Otherland

Shortlisted for the Douglas Stewart prize for non fiction and the Community Relations Commission Award in NS W and the Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

'I left too early, before tanks rolled into Moscow in 1991, and before Gorbachev was put under home arrest in a failed coup. I left before Russia and Ukraine became separate countries, before the KGB archives were opened, before the Russian version of Wheel of Fortune, before the word 'Gulag' appeared in textbooks. I left before Chechnya, before the mass renaming of cities and streets, before you could go into a shop and actually purchase the books of Brodsky, Pasternak and Nabokov. I left too early, I missed the whole point. I was not there when my generation was cornered by history.'

Maria Tumarkin travels with her Australian-born teenage daughter, Billie, back to Russia and Ukraine to have her experience first-hand the seismic shifts of her family's native country. For Maria the trip back is no simple stroll down memory lane. Splintered and scattered across the world, her generation has ended up inhabiting vastly different realities. Along with exploring the political and cultural fallout of a century of turmoil, Maria wanted to bring together the worlds of her mother and daughter - the different continents, histories and experiences they encompassed.

Before they set off, Maria wistfully imagined her and Billie's hearts beating in unison as they travelled back to a past they could both understand, forging a nearly superhuman bond along the way. But, in Maria and Billie's case, the past was not simply another country, but one that no longer existed.

Otherland is the story of a six-week trip traversing three generations, three lifetimes and three profoundly different but profoundly interconnected stories of mothers and daughters.

Reading Group Book Questions

1. Bob Dylan famously sang in ‘Mississippi’, ‘You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way.’ How does this sentiment figure into Maria’s return to Russia? What are the barriers – literal, emotional, figurative – that stand between Maria and her understanding of her past?
2. What is the relationship between Maria and her daughter at the beginning of the book and at the end? How do they change over the course of their trip, and what central events or experiences trigger these changes?
3. What does Billie reveal about herself in her diaries? How do her thoughts and opinions complement or diverge from Maria’s own feelings about their shared journey? How do you feel about Billie’s diary being included in Otherland?
4. Empathy is defined as ‘a mental entering into the feeling or spirit of a person or thing’. In what way is Otherland a story of empathy? How much are we capable of shaping another’s experience or perception of a place, a person or a significant historical moment?
5. Compare Maria’s and Billie’s response to Babi Yar, the site of the massacre of over thirty-three thousand Jewish men, women and children. How do notions of innocence and experience, subjectivity and objectivity influence these very different reactions? Are we capable of having aesthetically meaningful responses to scenes of darkness and pain?

About The Author

Born in 1974 in the former Soviet Union in a Russian Jewish family, which in 1989 immigrated to Australia. Maria has published three books, "Traumascapes" (2005) , "Courage" (2007) and most recently “Otherland”. All have received multiple award shortlistings. She lives in Melbourne with her two children.