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Megan Buskey – Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet
Saturday, March 25 @ 4:00 p.m.Featured on WKSU’s Sound Of Ideas: Listen Here
Featured in Cleveland Magazine
Excerpt in Cleveland Review of Books
Purchase your copy of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet
It wasn’t until well into adolescence that Megan Buskey learned the basic facts of her family history: her mother grew up in a gulag exile settlement because her grandparents were deported from their Ukrainian village to Siberia after the Second World War. Following her grandmother’s death in 2013, Buskey began to broach the silence that surrounded her family’s past—a silence, she soon learned, that had both personal and political causes.
Called “one of the best and most intimate histories of Ukraine” by the country’s Financial Times correspondent, Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet weaves together history, reportage, and memoir to illuminate the fates of an ordinary Ukrainian family against the extraordinary circumstances—war, totalitarianism, fledgling independence, and, once again, war—that have defined the country’s recent history.
In telling her family’s story, Buskey demonstrates how controversial and painful aspects of Ukrainian history, such as Nazi collaboration, the rise and persistence of Ukrainian nationalism, and the country’s enduring struggle with its powerful neighbor, Russia, are key to understanding the country today—as well as the roots of the Russian invasion that one year on continues to transfix the world. An investigation of the politics of memory, Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet is a testament to how a family’s story and a nation’s story can be inseparable.
Megan Buskey is a nonfiction writer who has contributed to The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The New Republic, NPR’s All Things Considered, and other outlets. A former Fulbright Fellow to Ukraine, she has been studying and writing about the country for two decades. She lives in New York City. Megan is a Cleveland native, and part of her book is set in Tremont, where her great-grandfather lived shortly after he immigrated.
Andy Fedynsky, Director Emeritus and Resident Scholar at the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, will be joining Megan in conversation.
