She Came from Mariupol

Novelist Wodin (Once I Lived) investigates in this resonant account the life of her Ukrainian mother more than 50 years after she died by suicide in a resettlement community after WWII. In 2013, Wodin writes, she typed her “mother’s name into the Russian-language search engine on a whim,”in an attempt to learn more about her and add to her own early childhood memories. Before long, she was posting on ancestry websites, which led her to meet amateur historian Konstantin, who emailed her in response to a post. The pair researched the author’s family history and eventually located some of Wodin’s mother’s living relatives and the diaries of Wodin’s aunt Lidia, which describe her time at a Soviet prison camp. Those diaries provide the basis for the book’s second part, in which Wodin recreates her mother’s experience during WWII, first working for the Germans while they occupied Ukraine and “recruited forced laborers,” and later becoming one herself. It adds up to a moving look at the lives of people caught up in global conflict, and one that takes on an eerie timeliness now.As Wodin notes, “It was a strange nightmare: the start of my search for my mother coincided with the first seismographic tremors of a fresh military conflict in Ukraine,” in reference to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. The result is an intimate look at the effects of war and displacement. (Apr.)