The Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine

“Planet Earth was the last place I wanted to be. I was basically under house arrest with Mom and GG. Don’t get me wrong—I love GG. When Mom and I used to visit her in the nursing home, she’d always slip me 3 Musketeers bars. She’d never been a big talker even before her stroke, but I didn’t mind; we’d smile at each other while Mom asked the nursing home aides a million annoying questions to make sure they were treating GG right. Her moving in with us hadn’t made her any more chatty and she didn’t smile much anymore. She spent a lot of time in bed watching TV or staring off into space with a gloomy expression. When she had a work Zoom, Mom sometimes made me deliver GG’s meals […] It was always a relief to get back to the living room couch and Zelda.”

The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown challenges Matthew’s understanding of his world, his family, and himself. This widespread crisis has shrunk his world, strained his relationships, and worsened his loneliness and frustration. This passage establishes the difficult parameters of Matthew’s world and introduces the primary conflicts in his storyline.

“Since early that fall, people from the countryside had been arriving in Kyiv, claiming there was not enough to eat. Papa told me not to believe their lies. They were kulaks, wealthy peasants, who, along with priests, aristocrats, and tsarist sympathizers, were our class enemies. In the Pioneers, we’d learned all about the importance of ridding society of kulaks, who refused to give up their land to join collective farms and hid their grain so they wouldn’t have to share it. Papa said they’d rather beg on the street than work together for the common good. The only reason there were food rations at all in the cities was because of the kulaks and their greed and laziness.”

Mila’s relationship with her father and involvement in the Young Pioneers define how she sees the world. She doesn’t understand that her country is in crisis, because her father has taught her otherwise. This highlights the theme of The Challenges of Widespread Crises. Because some people have a stake in minimizing the sense of crisis, it can be difficult to discover just how dire the situation is. This passage therefore establishes Mila’s outlook at the novel’s start and foreshadows how her perspective will change after she meets her cousin Nadiya.

“Pop must have ordered Mom to leave me be, because she didn’t come to smooth my hair or rub my back the way she usually did when I was upset. I huddled in a tight ball under my covers, slammed my fist into my pillow. How I hated him! Someday, I told myself, I would be all grown-up and never have to listen to him again. Already I was twelve and a half—just six more years and I could get a job and never touch another cabbage roll again, just eat 3 Musketeers and Snickers all day.”

Helen’s conflicts with her family and home life define how she sees herself at the start of her account. She’s living in the US during the Great Depression and has cousins starving in Ukraine. However, she doesn’t understand how these crises are impacting her life at this early juncture of the story. The passage therefore foreshadows the lessons that Helen will learn over the course of the chapters that follow.