BOOK REVIEW: Ania Savage returns to Ukraine (06/10/01)

BOOK REVIEW

Ania Savage returns to Ukraine

"Return to Ukraine" by Ania Savage. Texas A & M University, 259 pp, $29.95 (hardcover).

by Eugene and Helena Melnitchenko

"We are looking, you and I, at a ridge of mountains that resemble the Blue Ridge..." begins Ania Savage's multi-faceted "Return to Ukraine," the 12th book in the series of Eastern European studies edited by Stepan G. Mestrovic, instantly drawing the reader into the narrative.

A scholarly work, a memoir, a travel book, it is unusually well-written and researched, objective in its depiction of a nation, both new and ancient, in its first year of independence. A journalist by profession, an American by naturalization, Ms. Savage sees the country of her birth, which she left as a small child, unsentimentally with its imperfections as it struggles to become a democracy after 70 years of Communism in eastern and 50 years in western Ukraine.

In his preface, Senior Editor Mestrovic points out that little has been written about life under Communism in contrast to the many books about life under the Nazis. Writing about the atrocities committed by the Communists in the small Carpathian town of Slavske and those by the Nazis in Babyn Yar, and the artificial famines of 1932-1933 and 1946-1947 engineered by Stalin (7 million died in the first and a million in the second), Ms. Savage does not mince words.

Communism and the horrific legacy of the second world war cast a long shadow as she describes the xenophobia and paranoia of the bureaucracy and the population itself, as well as her own paranoia. As a child of that war whose parents fled Ukraine, she cannot escape it either. During her extended stay in Ukraine, first as a journalism lecturer at Kyiv State University and later as a teacher of English in the Crimea, she thinks she is being watched. Undoubtedly, she was.

Ms. Savage paints the Ukrainian landscape, offering an excellent tour of this country of old cities, mountains, steppes and the Black Sea. Maintaining a journalist's objectivity, she does not see the country of her birth, romanticized by her mother as expatriates often do, through rose-colored glasses, but tells it like it is - the bad roads and shabby towns amid the natural beauty of the Carpathian or the Crimean mountains. With an eye for the telling detail, she is particularly skilled in her characterizations of the many Ukrainians with whom she worked and lived and whom she encountered in her travels through the country.

Brought up in the United States, Ms. Savage realizes that she is no longer a Ukrainian in the country of her birth. "I am different from ... the people around me because I escaped being transformed by Communism," she writes. (Of similar immigrant background, these writers too, have visited Ukraine, and that statement resonates with us, as it no doubt does with many of the book's readers.)

Even her mother and aunt with whom she begins her travels, find themselves strangers in their native land, though less so. Poignantly, Ms. Savage writes of her mother's Alzheimer's disease as she struggles to remember a country she left as a young woman. As Ms. Savage writes about her fears, her distance from her mother, her mother's inability to let go of the past and her family history, she reveals herself guardedly.

She writes: "[My mother] brought me up to be the dispossessed - 'the other' - but her life also showed me that even the dispossessed survive. What I did not know and what I learned by going back was that the state of being 'the other' as well as a survivor are not only related but carry hidden benefits ... I could be the Polish traveler, the German ethnic, the brusque American, and whatever other ploy was called for by the circumstances in which I found myself. I was not rootless, but many-rooted."

In her conclusion on the progress of a fledgling country that almost lost its identity and the very serious problems it needs to address, Ms. Savage gives only a glancing blow to the serious issue of corruption that plagues the country. She points out that running a new country of 50 million people unskilled in self-government by writers and poets and even the Communist apparatchiks suddenly turned democrats is difficult - not only for Ukraine, but for other former Soviet bloc countries. Democracy does not come easily. She writes about the destruction of the work ethic under collectivization, but does not tie it to the fall of Communism.

Although the media played a role, there were many complex reasons for the fall of Communism, paramount among them the economy and the destruction of the environment. Ten years later, Ukraine continues to struggle with both.

In other matters, Ms. Savage is right on target, and the bibliography attests to the extensive research she has done for this book. (An exception, a minor error, creeps in toward the end of the book. In describing a cruise on the Black Sea on the "Feodor Challapin," she refers to the famous singer for whom the ship was named as a world-class tenor. He was, in fact, a bass.)

Such nit-picking aside, we need to emphasize that "Return to Ukraine" is an important book, dealing with the advent of democracy in a totalitarian society. It is also an entertaining book by a talented writer who opens a window into a country facing great challenges.

From Ms. Savage's book it appears that, despite the difficulties, the prognosis for Ukraine is good. She argues that the politics of Ukraine are more stable than those of Russia or Belarus because its constitution protects civil liberties and the rights of minorities. Ukraine has learned hard lessons under both Communist Russia and Nazi Germany.

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