On Our Way Home from the Revolution: Reflections on Ukraine

By Sonya Bilocerkowycz

Book Overview

One of USA Today's "10 books to help understand what's happening in Russia and Ukraine"
In 2014 Sonya Bilocerkowycz is a tourist at a deadly revolution. At first she is enamored with the Ukrainians' idealism, which reminds her of her own patriotic family. But when the romantic revolution melts into a war with Russia, she becomes disillusioned, prompting a return home to the US and the diaspora community that raised her. As the daughter of a man who studies Ukrainian dissidents for a living, the granddaughter of war refugees, and the great-granddaughter of a gulag victim, Bilocerkowycz has inherited a legacy of political oppression. But what does it mean when she discovers a missing page from her family's survival story--one that raises questions about her own guilt?

In these linked essays, Bilocerkowycz invites readers to meet a swirling cast of post-Soviet characters, including a Russian intelligence officer who finds Osama bin Laden a few weeks after 9/11; a Ukrainian poet whose nose gets broken by Russian separatists; and a long-lost relative who drives a bus into the heart of Chernobyl. On Our Way Home from the Revolution muddles our easy distinctions between innocence and culpability, agency and fate.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814255434
• ISBN13: 9780814255438
• Release Date: September 2019
• Publisher: Mad Creek Books
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 12 and higher