Two Hopes

Description

In December 2020, Nadezda Bobyleva boards a train at Berlin Central Station, bound east for the father she has seen only in a passport photograph. In her bag she carries a thin green notebook, found among her grandmother’s papers and dated 1967: another woman’s record of returning to Zlatopol, the Ukrainian hamlet of her childhood, scoured into ruin by famine, dekulakization and the long machinery of Soviet violence. The two women share a name – Nadezda, hope.

Two Hopes moves between these journeys with grace and unflinching clarity. Bobyleva writes of an emigration that split her life in two, of a Russian family in which violence and silence were quietly passed between generations, and of a brief, almost wordless reunion in a Kharkiv stairwell. By the book’s close, war has come to Ukraine, and the hamlet her grandmother mourned is gone twice over.