Where Nests the Water Hen

by Gabrielle Roy

Published by New Canadian Library 

Paperback

October 1989, 192 pages 

The story of Where Nests the Water Hen is as pure as the lives of the people in it – and as unforgettable. Set in the remote wilderness of northern Manitoba, this sunny, tender idyll of daily frontier life captures, as few novels ever have, the spirit and the surroundings of the pioneers – not the adventurers and trailblazers who make the headlines, but rather the humble folk who follow after and remain, living out their lives in obscurity to keep the trails open.

Where Nests the Water Hen, Gabrielle Roy’s second novel, is a sensitive and sympathetic tale that captures both the innocence and the vitality of a sparsely populated frontier.

Source: https://www.amazon.ca/Where-Nests-Water-Hen-Gabrielle/dp/0771098545

Unearthed: Love, Acceptance, and Other Lessons from an Abandoned Garden

by Alexandra Risen

Published by Penguin Random House Canada

Paperback

August 2016, 271 pages

Alexandra Risen's father dies just as she and her husband purchase a nondescript house set atop a natural gorge in the middle of the city. The garden is choked with weeds and crumbling structures. Over the years, as she undertakes the replanting, it stirs memories of her childhood when a nearby forest was her only escape from an empty home life.

As Risen beats back the bushes to unveil the garden’s mysteries, her mother has a stroke and develops dementia. On one of her last visits home, she discovers an envelope of yellowed documents that helps her piece together some of her parents' unknown story.

Uprooted from the Ukraine to work in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, her father and mother met and married in a Displaced Persons camp before emigrating to Edmonton. They never discussed their troubled past. Her father shut himself into a safe, silent world and spoke few words to Alex during his lifetime. Her mother sought refuge in her garden amidst her vegetables, flowers and fruit trees.

As Risen toils in her own garden, lifelong resentments and misunderstandings are replaced with memories and connections to her parents. Organized around various flowers, trees and shrubs that evoke particular memories, Unearthed is an affecting account of tangled family relationships, reconciliation and the healing power of nature.

Source: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/538849/unearthed-by-alexandra-risen/9780143198956 

More about Alexandra Risen:
http://alexandrarisen.com/

https://www.thestar.com/life/2016/08/06/toronto-author-unearths-abandoned-garden-and-finds-her-past.html

An Evening with Alexandra Risen
On October 19, 2018, Alexandra Risen graciously participated in a Rozmova Book Club gathering to discuss her memoir, Unearthed. She revealed her personal story openly, generously sharing details that don't appear in her book: her quiet dream to be a writer when it wasn't accepted in her parents' household; her intriguing writing process that transformed 20 stories about her garden into her memoir; her gratitude for the guidance she received from the University of Toronto Creative Writing Program; the direction her agent offered on facing her family's past; and the unwavering support her husband and son provided. Alexandra said the book was the result of looking deeply into her past and became a journey of understanding. Rozmova members are very grateful for Alexandra's insights and wholehearted participation in our discussion. Congratulations on a very good read!

Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man's Fight for Justice

by Bill Browder
Published by Simon & Schuster, New York
Hardcover
February 2015, 399 pages

Synopsis
A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin’s corruption.

Bill Browder’s journey started on the South Side of Chicago and moved through Stanford Business School to the dog-eat-dog world of hedge fund investing in the 1990s. It continued in Moscow, where Browder made his fortune heading the largest investment fund in Russia after the Soviet Union’s collapse. But when he exposed the corrupt oligarchs who were robbing the companies in which he was investing, Vladimir Putin turned on him and, in 2005, had him expelled from Russia.

In 2007, a group of law enforcement officers raided Browder’s offices in Moscow and stole $230 million of taxes that his fund’s companies had paid to the Russian government. Browder’s attorney Sergei Magnitsky investigated the incident and uncovered a sprawling criminal enterprise. A month after Sergei testified against the officials involved, he was arrested and thrown into pre-trial detention, where he was tortured for a year. On November 16, 2009, he was led to an isolation chamber, handcuffed to a bedrail, and beaten to death by eight guards in full riot gear.
Browder glimpsed the heart of darkness, and it transformed his life: he embarked on an unrelenting quest for justice in Sergei’s name, exposing the towering cover-up that leads right up to Putin. A financial caper, a crime thriller, and a political crusade, Red Notice is the story of one man taking on overpowering odds to change the world.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Red-Notice-Finance-Murder-Justice/

The House of Widows by Askold Melnyczuk

by Askold Melnyczuk
Published by Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, MN
Paperback
March 4, 2008, 256 pages

Synopsis
A novel of intrigue that is played across decades, continents, and generations by the celebrated, New York Times Notable author of Ambassador of the Dead.

