The House with the Stained-Glass Window

Name: The House with the Stained-Glass Window
Author: Zanna Sloniowska
ISBN: 0857057146

by Zanna Sloniowska

Żanna Słoniowska, a Ukrainian-born Polish author. This is her debut novel. It’s about four generations of women who share an apartment in a house in Lviv. The story extends from the Soviet Terror of the 1930s to the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. This is a Bildungsroman, in which the coming-of-age of the narrator, the youngest of the women, draws us into an archaeology of Lviv; the once-Habsburg, then-Polish, now post-Soviet Ukrainian city reveals itself as a layered composition. It’s a beautiful novel. Lviv is a city in western Ukraine, which is precisely the part of Ukraine that has been passed back and forth among different powers the most. For a long time Lviv had been Lwów, a city in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; in the late 18th century the Commonwealth was partitioned. Maria Theresa and the Hapsburg empire took this southern part and called it “Galicia.” Polish Lwów became Austrian Lemberg, a Hapsburg city with Hapsburg architecture. In the aftermath of the First World War, Poland gained its independence and defeated Ukrainian forces to claim the city again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty), in September 1939, the Red Army invaded what had been eastern Poland, and integrated Lviv into Soviet Ukraine. In summer 1941 the Wehrmacht came, the Germans pushed out the Red Army and occupied the city. Later in the war, the Red Army returned. The Jews who had lived in the city were killed, and as a result of population exchanges (“ethnic unmixing,” so to speak) so fashionable at the end of the Second World War , ethnic Poles were sent to Poland and Lviv became a Soviet Ukrainian city. Then in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine—Lviv included—became an independent country. The novel takes you through these different incarnations of the city. The borders have moved so many times. There were vicious episodes of ethnic cleansing during and after the Second World War. In 1943, there was Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansing in which radical Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom had been collaborating with the Germans, massacred Poles in Volhynia. After the war, the Polish government, in an effort to rid itself of concentrations of ethnic Ukrainians inside Polish territory, forcibly resettled thousands of Ukrainians in western Poland, murdering some in the process. At the same time, Poles and Ukrainians share a lot. They share experiences of Soviet occupation and German occupation. They share the experience of being caught between Hitler and Stalin and being passed back and forth between them. Their languages are mutually intelligible. The relationship is enormously complicated—as most relationships of any significance are.

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Marci Shore

"Żanna Słoniowska, a Ukrainian-born Polish author. This is her debut novel. It’s about four generations of women who share an apartment in a house in Lviv. The story extends from the Soviet Terror of the 1930s to the Ukrainian revolution of 2014. This is a Bildungsroman, in which the coming-of-age of the narrator, the youngest of the women, draws us into an archaeology of Lviv; the once-Habsburg, then-Polish, now post-Soviet Ukrainian city reveals itself as a layered composition. It’s a beautiful novel. Lviv is a city in western Ukraine, which is precisely the part of Ukraine that has been passed back and forth among different powers the most. For a long time Lviv had been Lwów, a city in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; in the late 18th century the Commonwealth was partitioned. Maria Theresa and the Hapsburg empire took this southern part and called it “Galicia.” Polish Lwów became Austrian Lemberg, a Hapsburg city with Hapsburg architecture. In the aftermath of the First World War, Poland gained its independence and defeated Ukrainian forces to claim the city again. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Following the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression treaty), in September 1939, the Red Army invaded what had been eastern Poland, and integrated Lviv into Soviet Ukraine. In summer 1941 the Wehrmacht came, the Germans pushed out the Red Army and occupied the city. Later in the war, the Red Army returned. The Jews who had lived in the city were killed, and as a result of population exchanges (“ethnic unmixing,” so to speak) so fashionable at the end of the Second World War , ethnic Poles were sent to Poland and Lviv became a Soviet Ukrainian city. Then in 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine—Lviv included—became an independent country. The novel takes you through these different incarnations of the city. The borders have moved so many times. There were vicious episodes of ethnic cleansing during and after the Second World War. In 1943, there was Ukrainian-Polish ethnic cleansing in which radical Ukrainian nationalists, some of whom had been collaborating with the Germans, massacred Poles in Volhynia. After the war, the Polish government, in an effort to rid itself of concentrations of ethnic Ukrainians inside Polish territory, forcibly resettled thousands of Ukrainians in western Poland, murdering some in the process. At the same time, Poles and Ukrainians share a lot. They share experiences of Soviet occupation and German occupation. They share the experience of being caught between Hitler and Stalin and being passed back and forth between them. Their languages are mutually intelligible. The relationship is enormously complicated—as most relationships of any significance are."

Ukraine · fivebooks.com