Remember Who You Are: A Ukrainian Family Saga of Love, War, and Memory

Why do Ukrainians fight so fiercely for their freedom? Why does identity matter so deeply to them? And why, after generations of loss, repression, and war, do they still refuse to disappear?Remember Who You Are is a multigenerational Ukrainian family saga about love, memory, survival, and the stubborn determination to remain oneself when history repeatedly tries to erase who you are.Kyiv, 1915. Yaryna and Saveliy are young, in love, and building a future together. But revolution, political violence, repression, and the collapse of the world they know soon invade their private lives. Their choices, sacrifices, and losses become part of a family memory that will survive long after they are gone.A century later, Ukraine is once again fighting for its future. From the war that began in 2014 to the full-scale struggle that follows, another generation faces separation, danger, loyalty, love, and the question that has followed Ukrainians for centuries: what are you willing to endure in order to remain who you are?Through two intertwined eras, the novel explores something that can be difficult to understand from news reports alone. For generations, Ukrainians have lived through attempts to suppress their independence, reshape their history, weaken their culture, and sever the connection between people and their own memory. Yet again and again, families preserve what institutions try to destroy: language, stories, dignity, love, and the knowledge of where they come from.This is why memory matters.This is why identity matters.And this is why Ukrainians can seem so stubborn when their freedom is threatened.Remember Who You Are does not tell this story through politics or statistics. It tells it through people: men and women who love, lose, make mistakes, protect their families, go to war, wait for those they love, and pass fragments of memory from one generation to the next.Inspired in part by family history and set against real events in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Ukraine, this historical novel is both an intimate family story and a portrait of a nation that has learned, through survival, that forgetting who you are can be as dangerous as losing your home.A novel about Ukraine for readers who want to understand not only what Ukrainians are fighting against, but what they are fighting to preserve.