Migration to a consumer society: a short history of tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka

In A Short Story of Tractors in Ukrainian (2005), Marina Lewycka analyzes the post-war and post-communism Ukrainian immigrant experiences in Britain drawing Ludmilla and Valentina as representatives of two entirely different generations. Lewycka explores the life of a Ukrainian family of an 84-year-old father, his middle-aged daughters and their families, and the memories of a dead mother who migrated to Britain after the World War II. Their lives are complicated by Valentina’s arrival from Ukraine to marry their father in the late 1990s. For Ludmilla and her generation, the primary aim was to survive, and to ’make-do and mend’ after years of persecution, depravation, oppression, fear, and anxiety; however, globalism and growing consumerism have profoundly affected expectations and aspirations of the new generation Ukrainian emigrants like Valentina who fails to survive in Britain despite her painstaking efforts.