Caught in the vortex of the Cold War and Iron Curtain, Orest and Irena, brother and sister in their twenties, meet for the first time in Moscow in 1969. Although Irena’s lifelong desire is finally met, the complex bond which develops between them is a keg of dynamite. On a tour across Ukraine, Orest is the prism through which Irena sheds her inhibitions, parents’ nostalgia and looks at Soviet reality through her own eyes. What is at stake is the discovery of her womanhood and her double identity.
Two characters on the tour, Mrs. Kapustynska and Mr. Holowaty, provide the comic, ironic counterpoint to the story’s tragic dimensions. Tomenko and Tkachenko, two farcical KGB agents, have Irena and Orest under constant surveillance. When they attempt to persuade Irena to become their agent, Orest is a pawn in their recruitment game and she is forced to make an agonizing choice.
DISPLACED is structured as a series of vignettes moving in different time frames. Flashbacks offer a historical backdrop to the main theme of loss and dislocation: their grandparents’ exile to Siberia, their father Josef’s imprisonment by the Soviets, their parents’escape during WWII, life in a refugee camp in Germany, immigrant life in the US. Scenes of Irena’s growing up with her father’s surreal hallucinations run parallel with Orest’s boyhood as an orphan in Ukraine, branded an “enemy of the people” and his contradictory feelings for his parents who left him.
As refugees again flood Europe, the novel is timely and compelling.
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2021
Professor and author Serhii Plokhii, Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University