Otherland: A Journey with My Daughter

#ReadAroundTheWorld”. #Ukraine

”I left too early, I missed the whole point. I was not there when my generation was cornered by history.”

This is the memoir of a woman returning to her home country of Ukraine with her 12 year old Australian-born daughter Billie. Maria left Ukraine as a 15 year-old, with her Jewish family, in 1989, when it was still part of the Soviet Union. Returning twenty years later to show Billie her homeland creates the opportunity to reconnect with family and friends but also to examine the seismic sociopolitical changes the country had undergone.

Tumarkin makes comments on communism, politics, feminism and quotes many Russian and Ukrainian poets and writers. She observes and makes interesting comments on the show more way women around her dress and behave.
“Women dressed as if being guided by comfort and self-restraint in choosing their clothes was an insult to the very idea of femininity. You can always pick the non-Russians in this crowd; they are the ones who leave their killer heels, their yummy pants and their volumising mascara for special occasions, not realising that life is passing them by as they prance around in their fisherman pants and their Converse sneakers…for at least one hundred years women have been the stronger sex, when it counts, in Russia. To them the idea that lipsticks and heels are tools of oppression sounds desperately foreign. For decades it was the very absence of such items from Russian stores, and the resulting need to hunt far and wide for them or to go without, that women found oppressive.”

She also makes astute observations on the feminism of communism, the equality yet disproportionate burden. “For many decades, the official Soviet rhetoric of equality and emancipation was maintained against a backdrop of actual startling inequality coupled with an unquestioning expectation of women's readiness for self-sacrifice. Yes, there were countless women engineers and women doctors in the Soviet Union at a time when their Western stepsisters were left to contend with the 'teacher, nurse or secretary' trifecta. During World War II Soviet women did not just bandage the wounded or manufacture ammunitions, they led tank divisions and operated machine guns…The 'glass ceiling' may have been well and truly broken for Soviet women, but the shards of the shattered glass lodged themselves in every aspect of women's everyday existence…Soviet women were repeatedly told how far they had come compared to their bourgeois counterparts – after all, the existence of the vast majority of tragically domesticated Western women was summed up by the Three K's in the atavistic German slogan popular under Hitler: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (Children, Kitchen, Church). The irony, of course, was that neither Kinder nor Küche had disappeared from the equation for 'liberated' Soviet women, while the Party was to prove far more demanding and omnipresent than the Kirche. Women were essentially the slaves of the slaves, with little leisure to contemplate the difficulties of their two-tier subjugation. It was not a question of wanting it all, but rather of doing it all – work, children, housework, community work and sex.”

She also visits Babi Yar, the site of the largest single massacre during the Holocaust, where at least thirty-three thousand Jewish men, women and children were murdered in two days in 1941.

The book details honestly her struggles with, and expectations of her daughter Billie. I found it to be a well-written memoir that deals with the personal and provides insights into the atrocities and millions of deaths under Stalin and the turbulence of post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. It did become overly introspective and analytical at times and drag a little at some points. 4 stars. show less