukrainian heritage as an inspiration for her writing. Among her favorite writers are Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko. After she completed her book-signing tour toward the end of July at Harvard, Ms. Zabytko planned to return to her home in Florida to complete her next novel, a Ukrainian version of Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

Recently, at a library where Ms. Zabytko was a guest, the librarian suggested that she change her name. Her response: "Would you ask Solzhenitsyn to change his?" Ms. Zabytko cannot change her name, for it is a name to be remembered.

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