Late one night, a week after Father's suicide, I finished sweeping the bulk of my inheritance into four giant trash bags, and heaved them into the dumpster at the construction site around the corner from his apartment. Then I sat down at the two-person coffee table in the middle of his kitchen, the fluorescent light loud as cicadas, and examined the three things I'd kept.
 
The three things that James kept are his father's British military uniform, an oversize glass jar, and a letter written in a language he can't read. They become the keys to unlocking the door on a past James never imagined while growing up amid the security of Boston's north shore, and they send him on an odyssey across England, Austria, and Ukraine. Along the way, he meets his dying aunt Vera, the matriarch of a mysterious branch of the family. His mission puts him face-to-face with the international sex trade, a displaced Palestinian girl with streaked pink hair and attitude to spare, and a violent world in which he is ultimately implicated. From old America, new Europe, and the timeless Middle East, James learns what it means to live in the webbed world of the twenty-first century.
In The House of Widows, Askold Melnyczuk offers a searing exploration of the individual's role in the inexorable assault of history.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/House-Widows-Oral-History/dp/1555974910

The Man with the Poison Gun by Serhii Plokhy

The Man with the Poison Gun
A Cold War Spy Story 
by Serhii Plokhy
Published by Basic Books, New York
2016, 367 pages

Synopsis
In the fall of 1961, KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky defected to West Germany. After spilling his secrets to the CIA, Stashinsky was put on trial in what would be the most publicized assassination case of the entire Cold War. The publicity stirred up by the Stashinsky case forced the KGB to change its modus operandi abroad and helped end the career of Aleksandr Shelepin, one of the most ambitious and dangerous Soviet leaders. Stashinsky's testimony, implicating the Kremlin rulers in political assassinations carried out abroad, shook the world of international politics. Stashinsky's story would inspire films, plays, and books-including Ian Fleming's last James Bond novel, The Man with the Golden Gun.

A thrilling tale of Soviet spy craft, complete with exploding parcels, elaborately staged coverups, double agents, and double crosses, The Man with the Poison Gun offers unparalleled insight into the shadowy world of Cold War espionage.

Source: https://www.amazon.ca/Man-Poison-Gun-Cold-Story/dp/0465035906

Reflections by Karen Yarmol-Franko

Historian and Director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, Professor Serhii Plokhii, has masterfully woven the facts of history into a compelling account that reads like a fictional spy novel -- except that it's all true. The depth of research, the approachable style, and the high readability, make it hard to put down. The events and outcomes in this book led to major changes in European trials of World War II war criminals, and opened the West's eyes to the menacing practices of the Soviet regime. What's most alarming, however, are the parallels to Russia's recent actions: the poisoning of journalist Aleksandr Litvinenko; the poisoning of Russian opposition politician, Vladimir Kara-Murza; the torture and murder of attorney Sergei Magnitsky; the assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov; the murder of journalist Anastasia Baburova -- and the list continues. An enthusiastic recommendation for all to read this historical account that makes us aware of a world we don't want to experience, yet sadly need to be informed about in order to understand our current political environment.

Prometheus: A Tale of the Human Quest for Enlightenment by Oles Berdnyk Translated by Roma Franko

Prometheus: A Tale of the Human Quest for Enlightenment
by Oles Berdnyk
Translated by Roma Franko, PhD
Published by Language Lanterns Publications
2012, 273 pages

Childhood friends–a beautiful girl of precocious intelligence, and her warrior-protector–travel from ancient Alexandria to classical Athens seeking education. Berdnyk imagines historical character Hypatia, a philosopher in the mid-4th to early-5th century AD, and her companion Isidore, traveling through ancient Greece, India and north Africa, encountering princes, priests, gurus and ascetics. We are immersed in a dazzling array of cultures and world views as we walk with them. 
Source: http://www.languagelanterns.com/ 

Rozmova Book Club members with Professor Roma Franko, translator of Oles Berdnyk's  

Prometheus: A Tale of the Human Quest for Enlightenment

Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy by Frederica Mathewes-Green

