Historical fiction
2021
Faride
by Irene Rozdobudko
The beginning of the novel takes place in the 20s of the last century in the Crimea. Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Jews live peacefully in the village. We see a company of children of different ethnic backgrounds. Before World War II, these children graduated and were preparing for adult life. Young Crimean Tatar woman Faride works in a kindergarten. Crimea is occupied by the Nazis. They gather all the Jews to shoot them outside the village. Faride taught Jewish children from her kindergarten to say that they were Tatars, and gave them new Crimean Tatar names. The Nazis tortured her, but the children were saved. 50 years later she was awarded the title of the Righteous Among the Nations. In 1944, Crimea was liberated from the Nazis by the Soviet army. Stalin accused the Crimean Tatars of collaborating with the Nazis and ordered their expulsion from the Crimea, even those who had fought in the Soviet army. One night they are all driven from their homes and taken for months in wagons, designed to transport cattle, to camps in Siberia. Half of them died on the way from starvation and disease. Faride manages to save her young son, leaving him in the village with neighbors, but she finds herself in a Stalinist concentration camp, where she works on cutting trees. After Stalin's death, Crimean Tatars were still not allowed to return home to Crimea; they were relocated to Uzbekistan, where they lived under police surveillance until 1989, when the Soviet Union began to disintegrate. Faride returns, but her son did not come to meet her, and strangers live in her house. Faride returns forgotten, tortured by both the Nazis and the Soviet regime. The novel is based on real events, it shows the life story of one woman in parallel with the tragic history of the entire Crimean Tatar nation.
