Author(s): Yaroslav Trofimov

Historical | July 2024 New Releases

Seventeen-year-old Deborah Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, 1930, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; it's a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Deborah finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. They fall in love, and she becomes pregnant.

But Deborah's prospects - and Ukraine's - soon dim. Famine plagues the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance: without warning, Samuel is sentenced to ten years' hard labour. Deborah is on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning.

Germany and Russia mobilize, and Ukraine becomes the no-man's-land during World War II, where its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Caught in the middle, like her country, Deborah must do whatever it takes to survive. Not only to protect herself, but also her increasingly observant mother and her increasingly anti-Semitic young son, who is being raised as a Russian. Deborah must change her name, renounce her religion, marry a man she doesn't love, and face the possibility of giving up on all her dreams.