48 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine MarshThe Lost Year: A Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impact of the Past on the Present
The three main characters’ historical settings influence their understandings of themselves. Because Matthew, Mila, and Helen are all 12 and 13 years old, they’re all coming of age in the narrative present of their respective chapters. Therefore, their environmental, political, and social backdrops affect how they see their identities. In Matthew’s chapters, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic influences how he sees the world and himself. In Mila’s chapters, Joseph Stalin’s rule and the 1933 Holodomor affect how she navigates her world and understands her place in it. In Helen’s chapters, the 1933 Great Depression in the US impacts her understanding of herself and her family. Matthew, Mila, and Helen are all living through what Matthew’s dad refers to as “real history” (27). The more that Matthew learns about Mila and Helen’s experiences via his great-grandmother’s stories, the more important history becomes to his life in the present. In his storyline, GG’s boxes of diaries, letters, articles, and official documents offer Matthew a living gateway into this history. The boxes are a direct connection to GG’s past and, therefore, to Matthew’s ancestors’ lives in Ukraine and New York. By sorting through the boxes with GG, Matthew is able to enter the present-day lives of Mila and Helen.
The more that Matthew learns about GG’s story, the more he understands his own place in history. GG’s stories reveal the truth of what she and her cousins Nadiya and Helen experienced during two major world-historical events. GG explains how these events influenced their relationships as children and how they saw the world and themselves. Before Mila met Nadiya, for example, she believed everything her father told her about the world. She regarded the typhus epidemic, the kulaks, and the kulak famine through her father’s lens, convinced that these issues had little to do with her and her family. She believed that her father “would never commit a traitorous act” (16) because she didn’t understand his or her own origins or place in the political conflicts of her day. Over time, her relationship with Nadiya gradually transforms her point of view and teaches her about who she really is. In turn, Matthew learns about his own true origins when GG tells him her story. Matthew realizes that if his great-grandmother and great-aunts could live through the historical struggles they lived through, then he can “survive being stuck home with a world-wide pandemic raging” (321). Furthermore, Matthew comes to see himself as the keeper of GG’s story. Like his great-aunt Helen, he has learned the importance of recording his family’s personal histories in order to preserve their experiences, stories, and memories. His relatives’ histories are his own and have thus shaped who he is in the present. Through the main characters’ interconnected storylines, the novel is thus conveying the ways in which all lives are connected, past, present, and future.
How Family Stories Shape Identity
Matthew, Mila, and Helen gain understanding of themselves by hearing, learning, and interacting with their family’s stories. Because Mila and Helen are Matthew’s great-aunts, their stories directly affect Matthew’s self-regard. As he learns about their lives through GG’s storytelling, he gains a new understanding of where he comes from and who he might be as a result. In Mila and Helen’s respective chapters, learning about their relatives similarly changes how they see themselves. At the start of Mila’s storyline, for example, Mila believes that she and her father are members of the wealthy elite and loyal devotees to Stalin’s Communist Party. Her mom died in childbirth, so Mila has grown up seeing her family as her orphaned father; her best friend, Katya; her “fellow Young Pioneers;” and “Papa Stalin, the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, who love[s] all children” (12). Therefore, when Nadiya arrives on her doorstep insisting that she is Mila’s cousin and that her father is Papa’s brother, Mila begins to question who she is. She realizes that if Nadiya’s story is true, she and her father are kulaks, too. Her understanding of herself continues to evolve the more time that she spends with Nadiya. Through Nadiya, she gains access to her true family history. Nadiya also informs Mila that they have family in New York, which is information that changes Mila’s life. Nadiya doesn’t try to disguise the truth of who she is and what their family has lived through. Her honesty gives her a clear understanding of her identity, which she in turn passes to her cousin Mila.
Meanwhile, Helen’s growing interest in her family in Ukraine gradually changes how she sees herself. This ongoing self-discovery journey begins for Helen after Mama tells her about Pop’s starving family and after she encounters Walter Duranty’s New York Times article denouncing the famine. With the help of her friend Ruth, Helen realizes that “[s]tories [are] powerful, but even more powerful [is] the act of sharing them” (155). Although Helen wants “to fit in as an American,” she also doesn’t want “to run away from who [she is]—from Pop and Mom, or their families, or the country they had left behind” (161). Ruth has helped her understand that it’s okay to be proud of who she is and where she comes from. Through her writing, Helen learns how to preserve and share her family stories while simultaneously claiming her identity. Matthew carries on this tradition in his chapters of the novel. Like Helen, he wants to preserve GG’s story so that no one will forget what she, Helen, and Nadiya experienced. In these ways, the three main characters’ interactions with their family stories gradually change how they see themselves and ultimately usher them through their coming-of-age experiences.
The Challenges of Widespread Crises
Matthew, Mila, and Helen’s storylines are all defined by widespread or global crises. These backdrops dictate the conflicts that the three main characters face throughout the novel. In Matthew’s chapters, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown have shrunken Matthew’s world and left him feeling trapped and alone. He becomes reliant on his video games to survive lockdown because his games keep him from “living the same depressing pandemic day over and over” (3). He misses his dad, who’s stuck overseas on a journalism assignment, feels pushed aside by his busy mother, and is unable to connect with his elderly great-grandmother. Matthew can’t attend school, and he isn’t allowed to see his friends. Therefore, all of the challenges that Matthew faces in the narrative present are inspired by the pandemic. Over time, Matthew learns how to think about these challenges differently. Hearing GG’s story particularly teaches him that if GG and his great-aunts could survive their particular tragedies, he can “survive a lot more” (321) than he once believed.
Mila’s storyline is similarly affected by her social and political context. After Mila meets Nadiya, for example, she gains an awareness of her circumstances, as Nadiya opens her eyes to the widespread crises occurring around her country. In Chapter 15, when Mila goes into town to find Nadiya, she encounters the truth of the Holodomor for the first time. She sees the children starving on the street and the peasants begging for food. Unable to “escape what [she has] seen,” she cannot help “imagining their bodies, open eyes and frozen mouths, imagining thousands like them—a whole city of the dead” (109). Once Mila realizes that her country and people are in a state of crisis, Mila’s engagement with the world changes. She is unaccustomed to feeling fear or sadness, but her awakening opens her to these physical and emotional challenges. In time, they compel her toward growth and change.
Helen’s experiences of the Great Depression in the US similarly challenge her and usher her character toward personal growth. At the start of her storyline, Helen’s biggest concern is fitting in at school. She refuses to eat her parents’ food or to speak up in class, because she is terrified of embarrassing herself in front of her classmates. Over time, however, Helen begins to learn about how the Depression is really impacting her family in the US. She also learns how the Holodomor is affecting her family in Ukraine. Like Mila, once she gains access to the truth of her social circumstances, she experiences an awakening. These widespread crises threaten Helen’s safety and security, but they also transform her. She starts collecting stories about the famine because she doesn’t “want to accept that their suffering was just life and that there was nothing to be done about it” (155). Like Matthew and Mila, Helen doesn’t want to sit idly by as tragedy occurs around her. Their stories show that there are many proactive ways to respond to widespread crises and that even in dire circumstances, one can make positive decisions.
