This article has been edited since it first appeared in print.
Kris Spisak (Photo by Rachel Loehr Photography)
When Midlothian author Kris Spisak learned about World War II in school, she listened for the stories she had heard as a child from her maternal grandparents, who lived in Ukraine at the beginning of the war. She waited to hear about the Ukrainians who celebrated the Russians leaving in 1941, only to flee after the subsequent arrival of the Germans, whom many had hoped would be their liberators.
Because that perspective on history was not taught in school, Spisak tried for decades, beginning in fourth grade, to share her family’s stories with the world. “I’ve played with it in poetry,” she says, “and I’ve played with it in an attempt at a young adult novel and in memoir, but I never found a way it worked.”
Then, in 2014, an opening scene popped into her head of a grandmother disappearing off an airplane and her two granddaughters searching for her. “That was my catalyst,” Spisak says.
The end result is Spisak’s debut novel, “The Baba Yaga Mask,” which she never anticipated would be so timely. “In this moment in history, especially,” Spisak says, “I feel like we all realize how many stories have not been told, and this was the one I always knew needed to be told.”
“The Baba Yaga Mask” begins with harried young mother Larissa hosting a kid’s birthday party and then driving her grandmother, whom she calls Baba Vira, to the airport. Early the next morning, when Larissa learns that Baba Vira never arrived at her destination after landing in Warsaw, Poland, she and her free-spirited sister, Ira, try to find their grandmother, following traces of Baba Vira from Poland to Slovakia to Hungary.
The fast-paced story unfolds like a mystical, magical scavenger hunt. Interrupted by heart-wrenching flashbacks of the tragedies Baba Vira experienced when taking a similar path after the Nazi invasion, it’s filled with symbols and traditions the protagonists’ enigmatic grandmother passed down to them, including Ukrainian music and dance, matryoshka dolls and, most significantly, Baba Yaga.
All their lives, Larissa and Ira have heard the stories of Baba Yaga, a complex figure from folklore who is characterized by witch-like features. At times, she acts violently, harming anyone who crosses her path; at other times, she provides help and guidance to those who need it. For Spisak, the complexity of Baba Yaga makes her compelling. “She is often evil and terrible and murderous, but there are times when she is this godmother spirit, and she makes you wonder, why that time?”
As the granddaughters search for Baba Vira, she sometimes becomes conflated in their minds with the figure of Baba Yaga, taunting them as she evades them. “I like Vira as an old woman finding maybe she needs to become a Baba Yaga to scare the world into becoming better,” Spisak says. This points to a key theme of the book: the strength of women. “This is the story of how my grandmother was strong and how she raised two completely different sisters — my mom and my aunt,” Spisak says, “and how they in many ways raised me, and how everyone has their own definition of what it means to be a strong woman.”
While researching the book, Spisak developed a new appreciation of her own cultural heritage.
“Every single person alive has stories,” Spisak says. “ ‘The Baba Yaga Mask’ speaks to a version of mine, but everyone has them and should try to dig them out.”
Kris Spisak will read from her book on April 7 at 6 p.m. at Blue Bee Cider. For more information, visit babayagamask.com.
