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Tribune News Service
Tribune News Service
Entertainment

Angela Ajayi: The Kyiv of my youth

A writer who spent summers in Ukraine dreams of bringing her own daughter there after the war.

As a Nigerian-Ukrainian child shuttling back and forth from Nigeria, where I lived most of the year, to Soviet-era Ukraine every summer, I held two impressions of the city of Kyiv — one had to do with the circus and the other with ice cream. Both were delightfully experienced by me there but neither had anything to do with books.

This was probably because our final destination was Byrlivka, an agrarian village outside Kyiv where my maternal grandparents lived and where I passed my days running through cornfields, reconnecting with old friends and, occasionally, swimming in muddy ponds.

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