TELL ME A STORY BABUSHKA

A child learns of her Ukrainian grandmother’s terrifying escape as a child.

Baba kneads dough for bread and tells her granddaughter, Karina, light-skinned and brown-haired, the story of a little girl living in a Ukrainian village. The soldiers of the Soviet army, portrayed as monsters, invade, first taking the villagers’ grain (a note at the beginning describes Holodomor, a famine caused by the Soviet Communist Party that resulted in 14.5 million deaths), then imprisoning families, including the little girl’s, in a camp in Siberia, where children are separated from their parents. One day the children discover matryoshka dolls beneath their mattresses; the fifth dolls contain messages of a rescue plan. At dawn, while their captors are at a campwide meeting, the children are ushered away through the forest, then onto a waiting train. Baba reveals that she was the little girl—and is now “a happy old lady, kneading bread dough and telling a true story to her granddaughter.” Beautiful, detailed illustrations bring to life an old-world village with a thatched roof cottage. As the invasion approaches, dark, foreboding scenes dominate with frightening depictions of soldiers with sharp-angled faces in silhouette, holding spearlike rifles. The matryoshka dolls are colorfully limned, a bright source in the darkness. This is an ugly historical moment of destruction told expeditiously, concluding with a decisive and constructive outcome for an earlier generation of Ukrainian children. (This book was reviewed digitally.)

Timely, with relevance to today’s difficult Ukrainian struggle as history is repeated.