The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

No Country for Love by Yaroslav Trofimov, the Ukrainian-born chief foreign affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, covers Ukraine from 1930-1954 and is based on the real-life experiences of his own grandmother, whom he interviewed right up to the time of her death at 96.  What was happening at the time is historically accurate, and the reader can be reasonably confident that his multi-faceted characters – even if some are imagined – capture what it meant to be Ukrainian at a particular time in that nation’s story.

Once a part of Austria, parts of Ukraine had also belonged to Poland. Twice it had been occupied by Germany. There were short-lived Ukrainian republics, and, for longer periods of time, Russia was in charge. Sometimes Ukrainians saw themselves looking to the West, as a European nation. At other times, they were part of Mother Russia. Fascism, communism, famines, pogroms, antisemitism, all tested Ukrainians’ resilience in what Trofimov has called in interviews the “meat-grinder of history.”

Ukraine’s past has been both bloody and enlightened. Principal character Debora Rosenbaum is born to Jewish parents in the little town of Uman. Her mother is somewhat observant; her father is an intellectual who is assimilationist.  In 1930, Debora moves to Kharkiv to take a job at a tractor plant, where she is tapped to design posters for local Communist party operatives. She is swept up in Soviet promises of opportunities for all in a growing industrial economy and quietly conforms to the mandate to use Russian rather than the Ukrainian language in the posters she is making.

She enrolls at the University in Kyiv, once seen as a great European capital. She is immersed in the study of literature and becomes intoxicated by the intelligentsia.  Under the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, however, Moscow increasingly quashes Ukrainian culture, literature and arts. Her professors’ books are no longer to be found in libraries or bookshops. Statues of Ukrainian heroes are replaced by oversized statues of Stalin. (The first thing Russians do today when they take over a Ukrainian town is to destroy statues of victims of the famine, Stalin’s form of Soviet genocide.)

Debora, like so many others trying to get along, remains silent. She falls in love with Samuel, a pilot, and, in 1933, they marry and have a son, Pasha. Their life in Kyiv is the high point for their happiness. Then things go south for their personal lives and for Ukraine.

Stalin’s ambitious 5-year plan depends on exploiting the resources of Ukraine, the breadbasket of the country. Debora, ensconced in university life, is in denial when the regime plunders the peasants working the farms, setting harsh production quotas and diverting most of the produce to the industrial centers. In the countryside, with their crops expropriated, the peasants are left to starve and die. Some are even driven to cannibalism. Across Ukraine, Stalin’s secret police arrest as traitors anyone who questions party doctrine. They create a culture of paranoia and fear, pressuring neighbors to spy on neighbors. Living quarters are taken over by the government. Residences are reassigned, and families are forced to live together in suffocatingly crowded spaces.  Anti-Semitism, which had seen a slight pause in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, is becoming more rampant.

Debora’s pilot husband, Samuel, is turned in on trumped-up charges by a man who resents having to share living quarters with the young family. Samuel is sentenced to ten years in prison camp at hard labor. No communication with the outside world is permitted.

Five years later, a cunning NKGB officer enamored of Debora, lies to her that Samuel is dead, possibly at Babi Yar. The grieving widow, for the security of her family, agrees to marry Maslov, who promises to protect her and Pasha. Maslov adopts Pasha, changes Debora’s name to Darya Grigoriyevna Maslova and obliterates her Jewish identity. Debora becomes a school teacher, eventually its principal, while her mother, Rebecca, stays at home. The family enjoys the privileges of Maslov’s officer status, including vacationing in Crimea.

In the early 1940’s, Ukraine suffers from the German occupation as it had in 1918. As the German army overpowers the Soviet army, the newly constructed family is forced to flee to safer territory, but officers’ food coupons mitigate the worst privation to which most Ukrainians are subjected. Personal possessions are either looted or sold off one at a time for food. Members of the intelligentsia are “disappeared” including Debora’s father and her soldier brother. Some 100,000 are killed at Babi Yar, among them nearly 34,000 Jews.

The war ends in 1945, with Stalin taking credit for the defeat of the Germans. After his death in 1953, there is a reborn movement to “put Ukrainians in charge in Ukraine again.” Moscow describes an insistent Ukrainian push for sovereignty (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) as “bourgeois nationalism.”  Maslov’s brutality in putting down the Ukrainian activists eventually wins him promotion to colonel in the Ministry of State Security. By the time Pasha is ten years old, Maslov has hardened him into a “little Soviet man,” who participates at school in bullying Jewish students.

This book is a stand-alone thriller. I won’t tell you all the gripping events or how it ends. Trofimov has given us many intriguing characters and twists of story line. It is a tense and driving narrative that grapples with the question of what’s the right thing to do when living amidst chaos and danger. Ukraine, says Debora, is a country where true love is a luxury. Decisions are made only to protect oneself and one’s family. Trofimov sees these moral compromises as the price one pays for survival.

When you read descriptions of Kyiv during the World War, you could easily mistake them for what you see on today’s nightly news, the result of the three-year old Russian invasion.  In interviews, Trofimov has said that generational history, stories like that of his grandmother, are what drive Ukrainians’ resilience today.  Reading this book reinforces our heartbreaking sense of how outrageously wrong it is for Donald Trump to sell out Ukraine in favor of his role model Vladimir Putin.