Authors & Insights: Yaroslav Trofimov and Sergey Radchenko

Description

Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign-affairs correspondent at The Wall Street Journal, will present his latest book, No Country for Love, in conversation with SAIS professor Sergey Radchenko.

The Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center are partnering to host the latest installment of Authors & Insights, a series of in-depth conversations with some of today's most compelling authors and thinkers exploring the issues that shape our world.

Doors open at 12:30 p.m.

Book Synopsis:

Seventeen-year-old Debora Rosenbaum, ambitious and in love with literature, arrives in the capital of the new Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, Kharkiv, to make her own fate as a modern woman. The stale and forbidding ways of the past are out; 1930 is a new dawn, the Soviet era, where skyscrapers go up overnight. Debora finds work and meets a dashing young officer named Samuel who is training to become a fighter pilot. They fall in love and begin to mix with Ukraine's new cultural elite.

But Debora's prospects—and Ukraine's—soon dim. State-induced famine rolls through the over-harvested countryside, and any deviation from Moscow-dictated ideology is punished by disappearance. When Samuel is sentenced to 10 years' hard labor, Debora is left on her own with a baby. And this is only the beginning. As advancing Nazi armies move through Ukraine during World War II, its yellow fields of wheat run red with blood. Forced to renounce the man she loves, her identity, and even her name, Debora also learns to endure, manipulate, and resist.

No Country for Love follows the hard choices Debora makes as Ukraine, caught between two totalitarian ideologies, turns into the deadliest place in the world—while she tries to protect those she loves most.