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 met, the complex bond developing 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 observes Soviet reality through her own eyes. What is at stake is the discovery of her strength; womanhood and double identity.
Two characters on the tour , Mrs. Kapustynska and Mr. Holowaty provide the burlesque counterpoint to the story’s tragic dimensions.Tomenko and Tkachenk, 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.
Serge
5.0 out of 5 stars A journy across the Iron Curtain
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2021
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In her book DISPLACED Irena Kowal masterfully brings together World War II, the Cold War with its Iron Curtain, and the reader who tries to make sense out of, arguably, the most tragic century in human history. It is a story of a young woman who embarks on a journey from the United States to Soviet Ukraine to find her brother, left behind by his parents in their escape to the West during the war. She soon finds herself on more than one journey, the second, and perhaps the most important one, of discovering herself, her womanhood and her hyphenated identity forever divided between the Cold War East and the West. Autobiographical in some of the most significant and moving parts of the story, this book leaves you with the intellectual and emotional experience that neither a work of fiction nor non-fiction alone can provide. For me the book opened a new window on the era I teach in my courses and which my students, with every passing year, have more and more difficulty understanding. What was at stake in the Cold War, and what were the personal experiences of the people who lived in a world that divided their families and often divided their inner selves? Few books can answer those questions in a more effective way than Irena Kowal’s DISPLACED.
Professor and author Serhii Plokhii, Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
More than 80 people gathered...on June 26 for the first presentation and dramatic reading of excerpts of noted author and playwright Irena Kowal's latest work "Displaced"...The novel deals with the struggles of four members of a western Ukrainian family: a father and mother, Josef and Marusia, and a brother and sister, Orest and Irena, as they deal with the issues of fear and powerlessness in the last days of WWII and the impact that their decisions have on their subsequent lives.
