Winterkill
This is an excellent and terrible book.
Well-written, it includes convincing and sympathetic characters, and it bears witness to an awful historical event: Stalin’s partially successful attempt between 1930 and 1933 to starve Ukraine to death. Its author, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch, is, in her own words, “fierce in her pursuit of truth.”
She skillfully evokes a fictional Ukrainian village called Felivka and a farm family who support themselves by raising wheat, vegetables, and livestock on a small scale. The story revolves around a twelve-year-old farmboy, Nyl, and Alice, a Canadian-Ukrainian who has innocently come to participate in the great Communist revolution. They are both twelve. By the end of the novel most other characters are dead, leaving Nyl and Alice among the few survivors of a genocide.
Stalin’s collectivization and Russification processes were brutal, and Winterkill spares no authentic detail: What’s it like to starve? To be a street child? To step constantly over dead bodies? To watch ravens eat unburied family members? For eight- to twelve-year-olds, for whom the book is intended, these are truly awful events to endure, even in print.
Skrypuch herself is Ukrainian-Canadian, and Ukraine has awarded her the Order of Princess Ohla for her writing. Like the Holocaust, Stalin’s lesser-known genocide, the Holodomor, should never be forgotten. But worst of all—any reader who follows the news knows that many of the same atrocities are recurring in Ukraine: bodies in the streets, forcible loss of culture, violence, orphaned children, hunger, darkness, and cold. Winterkill.
This is a hard book for adults to read, but we know truth is often hard. How incredibly sad will it seem to lucky, unhardened American third to seventh graders who are safe (hopefully) from such horrors?
