BOOK NOTES: Recent immigrant's M.A. project is published as novel

Everything Because of Teeth, by Luba Borochok. Baltimore: Publish America, 2003. 55 pp.

The book is a story about a father-daughter relationship set in a remote village, which is not even on the map, in former Soviet Ukraine.

As noted on the book's back cover, Anita, the protagonist, "is convinced she is a special child because an old dying woman prophesies ... that she will be an important person. Anita's father, a farmer, is the only person who is not impressed by the prophecy, and Anita does not like that. She prays for a better father. As she grows up, she notices one thing about him that annoys her the most - his teeth, which 'bore the mildew's bloom.' She is embarrassed by him. It gets worse when Anita is in college. She does not even want to admit that she is the farmer's daughter and convinces herself that she is not special to him. Only when she is about to leave her country forever does she realize that her father always loved her, and that she was special to him."

Luba Borochok was born in 1968 and raised in a small village on Ukraine's border with Poland. After graduating from a pedagogical institute with a degree in Russian language, she embarked on a one-year career as a teacher. Disappointed about not being adequately paid, she was intent to seek out better opportunities for herself. She turned to her uncle who lived in America for help and the latter invited her to the United States.

Upon coming to the States in 1991 at the age of 24, her goal was "to find a permanent job so she would not have to switch between cleaning people's houses, working at heavy industries, manufactures and domestic service. One day she got angry with people looking down at her because of her inability to communicate in English...[she] quit all the jobs and enrolled in college."

She earned a B.A. degree in English from Penn State University and an M.A. from Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia.

Ms. Borochok, a resident of Jamison, Pa., was encouraged in her writing by a professor in a fiction writing class at Arcadia, and the story of the father-daughter relationship became her culminating project for her degree from the university.

"Everything Because of Teeth" was released January 12 and can be viewed online at www.amazon.com, www.bn.com or www.publishamerica.com/boods/3440.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 25, 2004, No. 17, Vol. LXXII

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