The House with the Stained Glass Window- Zanna Sloniowska, translated from the Polish by Antonia LLoyd Jones

I can’t quite remember how I came across this novel, but was immediately keen to read it as it’s set in the city of Lviv in Ukraine, brought alive for me by Philippe Sand’s terrific book East West Street. This novel is the story of four generations of women living in the eponymous house with the stained glass window. Through their lives the city of Lviv and its complex history is explored: lying as it does just east of present day Poland, in the west of Ukraine, the city has been at the epicentre of tumultuous social and political upheaval during the twentieth century. These upheavals, the various ethnic identities and allegiances of its population, are presented to us through the characters but also through the architecture and monuments of the city, whose stars also rise and fall, giving us a rich and kaleidoscopic picture of Ukraine’s loveliest city ( Lonely Planet).

The novel is narrated by the youngest member of the family, whose name we’re never told (unless I missed it?). It begins in 1988 with the untimely death of her mother, Marianne, a much loved opera singer, who was shot by mistake at a political rally. The narrative then goes back and forth in time in an episodic, anecdotal way, to scenes from her earlier childhood with her mother to scenes from the lives of her grandmother and great grandmother and their routes to ending up in Lviv. Great- granma is a strict and unappealing character, a Catholic who married her Soviet officer husband in Leningrad in 1928 and came to Lviv with him and her daughter, Aba, after the war. By 1988 she’s a suspicious, paranoid old lady, who’s alienated her family sufficiently that they keep separate households. She forbids Aba from following her dream to be an artist. Aba becomes a doctor instead and soon after develops crippling rheumatoid arthritis which dogs her all her life. Added to this, she was not allowed to marry the Polish musician she’d fallen in love with and as the Polish border moved westwards after the war, so he left with it, moving to a place she couldn’t follow. Marianne is an established opera singer at the beginning of the book and an exciting and passionate character who’s recently got involved with Ukrainian nationalist politics. Her daughter is born as a result of a brief romantic encounter and though she has a liaison with the art historian Mykola, she’s not interested in settling down with him. So the youngest woman, the narrator, is brought up in a household of self sufficient and unconventional women where men have come and gone through their lives, but the enduring people, with whom she has the closest bonds, are women.

The scenes from the past are interspersed with the forward narrative: the narrator loses her mother on the cusp of adolescence and she becomes increasingly independent, spending more and more time with the art historian/ lecturer Mykola, who introduces her, and so the reader, to the iconic buildings, squares and monuments of the city. Their relationship eventually becomes sexual and, though their erotic and passionate encounters are well described and plausible, I wondered whether the author had intended us to feel uncomfortable about the age difference and power imbalance here? The narrative takes us through iconic public moments too, such as the toppling of the Statue of Lenin from its position in front of the Opera House in 1990, and the finding of the Jewish gravestones in its base- it was then removed to a builder’s yard, where its head was knocked off for ease of storage. The stained glass window of the title is an important physical symbol in the book too- a unique piece, stretching right through four floors as it does, it is also fragile and friable, at times breaking up and vulnerable to theft. The novel takes us right up to the Ukrainian protests of 2013/2014 in the last chapter The Maidan, where Marianne’s daughter, our narrator, is joining in the protests, recording the brutal behaviour of the security forces on her mobile phone.

For me one of the great pleasures of this book is Zanna Sloniowska’s vivid imagery, so well rendered by Antonia Lloyd Jones. I loved old Great-granma’s puckered legs, and Marianne’s dirty green dress which resembled the open belly of a gutted trout. This is no deoderised, sanitised and scented feminine world, but one of sweat and body odour: Marianne’s little girl loves to leap into her mother’s unmade bed in the morning with its whiff of unwashed body and describes her mother’s legs encased in the mesh of her black stockings, slightly damp with sweat, they were prickly with hairs long unshaven.

And she excels at set pieces: I loved the birthday party at Uncle Alexei’s with its Brezhnev era spread : eggs stuffed with mushrooms and mayonnaise, red and black caviar canapés, beetroot and prune salad, the Olivier salad mandatory at every Soviet feast. The narrator sneaks into her aunt and uncle’s bedroom to poke about  in their private sphere and discovers  a mighty double bed, with a sort of frilly drape- an ice breaker in lace.

But my favourite is the chapter called Akademitska where she describes going shopping with Aba. First to the Galanteria, or Accessories, shop where a crush and a clamour of portly ladies pushed towards the counter, unashamedly extracting their beige bosoms from their dresses to try on the bras. Then the Kovbasa or Sausage shop where the assistants were as inaccessible and implacable as queens; their ample figures were too big for their frilly aprons. Then the Tiutin or tobacco shop with its fabulous wall and ceiling paintings of Cossacks, half- recumbent in close ranks besides their horses, amid the fumes of their own pipes, their fine dark eyes were closed, the feet emerging from their dark-blue pantaloons were long, their nails clipped, and their wavy topknots grew into their horses’ curly manes. I loved the account of the unspoken queuing rules, the relations between customers and shop assistants, the range of characters observed. I loved the scent of the countryside brought by the Astrakhan sheepskins and woollen coats and the tradeswomen in the bazaar, standing on their makeshift platforms above heaps of potatoes and carrots, eggs and meat, shouting and gesticulating, unashamed of their fat, blackened fingers.

And here, as elsewhere, identity is inextricably linked to language. The country people speak Ukrainian, the townspeople Ukrainian and Russian. Marianne marks her commitment to the Ukrainian cause by choosing to speak Ukrainian instead of Russian. I was reminded of Natasha Wodin’s book Sie kam aus Mariupol where, at an earlier time,  the 1917 Russian revolution meant that the language of the people, Ukrainian, became the lingua franca overnight and university professors, eloquent speakers of Russian, had to interview candidates in Ukrainian. Yet decades later, in this book, when Ukraine nationalism becomes a threat, the Russian authorities attempt to reduce the influence of the language by banning it as a medium language in schools and attempting to eliminate ethnically Ukrainian words from the dictionaries.

The book ends on an ambiguous note.The stained glass window, its existence threatened when a developer wants to remove it next door, is saved by a promise from the Polish authorities in Warsaw to renovate both house and window. Yet the Ukrainian authorities are outraged at another country’s Ministry of Culture interfering with their affairs. And poor Aba, rejected and abandoned by the narrator as she grows up and away from her, turning her back on the family,  is a lonely figure indeed. But the very last chapter, The Maidan, has our young protagonist narrator participating in the most recent protests, very much her mother’s daughter, but also her own person, protesting in a new era where new media plays a crucial role in the protests.

In a concise 240 pages Zanna Sloniowska combines a compelling family story with the history of a city in the crossfire of 20th century conflict and political struggle. While describing the Russian, Polish and Ukrainian communities there is little reference to the large Jewish population who were killed during the Second World War- the reader will need to go to Philippe Sands’s book to find out more about the terrible fate of the Jewish community. Thanks to Antonia Lloyd Jones for bringing this to us in a wonderfully smooth and readable translation: I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.