"From Chernobyl with Love:
Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union"
by Katya Cengel
A review
The
fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a powerful symbol of the more widespread
collapse of communist regimes in Europe and the thawing of relations between
East and West. Since then, countries
which were once behind the so-called “Iron Curtain”, including the Baltic
states, have become popular tourist destinations – apart from enthusiastic
competitors in the Eurovision song contest. However, it sometimes seems as if their years
under Soviet rule or influence have not yet been shrugged off, giving them a
strange and exotic aura. Decades after
its demise, the USSR and its satellite states still exert a morbid or (depending
on one’s sympathies) nostalgic fascination.
Perhaps, this explains, in part, the enthusiasm for HBO’s tv series Chernobyl.
If
Eastern Europe still feels ‘different’ now, imagine how it was like in 1998. For Californian journalist Katya Cengel, then
just a twenty-two-year old college graduate, it was, both literally and
metaphorically, at the other end of the world. Far from disheartening her, this
challenge drove her to seek a job with the Baltic Times in Latvia and
then, once this first leg of her European adventure was finished, to move to
the Ukraine.
From
Chernobyl with Love contains the memoirs of these difficult but rewarding
years. Admittedly, the choice of title seems suspiciously like an attempt to
capitalise on the current interest in Chernobyl – the book has little to do
with that nuclear plant or its notorious disaster, apart from the fact that one
of Cengel’s assignments in Chernobyl led to her meeting with her husband, whose
step-father happened to be an engineer at the plant at the time of the explosion.
Yet,
even if it’s Chernobyl which makes you pick up this book, you will likely hold
on to it for other reasons. For Cengel
is an engaging raconteur. The story she presents
to us is, primarily, a personal one. She
reveals much about her relationship with her family, about the friends she made
in Latvia and the Ukraine, about falling in (and out of) love with the man who
would become her husband. In her account, Cengel tends to downplay her professional
prowess and successes – she’s actually a prize-winning, globe-trotting journalist. Her skill shows in the way she uses her (and
others’) personal stories to comment on wider social, political and cultural
issues. Thus, her own struggles with illness
give her account a human dimension, but also serve as eye-openers about the
dismal health services in the Ukraine. Her relationship (and subsequent rift)
with her ex-husband, also serve to highlight the difficulty of bridging the almost
irreconcilable differences between distant cultures. Small details reveal the hardships faced in
post-Communist countries – from the constant struggle with the cold in
less-then-comfortable residences to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Government offices (importing orthodontic
retainers involved getting a personal authorisation from the Health Minister)
and the quasi-farcical political posturing (as revealed in Cengel’s chapter
about her assignment in the separatist state of Transdienstria). Several chapters recount the build-up to Ukraine’s
Orange Revolution, as witnessed at first hand by the author.
From
Chernobyl with Love is no history book. It’s something even more authentic – a personal
account of some of the most tumultuous events of the recent past.
Hardcover, 304 pages
Expected publication: November 1st 2019 by Potomac Books (University of Nebraska Press)
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