Overview

The story of the deportation of Romanians from Bukovina to the steppes of Siberia, an exercise in historical memory and a powerful story of maintaining humanity in impossible conditions. A new novel from Liliana Corobca and her translator Monica Cure, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld translation prize. The story of the deportation of Romanians from Bucovinato the steppes of Siberia, an exercise in historical memory and a powerful story of maintaininghumanity in impossible conditions. A new novel from Liliana Corobca andher translator Monica Cure, winner of the Oxford-Weidenfeld translation prize. Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her fromBucovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan.She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form ofstorytelling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great granddaughter,who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candor, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map. The narration is interspersed with songs that transform into poems, and prayers spoken in the past that become prayers in the present. What links the narration is not so much a plot as it is the reader's astonishment. Howcould Ana survivesucha series ofexperiences, and do so with her mind and heart intact? A history of cruelty and trauma lies behind the banal markers of contemporary life. These realizations combine in the central theme of the book, one which the narrator describesas, ""stories bring you youth.""

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9781644214176

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Reviews

"""As a Ukrainian, Too Great a Sky’s depiction of the Soviet deportations in Bukovina in the 20th century remind me of those now occurring in Mariupol and other occupied cities in Ukraine. Corobca’s moving story lets the reader into this experience, in which locals are driven out and the new ‘masters’ declare the land as ‘always theirs.’ We should all hear stories like this one."" – Artem Chapeye, author of The Ukraine ""There's a mythic, fairy-tale aesthetic that comes into play when survivors depict Stalin's resettlement policies (fans of Platonov and even Pasternak will know what I mean), the sense of being orphaned by the universe, of complete and utter deprivation, free of resentment, because what would be the point? Liliana Corobca's Too Great a Sky opens with its primal scene: after weeks of crossing endless steppes in cattle cars, you are released with nothing but the summer clothes on your back and assigned to a labor crew. But do you despair? Why would you? God still loves you, and there's plenty to eat: grass, mice, once every three years a very small potato . . . I admit I cried a lot while reading this book, in part because my best friend's father came from the same part of Romania as the people in the book and ended up deserting from the Red Army and walking to Israel. His mother, having been driven (literally, in the sidecar of a motorcycle) from Poland at age four, watched her own mother starve to death in Uzbekistan and did slave labor in an asbestos plant. I'd known these stories for 25 years in the form of jokes—for instance, it started snowing in Haifa, and my friend's mother refused to go to the window, saying the snow in Siberia had been enough for one lifetime. It took a novel to flesh out those jokes with the emotions that even my friend has repressed. So I would give this book eleven points out of ten as one of the most moving I've ever read."" — Nell Zink"

"""As a Ukrainian, Too Great a Sky’s depiction of the Soviet deportations in Bukovina in the 20th century remind me of those now occurring in Mariupol and other occupied cities in Ukraine. Corobca’s moving story lets the reader into this experience, in which locals are driven out and the new ‘masters’ declare the land as ‘always theirs.’ We should all hear stories like this one."" – Artem Chapeye, author of The Ukraine"

Author Information

LILIANA COROBCA is a writer and researcher of communist censorship in Romania. She was born in the Republic of Moldova and is the author of the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the 'Prometheus' Prize for debut fiction. She is also the author of the novels The Censor's Notebook (Seven Stories Press, 2022), which won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize, A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013), and The Old Maids' Empire (2015). She has received grants and artists' residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland. MONICA CURE is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist, as well as a two-time Fulbright grant award winner. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she's the author of the book Picturing the Postcard- A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of The Censor's Notebook by Liliana Corobca won the 2023 Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is currently based in Bucharest.

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