“A Biography of a Chance Miracle,” by Tanja Maljartschuk, translated by Zenia Tompkins. Kumamoto, Japan: Cadmus Press, 2018. 238 pp. ISBN: 978-4-908793-41-7 (paperback), $20.
The novel “A Biography of a Chance Miracle” tells the story of Lena, a young girl growing up in the bureaucracy-ridden and nationalistic fictional western Ukrainian city of San Francisco. An outcast due to her unwillingness to scorn everything Russian, her propensity for befriending forlorn creatures, her aversion to the status quo and her fear of living a meaningless life, Lena sets forth on a mission to defend the abused, be they canine or human. Armed with an arsenal of humor, stubbornness, chutzpah and no shortage of imagination, her successes are minimal but, in the process of trying to save San Francisco’s humanity, she may end up saving her own.
Tanja Maljartschuk, 36, is one of the most prolific young authors currently writing in Ukrainian. Her style blends searing social commentary with heartwarming humor and an appreciation for the human condition. “A Biography of a Chance Miracle” is her first novel, her sixth book and her first book to be made available in English.
Individual stories by Ms. Maljartschuk are available in English in the anthologies “Best European Fiction,” “Herstories” and “Women in Times of Change,” as well as in literary magazines such as World Literature Today, Words Without Borders, Belletrista and Apofenie.
The translator, Zenia Tompkins, holds graduate degrees from Columbia University and the University of Virginia. She is the founder of the Tompkins Agency for Ukrainian Literature in Translation (TAULT), a nonprofit literary agency and translation house. This, her first translation, won the 2017 Kovaliv Fund prize for best translation of a Ukrainian work. Ms. Tompkins is proficient in eight languages and translates exclusively from Ukrainian.