On April 14 th , 2023, the Institute of European Studies co-hosted an event in collaboration with the German Department featuring Ukrainian-born author Tanja Maljartschuk. The event was hosted by Professor Anna Dwyer and Professor Patricia Anne Simpson. Tanja Maljartschuk grew up in Ukraine, studied philology in Kiev and worked as a journalist after. She emigrated to Vienna in 2011 and has published multiple books and essays since. She has won multiple awards for her work and her most recent publication is a collection of essays entitled “Gleich geht die Geschichte weiter, wir atmen nur aus” (The story will continue soon, we are just breathing out), written between 2014 and 2022. She writes both in Ukrainian and German.
Maljartschuk started her presentation by reading some short essays from her most recent publication. She explained that she often writes about her grandmother, who taught her how to write and how to tell stories. She explained that her grandmother is the personification of Ukraine in the 20th Century. Her grandmother lived through the Holodomor (great famine in Ukraine in 1933) and worked as a maid for a Jewish family in Kiev during World War II.
In her work, Maljartschuk talks about Ukrainian history and culture and explains how important culinary traditions are in Ukraine. She sees the roots of this importance in the Holodomor and said that her grandmother thought that the greatest way of showing appreciation for her family was feeding them, because she knew the horrors of having nothing to eat. In that context, Maljartschuk spoke about transgenerational trauma and about how all of us are impacted by family history. Later, the author spoke about the cultural diversity of Ukraine. This diversity can be found in the different languages that are spoken there apart from Ukrainian: Polish, German and Yiddish in the west, Russian in the east and Greek and Bulgarian in the South. This multilingualism is a direct consequence of Ukraine’s colonization by different empires throughout history. On the one hand, this multilingualism is culturally enriching, on the other hand it can lead to conflicts because it complicates the emergence of a distinct national Ukrainian identity, she explained. At the end, Maljartschuk read some of her essays that she wrote in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In one, she powerfully compares the war with a monster in her living room that she tries to fight but cannot. In another one, she writes about a young girl that loses her faith in God, because if he existed, he wouldn’t have let her father die in war.
In the following discussion with the thirty participants the author answered questions about the importance of journalism and literature in the time of war, about the Holocaust in Ukraine, the village she grew up in, and about how the experiences of writing in German and Ukrainian are different.