The Apartment On Lepky Street

The Apartment on Lepky Street tells the story of a city with a dramatic history, where the silences about past wars and mass murders are so unbearable that only an abandoned dog can trace the secrets and "speak" for the people who still cannot speak for themselves.

The story follows three generations of the family of an old Soviet military pilot – a Korean war veteran – who settle in a city once a cultural centre of Europe, a place variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, and Lviv. The apartment that this Soviet family has inhabited since the '70s is, by coincidence, the former childhood home of Stanislaw Lem. A Polish writer of Jewish origin, Lem is one of the few survivors of the Holocaust in Lviv, who leaves the city forever after World War II. Because it is hard, if not impossible, for the humans to talk about the city's complicated past and their own traumatic memories of Soviet and Nazi atrocities, it is a dog named Dom who accepts the challenge to pick up the pieces of the family story and Ukraine's history.

Living in a small apartment with the old colonel and three generations of women, Dom astutely observes the shifting world around him, piecing together for readers the layers of history and uncertain future of this new and strange city. Memory and history cannot remain hidden beneath cement or in the silence of stone walls—not to a dog's senses.

Born in a Soviet wool factory, Dom feels just as much of an outsider as English-language readers might to the world of 1990s Lviv – guiding us, as Virgil, through its cobblestone streets. Through Dom's voice, Amelina presents a fresh perspective on critical issues such as the supposed east-west divide in Ukraine, themes of migration and displacement, Lviv's history as a major Polish and Jewish metropolis, its dark history with the Holocaust, and its multiple transformations over the tumultuous twentieth century.