“Our Others” was the ninth book in the series of my personal quest to learn more about my native country, Ukraine. Previous ones that I have read ranged from fiction to non-fiction, written in English, German, Ukrainian and Russian: “Diary of an Invasion“, “Sommer in Odesa“, “You Don’t Know What War Is“, “A Ukrainian Christmas“, “Родина-тётя“, “In Wartime“, “Eine Formalie in Kiew” and “A History of Ukraine“. The stories within this book were really important for my understanding of how multi-cultured our nation really is and which other nationalities populate many different regions. The author managed to create a balanced narrative, combining both people’s touching stories, as well as important historical background information. Whereas I found that the quality of the different chapters varied, there were quite a few passages that were stylistically beautiful. They permitted the reader to dive straight into the atmosphere of the interviews that the author led, a few examples of these below:

At last, seeing joy in our faces, he smiles himself in response. His moist, amber eyes, shielded by heavy eyelids, sparkle with satisfaction in the sun. The noontime rays slink into the home’s most out-of-the-way crannies, even under the low eaves of the entryway. Time hangs suspended in the current of hot air and stretches into decades. A lazy breeze carelessly tosses up a cobweb, white like Yanko’s hair.

p. 123

Somewhere in the background, music arises once again. The villagers are beating out the rhythm that we heard when we first arrived: with the rocks under their feet, the plates in their kitchens, the shuffling of their slippers, the barking of their dogs, the latching of their gates, the unbolting of their doors, the creaking of hand water pumps, the plucking of overripe cherries, and the soft rustling that pulsates in time with it all.

p. 125

I believe that this book is just as important for Ukrainian readers, as it is for foreigners. While reading it, I was finding out about Armenian, Czech, Georgian, German, Polish, Roma, Romanian, Slovak, Swedish and Gagauz communities living in my home country for the first time. Have you ever heard about the Gagauzes and the fact that they speak their own language? If not, you’ll probably have a lot of new facts to discover within “Our Others“, just like I did! It didn’t come as a surprise but one characteristic that all the various communities had in common, was how they suffered under the Soviet Union rule, under imposed communist practices such as collective farms, how horribly famines hit them and how frustrating resistance against Russia was already back in the days.

The Gagauzes, like Ukrainians, have few reasons for fondness toward the Soviet Union. They too suffered, both from repressions and wide-scale famine – particularly in 1946 and 1947, when these tactics were used to herd people into collective farms.

p. 99

Everything changed in 1946, when the eastern part of the settlement went to the Soviet Union, and the western part to the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Selementsi was broken in half like a loaf of bread. […]

From behind this barbed wire, a bride in a white dress would wave to her mother, unable to embrace her. From behind the wire, people bid farewell to their deceased as they gazed at a casket displayed on the far side of the border. From behind the barbed wire, grandmothers watched their children grow. So it was for fifty-nine years.

p. 55 – 56

The reason for my reduction of the rating seems to only be linked to the fact that I read the translated version of the book into English. Some typos, capitalisation and punctuation errors could be found and some phrases sounded a bit awkward. A table of contents and a numbering of the chapters would have been really useful since a map was provided in the beginning and which was numbered in reference to the regions that were described within the book. It’s only upon reading the acknowledgements in the end and the author thanking one of the contributors for the beautiful design of the book that I looked up online what the original edition in Ukrainian actually looked like. You can find a little preview of it here, being filled colorful photographs. In case you speak Ukrainian, I’d highly suggest you to try and track it down in its original version. I’m nevertheless really glad that a translation of the book exists, even if it’s in a minimal version, at least more people can potentially have access to all these fascinating stories.

Reading up on the author’s journey of putting the book together made it even more fascinating (you can check this interview with the author in Ukrainian). The way she found the people that she interviewed within the chapters, how much time it took for her to put the stories together and the fact that there were even five videos filmed to accompany the whole project (linking two here, which you can watch with English subtitles: accompanying the first chapter, “Apples from a Forgotten Garden” and the twelfth, “The Polish Experiment“). I’d recommend “Our Others” to those, who are interested in finding out more about Ukraine, what makes up the nation and its people, its culture and its traditions but most importantly its respect towards its diversity. If you’re curious about more of these types of stories, keep an eye out for books being published within the ever growing book series “Ukrainian Voices”, which publishes English and German works by Ukrainian writers, politicians, intellectuals, activists, officials, researchers, entrepreneurs, artists and diplomats.

That is the question we need to be asking ourselves time and again. There are few things in this world as dangerous as an aspiration to linguistic and cultural homogeneity, and there are few things as sad as an unwillingness to unwind this process and examine what survived under the steamroller of history: all those scattered crystals, keepsakes, and “little secrets”.

p. 11

★★★★☆ (4/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-3-8382-1475-7
ibidem-Verlag, 2020 (first published in Ukrainian in 2018)}