Twenty Two Letters from Ukraine

 

Twenty-Two Letters from Ukraine / Katya Tokar
trans. from the Ukrainian by D.B. Lewis
Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK: Bryn Stowe Publications, c2023.
258 p.

Another unusual pick from me, this time it's non-fiction. This book is a series of letters written by a young Ukrainian woman over the course of the first few months of the full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine starting on February 24, 2022. 

The book is structured in letter format, written from her immediate experience or related slightly later from her journals. It has an immediacy that makes the mundane and everyday issues of war and internal displacement very real to the reader. Tokar shares the experiences of her family - her husband, mother, little sister, and small dog, who all live together, and leave their home in Eastern Ukraine to drive west, along with many others. The life of an internal refugee, trying to find a place to resettle even briefly, sounds very stressful. She's always on apps to try to locate hostels, shelters, etc. for the family to stay. There are a couple of places that they stay in only for a night or two, and a few more that are a few weeks at a stretch. 

Finally they decide that her mother and sister will cross to Poland, and then on to Ireland where they have a relative. But Katya is going to stay in Ukraine with her husband. 

I found it illuminating, the daily struggles of not having a home, job, or purpose. Trying to find safe places to stay, to feed the family, and worrying about money and their car. Not knowing what the future holds at all, or if she will ever be able to go back to being a preschool teacher, or have a permanent home again. The letters end after a year, when she and her husband move to Kyiv, first to stay with a relative and then finally finding their own apartment. 

She talks about her grief at being separated from her mother and sister, and worry about her husband in this precarious situation. It is an individual story, about one person, and this brings the scale of the war down to a very understandable event -- you can feel it. While the style is quite simple, there are some moments in which she talks about memory and having to leave the past behind where the writing is more powerful. This was a powerful read about real life experience, told by someone who isn't a writer but just wants to share the realities of life under war.