Facing East: A Pilgrim's Journey into the Mysteries of Orthodoxy
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Published by HarperOne
February 28, 2006, 272 pages 

The classic story of a family's pilgrimage into the Orthodox Church. Veiled in the smoke of incense, the Eastern Orthodox Church has long been an enigma to the Western world. Yet, as Frederica Mathewes-Green discovered, it is a vital, living faith, rich in ritual beauty and steadfast in integrity. Utilizing the framework of the Orthodox calendar, Mathewes-Green chronicles a year in the life of her small Orthodox mission church, eloquently illustrating the joys and blessings an ancient faith can bring to the worshipers of today. 
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/417582.Facing_East 

Tarnished by Lesia Annastasia Chytra

Published by Lesia Annastasia Chytra, July 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9948981-0-4 Paperback
271 pages 

Reflections by Lesia Shipowick

In listening to the account of Anastasia (Tasya’s) early life, Tarnished has reiterated to those of us who are first generation Canadians, the stories we have heard from our own mothers and grandmothers (babas). It depicts their unsettled lives that took them from the security of their homes in Ukraine to the unthinkable hardship of forced labour in factories and on farms in Germany during WW2.

The young women in Tarnished portrayed lives so similar and familiar to some of our own mothers and babas, it appears that for many, the only difference was the name of the factory or camp they resided in.  

Reading this book, I sadly realized that many of us probably did not ask enough questions of our own mothers and babas to really understand what their lives were like during this unsettled and difficult time.  More likely, we didn’t even know what questions to ask because we had no idea of what they had been through and we couldn’t imagine a life like that.  Now safely in North America, many of these women did not wish to relive this awful past and hence the generalities they told us were an oversimplification but seemed sufficient for them and for us. 

Tarnished retells the stories we have all heard, but Lesia Chytra has fleshed them out, and hence has given our limited versions, substance and a soul.  We, the readers come nearer to feeling the uncertainty and fear that these young women experienced and in reading about Tasya’s story, stand in awe of their tenacity, their strength and their optimism that they would, persevere.  The Ukrainian spirit lived in Tasya as it did and does in our mothers and babas today.

Reflections by Marta Bozdek

I approached this book with no expectations other than getting ready for our book club meeting and was very pleasantly surprised by how readable and well written the book was. The author, Lesia Chytra, quickly captured my attention with the story and the characters. The characters were immediately believable and relatable. The pacing of the storytelling was strong, and I found myself carried along and wanted to continue reading.  The dialogue flowed, was natural, and well-utilized for the storytelling. 

Chytra was able to vividly paint the scenes and settings in the lives of the characters. The emotional responses of the characters to difficult and dreadful situations were real and not over-wrought. Telling the story from the perspective of three generations of female family members, and at different periods, made the story more complete. I am glad the author stayed with a time and a place until that particular story had unfolded, and then switched perspective, place, and time.

This book makes one think about all the life stories that the baba's generation did not speak about, did not share, did not tell. Lesia Chytra has made this story available for her own family and has unexpectedly opened the door for other families to learn about and share their stories.

The graphic design elements of this book also make it more accessible.  The cover is intriguing and the layout is clean, clear and easy to read.

Reflections by Karen Yarmol-Franko

Lesia Chytra’s Tarnished is an engaging read that cleverly interweaves history and personal experience into a compelling story. Her interviews with her grandmother, supplemented by research to “fill in the gaps” as she puts it, gives us a glimpse of a reality that we hope we will never know. It also explains the tenacity, perseverance and determination of Ukrainian people of that generation in the diaspora.

Ms Chytra provides each of us with a role model for capturing the experiences of our parents and grandparents who come from a time and place that’s so very different from our current reality. Her desire to tell her Baba’s story for her family, organically mushroomed into a novel for a generation of Canadian-Ukrainians with their own family stories to gather. 

Personally, I feel immense regret for not having the foresight to ask my grandparents – who have all long passed – more about their lives in Ukraine, and their journeys to Canada in the 1920s. My parents, having grown up in Canada, did not experience the trauma and displacement of war, although theirs is also a story worth capturing. For those whose parents and grandparents are still with us – we should rally to hear them and record their experiences for future generations.

Be sure to Like Tarnished on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TarnishedLAChytra/

Lesia Chytra (second from left front in white) joined a Rozmova Book Club meeting in April 2016 to discuss her writing process, her inspirations, and her new venture in literature on Ukrainian themes.