Nadezhda in the Dark

On the longest night of a milk—dark Berlin winter, a doomed couple sit side by side on their bed. Both fled the Soviet Union as children, the narrator from Ukraine, and her girlfriend from Russia.

The lights are off. Neither speak.

In their silence, a century of Ukrainian and Russian history resurfaces: forgotten literary characters, Yiddish maxims, contraband jokes, LGBT life in the post—Soviet bloc,...