Lots of people are doing this now-there’s an unbelievable level of solidarity and spontaneous organization. One of my dearest friends, the bandleader and accordionist Sergei Topor, has been energetically helping to evacuate people from Kyiv to Moldova, where he’s from. A lot of my Ukrainian friends in the US have been physically sick with worry and grief. She told me she didn’t sleep for the first week or so of the invasion.
They wanted to be at home, and her brother wanted to stay and fight. Like many people in Kyiv, her family chose not to evacuate, at least not so far. She’s been beside herself with anxiety for her mother and brother, and for his young children, whom she helps raise. Another of my closest friends was in New York on a business trip when the invasion started. Some friends with grown-up children found themselves in the situation, when the invasion started, of being separated without any clear way of reaching them-a nightmare. But of course, many people in Ukraine now don’t even have that level of security. It broke my heart to see his pictures of his wife in a winter coat, breastfeeding their baby in a dark car, or to have my first video call with them and their baby cut short when an air raid siren went off and they had to go and hide in a sauna in the basement of a hotel. A lot of them have young children-one of my closest friends had his first child on January 1-and it was especially alarming to wonder how they’d get out. Several made it to Moldova or Poland with their families. Some are still in Kyiv, especially men over eighteen, who aren’t allowed to leave.
Sophie Pinkham: Yes, fortunately all my friends in Ukraine are fine so far-or rather, as fine as you can be when your country is being invaded and bombed. Lucy Jakub: First-are your friends in Ukraine okay? Who are you in touch with? This week, over e-mail, she shared what she’s been seeing and hearing of the war in Ukraine from her perch in Ithaca, and told me about her next book project, a cultural history of Russia’s forests. As an American observer, Pinkham has a sharp eye for the surreal and telling details of post-Soviet politics and culture-as she puts it, the “heavy-handed postmodern novel” that is history unfolding in Eastern Europe. In 2019 she profiled Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his sitcom-cum-service career. Over the past three years she has become a frequent voice in the Review, writing on history and politics in Russia and Ukraine, and on literature and art under autocracy. In 2008 she moved to Ukraine, and after the Maidan revolution in 2013–2014 wrote Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine, a work of memoir and social reportage that offers an arresting portrait of the country’s cultural identity and political upheaval. Pinkham first visited Russia as a volunteer for the Red Cross, just out of college.
0 kommentar(er)
