EBOOK
About
In December 2020, Nadezda Bobyleva boards a train at Berlin Central Station, bound east for the father she has seen only in a passport photograph. In her bag she carries a thin green notebook, found among her grandmother's papers and dated 1967: another woman's record of returning to Zlatopol, the Ukrainian hamlet of her childhood, scoured into ruin by famine, dekulakization and the long machinery of Soviet violence. The two women share a name–Nadezda, hope.
Two Hopes moves between these journeys with grace and unflinching clarity. Bobyleva writes of an emigration that split her life in two, of a Russian family in which violence and silence were quietly passed between generations, and of a brief, almost wordless reunion in a Kharkiv stairwell. By the book's close, war has come to Ukraine, and the hamlet her grandmother mourned is gone twice over.
Two Hopes moves between these journeys with grace and unflinching clarity. Bobyleva writes of an emigration that split her life in two, of a Russian family in which violence and silence were quietly passed between generations, and of a brief, almost wordless reunion in a Kharkiv stairwell. By the book's close, war has come to Ukraine, and the hamlet her grandmother mourned is gone twice over.