Son From Ukraine

After a long flight, Sandra and Albert Upeslacis step out of the aircraft and look upon Ukraine, a country with a rich heritage and culture that is, in the year 2000, still working to shake off the ghosts of Soviet occupation. A five-week stay lies ahead for the couple, and if all goes to plan, they will not be returning to Canada alone—through the many hurdles of international adoption, a young boy waits for them, unaware that soon, his family will find him. Son from Ukraine is the heartwarming true story of Sandra Upeslacis’s international adoption of her son. It shows in stunning detail the international adoption process, Ukraine at the turn of the century, and the cultural, linguistic, and bureaucratic realities of a post-Soviet country. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in international adoption and the history of Ukraine. Shining above every difficulty, however, is the story of love and a family taking its first tender steps into togetherness.

After a long flight, Sandra and Albert Upeslacis step out of the aircraft and look upon Ukraine, a country with a rich heritage and culture that is, in the year 2000, still working to shake off the ghosts of Soviet occupation. A five-week stay lies ahead for the couple, and if all goes to plan, they will not be returning to Canada alone—through the many hurdles of international adoption, a young boy waits for them, unaware that soon, his family will find him. Son from Ukraine is the heartwarming true story of Sandra Upeslacis’s international adoption of her son. It shows in stunning detail the international adoption process, Ukraine at the turn of the century, and the cultural, linguistic, and bureaucratic realities of a post-Soviet country. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in international adoption and the history of Ukraine. Shining above every difficulty, however, is the story of love and a family taking its first tender steps into togetherness.

In Children of Rus’, Faith Hillis recovers an all but forgotten chapter in the history of the tsarist empire and its southwestern borderlands. The right bank, or west side, of the Dnieper River—which today is located at the heart of the independent state of Ukraine—was one of the Russian empire’s last territorial acquisitions, annexed only in the late eighteenth century. Yet over the course of the long nineteenth century, this newly acquired region nearly a thousand miles from Moscow and St. Petersburg generated a powerful Russian nationalist movement. Claiming to restore the ancient customs of the East Slavs, the southwest’s Russian nationalists sought to empower the ordinary Orthodox residents of the borderlands and to diminish the influence of their non-Orthodox minorities. Right-bank Ukraine would seem unlikely terrain to nourish a Russian nationalist imagination. It was among the empire’s most diverse corners, with few of its residents speaking Russian as their native language or identifying with the culture of the Great Russian interior. Nevertheless, as Hillis shows, by the late nineteenth century, Russian nationalists had established a strong foothold in the southwest’s culture and educated society; in the first decade of the twentieth, they secured a leading role in local mass politics. By 1910, with help from sympathetic officials in St. Petersburg, right-bank activists expanded their sights beyond the borderlands, hoping to spread their nationalizing agenda across the empire. Exploring why and how the empire’s southwestern borderlands produced its most organized and politically successful Russian nationalist movement, Hillis puts forth a bold new interpretation of state-society relations under tsarism as she reconstructs the role that a peripheral region played in attempting to define the essential characteristics of the Russian people and their state.

Single women have a long and successful track record as adoptive parents, but single men seeking to adopt have had a tougher time of it. And yet the need for role models in this regard exists, if for no other reason than to offer hope to those men who want to adopt but are daunted by the seeming immensity of the challenge. Available children tend to live in countries that are both traditional and conservative and think in terms of "mother and child" but rarely "father and child." Presuming that his already being an adoptive parent (he had previously adopted a boy from a Russian orphanage) would make a second attempt easier, Robert Klose was nevertheless confronted by a Ukrainian bureaucracy hobbled by its Soviet origins, as well as the vagaries of personalities in whose hands his fate would rest. The result is a harrowing narrative full of characters both picaresque and sympathetic, with all the actors, including the author, playing their roles in the chaotic aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Adopting Anton is the story of a single man's determination to bring a five-year-old boy to a new home in America, but not knowing, until the last moment, whether his efforts would result in failure or success.

The Cossack revolution of 1648 redrew the map of Eastern Europe and established a new social and political order that endured until the early nineteenth century, with the full integration of Ukraine into imperial states. It was an era when Ukrainian Cossack statehood was established, when a country called Ukraine appeared for the first time on European maps, and new, diverse identities emerged. Eighteenth-Century Ukraine provides an innovative reassessment of this crucial period in Ukrainian history and reflects new developments in the study of eighteenth-century Ukrainian history. Written by a team of primarily Ukrainian historians, the volume covers a wide range of topics: social history, demographics, history of medicine, religious culture, education, symbolic geography, the transformation of collective identities, and political and historical thought. Special attention is paid to Ukrainian-Russian relations in the context of eighteenth-century Russian imperial unification. Eighteenth-Century Ukraine is the most comprehensive guide to new visions of early-modern Ukrainian history.

For: Stephen & Mary Perch.

A heartrending and beautiful trilingual book that gives voice to the children of war-torn Ukraine, interspersed with moving works of art. What is it like to be a child living in a country under siege—or living in a foreign city or land far from everything you have known and loved? In this moving and unforgettable book, Ukraine’s children speak out about growing up in amid the violence, terror, and death of war. Through the Eyes of Children is a collection of children’s quotes paired with evocative color artwork. Each quote appears in Cyrillic, transliterated Ukrainian, and English, making the book a tool for both language learning and language preservation. Each copy sold funds a week’s mental health assistance for a Ukrainian child.