A tale of different generations and emigrations from Ukraine (07/24/05)

BOOK NOTES: Summer reading

A tale of different generations and emigrations from Ukraine

by Oksana Zakydalsky

The authors of two novels published this year, one British, the other American, have some things in common. Both authors have "day jobs" and for both these are debut novels. Marina Lewycka, author of "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," is a lecturer in media and public affairs at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK while Alexander Motyl, author of "Whiskey Priest," is a professor of political science at Rutgers University - Newark, as well as a painter. (In the space of three days, April 14-16, Prof. Motyl delivered a paper at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Conference at Columbia, had a presentation of his book and opened an exhibit of his paintings at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York).

Both novels have contemporary Ukrainian themes. Ms. Lewycka's book deals with the attempts of a bombshell from Ternopil to get residence status in Britain by marrying an elderly widower, while "Whiskey Priest" is set in the sordid milieu of former KGB spies-turned-hit men for the mafia, money laundering, grant money embezzlement and the international sex trade.

"A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian," by Marina Lewycka. New York: The Penguin Press, New York, 2005. 294 pp.

Marina Lewycka's story takes place in the town of Peterborough in the British Midlands, where Nikolai Majevskyi has informed his younger daughter, Nadia, that he is planning to marry Valentina, a voluptuous 36-year-old Ukrainian with a 14-year-old son, whose temporary visa is about to run out. Nikolai (in Nadia's words) turns into an "84-year-old teenager" besotted with the sexpot and obsessed with rescuing a destitute Ukrainian.

Nikolai and his recently deceased wife had been Ostarbeiters (slave laborers) in Germany during World War II and arrived in Britain in 1946 with daughter Vera. Nadia, born in the U.K., has grown up to be the exact opposite of her Ukrainian-born older sister. She is a left-wing sociology lecturer who dresses in clothes bought at Oxfam, (a second-hand store), while Vera has become a Gucci-wearing capitalist society woman who married rich, although is now divorced. Their conflicting personalities had kept them apart, but a disagreement about money left by their mother has them not speaking to each other. But, confronted by a common threat, they gang up on Valentina and try to persuade their father that she is out to con him.

Valentina is alternately ridiculous and threatening. She bullies and coaxes the old man to give her money and overwhelms him with explicit demands. She wants a new life in the West - "a good life, with a good job, good money, a nice car - absolutely no Lada, no Skoda - a good education for her son - must be Oxford/Cambridge, nothing less." Valentina is a splendid comic creation, her "mongrel language" invective is sometimes very funny - "you she-cat-dog-vixen-flesh-eating-witch" - although many of her tirades can't be quoted in a family newspaper.

As the story evolves, Nadia softens and begins to understand Valentina's vulnerability and sees her as a woman who has never grown up or learned to look after herself. Their common cause forces the sisters to become more cordial with each other and prompts Nadia to piece together the truth about her family's past. Underlying the family story are the dark memories of 20th century Ukraine - Famine, Stalin's purges, the Nazi occupation, Ostarbeiters, refugees and the horrors of Soviet existence culminating in a sordid tale in the German labor camp when little Vera steals cigarettes and is caught. Although Nadia persists in digging up the past, Vera is a reluctant storyteller; her attitude is "what's over is over."

Nikolai, who worked as an engineer in a Luhansk tractor factory before the war, has begun writing a treatise on the history of tractors and that book becomes his touchstone of sanity. When occupied with his writing, he seems to live on another planet, almost a caricature of an expatriate East European mad scientist (in North America he would be a card-carrying member of the Shevchenko Scientific Society). The long quotes from his book become somewhat tedious (this device of parallel texts never works for me: I skipped most of the science fiction in Margaret Atwood's "The Blind Assassin" and skimmed the found poems in A.S. Byatt's "Possession").

As the sisters battle Valentina, the story gets complicated. When her visa is refused because the immigration investigator does not believe "a real marriage" has taken place, Valentina thwarts the sisters' attempt at having the marriage annulled. Immigration tribunals, divorce proceedings, the appearance of Valentina's first husband in the U.K., a pregnancy with confusing paternity produce "a plot that is really a vehicle for social satire, some good jokes and an overdose of slapstick. It adds up to a clever, touching story." (The Telegraph)

There are some minor irritants in the book: the main character is called, alternately, Nadia and Nadezhda - not likely in a Ukrainian-speaking family; the father's name is rendered as Nikolai instead of the Ukrainian Mykola and place names are given transliterations from the Russian. There are occasional cultural lapses: when describing the wedding of the grandmother in Ukraine in an Orthodox cathedral, the writer says: "her brother gave her away" (in the Orthodox marriage ceremony the bride and groom come to church together).

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