American-born Larissa Babij is at home in Kyiv when Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Her grandparents left Ukraine amidst the violence of World War II, and nearly 80 years later, she is fleeing the advancing Russian army. A Kind of Refugee chronicles the first year of all-out war in Ukraine through vivid dispatches that Babij sent to readers abroad. In cities flooded with refugees and bustling with humanitarian aid efforts, or while supporting an innovative military unit making DIY drones, Babij examines Ukrainian cultures of cooperation. Reflecting on her American upbringing, she ponders the premium that Western societies—shaped by the traumatic history of WW II—place on security. When she returns to Kyiv, sirens, Russian missile strikes, and long periods of darkness organize her days. This moving account of taking responsibility for your home and your history concludes with several essays on theater published between 2015 and 2021. Written with a fierce love for Ukraine and its people, this book is a testament to the courage of ordinary people committed to freedom while defending their homeland.
“Larissa Babij’s vital dispatches from Ukraine humanize people subject to the dehumanizing conditions of war. In her letters, we meet those who are learning to live and make meaning despite it all, those dancers driven to armed defense, and the IT experts learning to make drones. Babij’s unique voice bridges worlds, weaving together her experiences between the US and Ukraine, between the diasporic imagination and blunt local realities. At times meditative, at others sharp as shrapnel, Babij’s testimonies slice through the fog of this ongoing war, making the existential stakes of this battle for Ukraine clear as day.”
—Maria Sonevytsky, Professor of Anthropology and Music, Bard College
“This is a vivid and vital personal account of the first year of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Determined to support her country, Babij stayed in Ukraine, directing resources and attention from abroad toward local initiatives aiding displaced people, transporting medical and military supplies, and building drones to improve the military's defense. A powerful war diary written amid air strikes, relocations, and power outages, Babij’s book is deeply thoughtful and thought-provoking, moving, and necessary.”
—Anya Yurchyshyn, author of My Dead Parents
"Good writing collapses space and time—-what's far grows near, turning »the other« into us. »When your conscience says ›Pay attention!‹ and you cannot look away, even though its scary, even though you are tired, even though you risk losing ... something inside you shifts,« writes Larissa Babij. Decades from now, when Russia's savage attack on Ukraine enters the catalogue of 21st century disasters, historians will turn to this chronicle by a courageous American woman of Ukrainian ancestry who chose to stay in Ukraine when others fled. By all accounts, the experience of war with all its urgencies, shocks, horror, and unexpected intimacies is incommunicable but 'A Kind of Refugee' comes close to achieving the impossible. Babij's vivid account of her days in Kyiv and traversing the war-ravaged country, together with a brief but illuminating return to the US, offers a paradigm and becomes an essential contribution to the growing body of what's known as 'the literature of witness.'"
—Askold Melnyczuk, author of The Man Who Would Not Bow
"Larissa Babij, born and raised in suburban Connecticut, traced her grandparents' journey as Ukrainian refugees in reverse. She made a life for herself in Kyiv as a dancer, a writer, a translator. Then came war, and she had to decide: to stay or to go? This is a book about home as reinvention, as continuity and transformation at once, as--like so much in dance--improvisation. In self-questioning, fluid diary entries, Larissa tells stories of the paradox of fear, the limits of universalism, and the uncanniness of the human capacity to adapt to what had just shortly before been unimaginable. This is a story about living in two worlds, about negotiating the relationship between the past and the future, and about coming to responsibility for making choices. "I had no idea," she confesses, "that the world is mine to take care of." What she comes to grasp through living in war is that we are formed not by what happens to us, but by how we respond."
Marci Shore, Yale University, author of The Ukrainian Night
"A remarkable record of the shock and disruption experienced by a longtime Kyiv resident in the first months of Russia's full-scale invasion. The grandchild of Ukrainians forced to flee their country during World War II, Larissa Babij brings the ordeal of her forebears into conversation with her own unexpected experience of escape in 2022, creating a portrait of contemporary Ukraine that reverberates with the pain and questions of the past."
Megan Buskey, author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet
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