WHEN LUBA LEAVES HOME

Ten interconnected tales about a tightknit Ukrainian neighborhood in 1960s Chicago: a first collection from the author of the novel The Sky Unwatched (2000).

Narrator Luba lives with her émigré parents and attends a local college where, eager to assimilate, she uses the name Linda. The first story she tells, “Steve’s Bar,” sets up the community’s generational divisions. Steve’s original patrons, mostly immigrants from DP camps after WWII, look up to officer Kharkevych, the cop they call on to avert neighborhood crises. But their college-age children watching the TV above the bar are nonplussed to see him among the other cops roughing up antiwar protesters from their campus. In “My Black Valiant,” the secondhand car Luba’s purchased, loses its potency as a symbol of rebellion after she catches her parents giggling in it one Sunday morning. “The Celebrity” is a famous Ukrainian poet’s widow whom Luba chauffeurs around in the Valiant. The woman is a money-grubbing phony, but her charisma works genuine magic on Luba and everyone else. A different kind of charisma is at work in “Saint Sonya.” Sonya became briefly famous for bleeding with stigmata during middle school, until Luba told on her for hanging out with boys. Now Sonya works in a bakery and is perfectly content. In “Obligation,” a young woman becomes unraveled when she recognizes a bag lady as the person who saved her life as a child in the camps. “Pani Ryhotska in Love” makes Luba jealous that the old woman can find romance with her aging boarder, especially since Luba’s crush on Pani Ryhotska’s artist son is a theme throughout the stories—finding a disillusioning climax in “The Prodigal Son Enters Heaven.” In the final piece, “John Mars, All American,” Luba faces her own ambivalence when she brings a potential suitor to Steve’s Bar, sees her world through his critical non-Ukrainian eyes, and loses interest in him.

Often inconsequential taken alone, the stories build incrementally to create a moving whole.