Blessings - Ukraine - poem

Literary Review, Wntr, 1999 by Steven Boyd Saum

"I read that the book had been translated into thirty-four languages," he said. "So I thought, why not let Ukrainian be number thirty-five?"

He wanted to know why Grisham was so popular in the States. The prose was simple -- so the accessibility part he understood. We talked about knowing your market, middle class lawyer heroes for middle class readers, white do-gooders, racial justice and Rodney King, slavery, O.J., black/white buddy movies. Somehow we wound up at Ukraine girls. But then that's almost always the case. If you're drinking, the third toast is always to women or to love. Or both. And a single male learns quickly how to answer, So when will you find a nice Ukrainian girl to marry?

"The thing about our girls," he said, and he held up his index finger, "is that they are beautiful and they know it."

Potatoes

With my editor acquaintance I also talked about the Dean of Foreign Languages, the man whose office we occupied. He was in Kiev for the day. On his most recent trip back from the city he had borrowed a car, something big and shiny and Japanese. He was stopped at every militia checkpoint he passed. A nice car means the driver has money for bribes. Outside of Kiev the gray uniforms were all business.

"Listen," said the first cop who stopped him. "Give me a couple of hryvnia, okay?"

Closer to Kirovograd they were still playing games: searching the car and saying his first aid kit wasn't accessible, poking around the chassis, leafing through documents.

"I'm in a hurry," he said. "Do you want a bribe or not?"

He came back disgusted with the provincial militia. Of course the whole country was corrupt, but at least near the capital they were more efficient about it.

Corruption has been the buzz-word this spring in Ukraine. Overnight Ukraine seems to have gone from being a U.S. foreign policy darling, an anchor of stability south of Lukashenko's insanity in Belarus and Yeltsin's latest excesses and repackaging of himself in Russia, to a basket case with the worst case of corruption in Europe -- and in the former Soviet Union. The U.S. Congress has debated rescinding aid that has already been approved. The Washington Post, New York Times and Christian Science Monitor all ran stories on corruption.

One Monitor story was by Igor Greenwald, the editor for the Kyiv Post. (To please Ukrainian Americans who read the paper, they recently changed the spelling from Kiev to Kyiv -- a switch from transliteration of the Russian spelling to the Ukrainian spelling.) The Post lurches between insightful feature pieces, gleefully cynical editorials and news no other paper carries to third-rate college journalism and a whiny expatriate clubbiness. The low mark the paper can claim would probably be a column this winter by a recently arrived American woman who complained about how much her babushka landlady and cook mothered her and, worse, that the grandmother actually had the effrontery to serve her kasha with raisins in it. Her column elicited a response from a Ukrainian emigre to the U.S. who had come back home, who traded tit for tat on Los Angelinos, and was galled by the way Americans put their feet on the seat in front of them in movie theaters. Conclusion: if you don't like it here, you can always leave Ukraine.