Irene Zabytko grew up in Ukrainian Village in the 60s. But she and her neighbors didn’t call it that. “We called it a slum,” she says. “I lived across the street from a factory. There were gangs and there was a lot of violence.”
When she returned home she quit school and “meandered” for a while, “falling in love with a guy and moving to Vermont.” That move made her realize she should “go to school and do something more worthwhile than living with a guy and chopping wood.” She earned a humanities degree and an MFA in writing from Vermont College and started teaching English as a second language, splitting her time between Vermont and her parents’ home in Florida. She’d begun to write short stories about the people in Ukrainian Village, and they were getting published in anthologies and textbooks.
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After her students got over their surprise that she spoke Ukrainian (“The language is so despised in their own country”), they told her about their experience of the Chernobyl disaster. They recalled seeing the sky light up that night and then tasting something metallic in the air, thought they didn’t find out what had happened until many days later.
There have been plans to close down the remaining Chernobyl reactors for a long time, but no date had been set until recently; the one currently being tossed around is December 15. Zabytko–who’s completing her second novel, a “post-Soviet Ukrainian update of the Canterbury Tales”–says she’ll believe it when she sees it. She says that one reactor there has been leaking since 1987, and nothing has been done about it.
