The Green Library

Norman Ravvin is the author of Café des Westens (which won the Alberta
Culture New Fiction Award) and Sex, Skyscrapers, and Standard Yiddish.

The Green Library is, in the words of one of its characters, a “love
story—and a war story.” Shifting smoothly between contemporary
Toronto and wartime Kiev, the narrative focuses on Eva, a woman whose
circumscribed existence on Toronto’s west side is transformed by the
appearance of a photograph, surreptitiously dropped through her mailbox.
In it appears “a woman who looks to be about Eva’s age,”
photographed “in some foreign place” many years before. In the
course of the novel Eva will learn that this is her maternal
grandmother, a Ukrainian poet murdered by the Nazis at Babi Yar.

Although the novel carefully depicts these two women’s private lives,
it also recounts Ukrainian history and myth, depicts the place of
Eastern European immigrants in postwar Canada, and portrays a
crisis-ridden visit Eva makes to contemporary Kiev. There, amid the
fallout of Chernobyl and the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Eva’s love
story and the story of her fallen grandmother begin to move toward a
resolution.

Kulyk Keefer’s Governor General Award–nominated book asks hard
questions concerning identity, the spirit of multiculturalism, and the
meaning of a difficult history that continues to rule the present. In
its sweep and its lush detail, it presents a compelling portrait of the
ties that bind the New World to a complicated European heritage.
“It’s all so foreign to Eva, and yet far too close,” writes Kulyk
Keefer. “There’s a bloodline, not just ink on paper, but a thin,
tough line of blood linking her ... with those doomed people ... in a
country no more real to her than a kingdom in a fairy tale.” In the
course of the novel, Eva’s Canada comes into focus as a far more
complex and varied place than she’d believed it to be, and Ukraine is
transformed in her mind from a fairy-tale kingdom to a deeply troubling
yet tempting place of possibility.