Illustrator and picture book creator Yevgenia Nayberg makes her solo graphic novel debut with her middle grade memoir Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters, which is set during the 1986 Chernobyl incident. Now old enough to take the entrance exam for Kyiv’s National Secondary School of Art, Jewish 11-year-old Nayberg works with a tutor to hone her creative skills. But her preparations are derailed when an accident at a nuclear plant 90 kilometers away in Chernobyl forces Nayberg and her family to evacuate Kyiv to stay with relatives in Volgograd, where adults speak carefully over government-tapped phone lines while the tween searches for a way to pursue her artistic dreams. In a conversation with PW, Nayberg spoke about the convention of memory, the intuitive nature of her art, and the challenges that come with writing in a foreign language.
In a closing note, you write that you wanted to “recreate the world I lived in the way I remember it.” What is your relationship with memory and how did that impact the way you approached writing Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters?
The most difficult part was trying to forget that I know the future. As an adult, I know so much more than the main character, and the world knows so much more about Chernobyl, so I had to force myself to forget that, because the atmosphere of the time was that everything was unknown for everyone. That’s what I wanted to recreate. I had to forget pretty much everything that I knew historically, but also forget how I feel now about who I was then. I tried to be faithful to how I felt as an 11-year-old, rather than reminiscing or being sentimental about my childhood.
This story stops for the character in 1986. Whatever is going to happen after that is a complete unknown. I think it’s dangerous territory to write a memoir that’s sentimental about yourself. That was the biggest revelation I had. However sweet my memories of my childhood were, I had to cross that out and stay in character as the child I was.
Were there any aspects of the memoir that you corroborated with family members? How did that unfold?
I asked my mom about the time, and I was surprised that some of the things that were really dramatic for me, she didn’t remember at all. But I didn’t want to correct myself—or, rather, I didn’t have to correct myself—because it was my story. And I’m very aware of the fact that people remember that time differently. It was kind of a funny situation with my mom, because she said, “I can’t wait for my friends to read this book. I want to know what they say.” And I said, “I can tell you right away, they’re going to tell you that none of that ever happened.”
Everyone has their own memory of everything. Something I remember was that when I wrote about my grandma’s brother, who died in the war when he was 23, I spelled his name wrong. I had never seen his name written down, and so I always just assumed, phonetically, that his name was spelled differently. When my mom saw it, she said, “This feels so weird. It’s just so jarring to look at the way you spelled his name.” So I corrected my spelling. That was the only thing I changed.
There’s a lot of visual discord beneath the book’s primary illustrations, such as scribbled pencil strokes and paper creases. What did you want to convey through these details?
I’m not sure. I just draw the way I draw. I didn’t try to create a special style. I’m never concerned with style in general. As an artist, I just do my thing. I didn’t think of it as, “It is set in the past, so it has to have that special ‘past’ look.” I don’t think like that. I just imagined a palette that I thought felt authentic to how I remembered it.
There are some moments where I really push the color or the values for emotional impact. There are moments where you see Kyiv as this really beautiful, almost magical place. And then there are moments where you see it as more drab or regular, ordinary. Things like that felt pretty intuitive.
This is your first solo graphic novel. Was there anything about developing Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters that challenged or surprised you?
Well, it’s long. Everything I’ve written so far have been picture books, so this was pretty daunting. But I thought it was the best form for the story. I didn’t feel that the story would fit into a picture book, but it was still scary to approach this. First of all, I’m writing in a foreign language [English], and that feels pretty crazy, especially because I’m writing about something that was not happening in that language. The biggest thing for me was trying to remove that accent from writing. I didn’t want this book to sound exotic. I’ve read a lot of translations from Russian that had this special exotic flair, and I really didn’t want that. I wanted it to be read as naturally as possible. The situation is already exotic, and the time period is different, so I felt that was enough disconnect, and I wanted to create something that was very real and approachable.
Chernobyl, Life, and Other Disasters by Yevgenia Nayberg. Holiday House/Porter, $24.99 Apr. 14 hardcover ISBN 978-0-8234-6058-8; $15.99 paper ISBN 978-0-8234-6278-0
