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A review by tasmanian_bibliophile
The Silence of Trees by Valya Dudycz Lupescu
5.0
‘What else does an old woman have but memories and fantasies?’
In the present, Nadya Lysenko is a seventy year old woman living in Chicago, surrounded by her family: husband, children and grandchildren. Fifty years have elapsed since she last saw her parents and her sisters in the Western Ukraine, and Nadya has kept many secrets during those fifty years. At sixteen, Nadya left her home one night to meet a Gypsy fortune teller in the nearby woods. Nadya was keen to have her fortune told, and while she was away soldiers burned her family home. She could find no survivors, and after a period as a displaced person in a German labour camp, marries and emigrates to the USA.
‘I had no idea what that new life would look like, but I knew it could not include my past.’
Years later, Nadya remains haunted by the deaths of her parents and sisters. She feels guilty that she has survived and they have not and she wonders whether she could have changed the course of history by staying home that night. Nadya has never told her husband or children of her past, although she shares Ukrainian traditions and customs with them. This legacy of her past, the importance of these myths and of their magic, can be shared: house spirits must be taken care of, and dreams treated with respect. But through guilt and fear she does not speak of the people who were part of her life.
But then events make Nadya realise that the past cannot always be kept separate from the present, and that keeping secrets does not always protect those she cares about. Nadya discovers, too, that accepting and speaking about the past leads to other possibilities and opportunities in her own life.
I loved this novel. Nadya’s story – both past and present - is engrossing. Her experiences are both a poignant reminder of the destruction and disruption of lives during World War II, and of the resilience of the human spirit.
‘Names made connections between the dead and the living.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
In the present, Nadya Lysenko is a seventy year old woman living in Chicago, surrounded by her family: husband, children and grandchildren. Fifty years have elapsed since she last saw her parents and her sisters in the Western Ukraine, and Nadya has kept many secrets during those fifty years. At sixteen, Nadya left her home one night to meet a Gypsy fortune teller in the nearby woods. Nadya was keen to have her fortune told, and while she was away soldiers burned her family home. She could find no survivors, and after a period as a displaced person in a German labour camp, marries and emigrates to the USA.
‘I had no idea what that new life would look like, but I knew it could not include my past.’
Years later, Nadya remains haunted by the deaths of her parents and sisters. She feels guilty that she has survived and they have not and she wonders whether she could have changed the course of history by staying home that night. Nadya has never told her husband or children of her past, although she shares Ukrainian traditions and customs with them. This legacy of her past, the importance of these myths and of their magic, can be shared: house spirits must be taken care of, and dreams treated with respect. But through guilt and fear she does not speak of the people who were part of her life.
But then events make Nadya realise that the past cannot always be kept separate from the present, and that keeping secrets does not always protect those she cares about. Nadya discovers, too, that accepting and speaking about the past leads to other possibilities and opportunities in her own life.
I loved this novel. Nadya’s story – both past and present - is engrossing. Her experiences are both a poignant reminder of the destruction and disruption of lives during World War II, and of the resilience of the human spirit.
‘Names made connections between the dead and the living.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith