Friendship Over Tragedy: A Review of Blackbird Girls

Although they live in the same apartment building in Pripyat, in the Ukrainian republic of the Soviet Union in 1986, Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko are not friends. Valentina’s father is the supervisor of Oksana’s father at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and Oksana’s father believes he rather than his Jewish colleague should have gotten the job. And like many who are frustrated in their career ambitions, he has convinced his daughter to hate Jewish people at the same time as he abuses her emotionally and physically. On the Saturday morning that the sky turns red and smoky and a strange odor pervades their town, Valentina and Oksana’s fathers never return. Within days, the 11-year-old girls are evacuated, with Oksana’s mother rushed to Minsk due to radiation sickness. In Kiev, Valentina’s mother has to send the girls alone to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) because authorities don’t allow her to buy a ticket. She fears for the girls because her mother has been under police surveillance for years for reasons she won’t tell them.

In Leningrad with Valentina’s grandmother, the reader learns why, in chapters told from her point of view as a Jewish child who survived the German invasion and the war. Traveling 3000 miles by boat and foot, much of it alone, Rita – then Rivka – was sheltered by a Muslim Uzbek family and has remained best friends with their oldest daughter now a grandmother herself. Although that is not the secret, it becomes the means by which Rita and Valentina must save Oksana when her life is in danger.

Along with the two timelines, chapters alternate between Valentina and Oksana, showing how their friendship grows, to the point at which Valentina would risk everything to save her friend. Oksana learns to love and trust the Jewish family that comes to love her, but before she can do that, she needs to learn to love herself. Anne Blankman shows how Oksana evolves from an abused child whose prejudice and bullying behavior hides her terror to a self-confident youngster who learns to help herself and those around her – and to challenge the system that put her in her position. Valentina, too, grows as she comes to appreciate the grandmother she barely knows and the traditions that have kept Judaism and the Jewish people alive despite hatred and oppression. Blackbird Girls is an inspiring story of courage and friendship set against the backdrop of one of the worst (and most highly covered up) nuclear disasters in history.