Otterbein’s Integrative Studies Program, in collaboration with the Humanities Advisory Committee and The Frank Museum of Art and Galleries, welcome Megan Buskey, author of Ukraine Is Not Dead Yet: A Family History of Exile and Return (Ibidem Press, 2023).

Public Talk: Ukraine is Not Dead Yet
Date: Wednesday February 7, 2024
Time: 3 pm – 4:30 pm
Location: Riley Auditorium, Battelle Fine Arts Center, 170 W. Park Street, Westerville, OH

ABOUT THE BOOK
When Megan Buskey’s grandmother Anna dies in Cleveland in 2013, Megan is compelled in her grief to uncover and document her grandmother’s life as a native of Ukraine. A Ukrainian American, Buskey returns to her family’s homeland and enlists her relatives there to help her in her quest—and discovers much more than she expected. The result is an extraordinary journey that traces one woman’s story across Ukraine’s difficult twentieth century, from a Galician village emerging from serfdom, to the “bloodlands” of Eastern Europe during World War II, to the Siberian hinterlands where Anna spent almost two decades in exile before receiving the rare opportunity to emigrate from the Soviet Union in the 1960s. In the course of her research, Megan encounters essential and sometimes disturbing aspects of recent Ukrainian history, such as Nazi collaboration, the rise and persistence of Ukrainian nationalism, and the shattering impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Yet her wide-ranging inquiries keep leading her back to universal questions: What does family mean? How can you forge connections between generations that span different cultures, times, and places? And, perhaps most hauntingly, how can you best remember a complicated past that is at once foreign and personal?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Retired U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Arnold, a Central Ohio resident and former Special Forces officer with three combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, has spent extensive time near the front lines advising the Ukrainian military (at his own expense).  Gen. Arnold is a nationally recognized expert on the war in Ukraine and has been quoted extensively in the Washington Post, among other publications.