By Mira Levin
Embers in the Birchwood is a quiet storm of a novel, a story braided with myth and memory, where grief dances with ghost-light and every sentence aches with longing. At once a work of postwar immigration fiction and a reverie in folklore, Zorya Halik’s debut novel doesn’t so much retell fairy tales as reclaim their buried teeth.
Like Nadya in Valya Dudycz Lupescu’s The Silence of Trees, Halik’s narrator—Irina—treads the narrow path between Old World superstition and new world loneliness, between the hunger for survival and the hunger for touch. She is an octogenarian widow living in a decaying Chicago neighborhood, whose life has been reduced to tea, silence, and the occasional phone call from her estranged daughter. But when she receives an unmarked package containing a handful of birch bark and a photo of a child she’s never met, her carefully collapsed history cracks open—and memory rushes in.
Halik’s prose is lush without losing clarity. Her descriptions don’t just conjure scenes, they haunt them. In one early moment, Irina finds herself in the bathtub, staring at the ring left by her body in the water: “A ghost made of steam and soap,” she says. “Not mine. Or maybe too much mine.” The book swells with moments like this—phrases that flicker like candlelight and then leave behind the scent of ash and pine.
And yes, there is a foot rub—though in this case, it’s more invocation than seduction. In one of the novel’s most striking scenes, Irina lets her long-dead husband’s former comrade, Aleksy, touch her feet during an unplanned visit. The moment is gentle, reverent, but electric: “He touched my foot like he was reading a secret, as if the arch held all the maps I’d ever used to escape.” Halik doesn’t reduce aging bodies to tragedy or grotesque. Instead, she imbues them with vitality—reminding us that desire doesn’t vanish with time, it only gets quieter, deeper, more resolute.
Irina’s story is set against the backdrop of both literal and psychological war. As a young girl, she escaped a bombed-out town in Eastern Europe by stowing away in the coal bin of a train. She made it to a refugee center in Denmark, then on to Canada, and finally Chicago. But survival came at a cost—names changed, secrets bartered, ghosts silenced. When the package arrives, it carries not only remnants of a life she buried but also the possibility of reckoning.
Throughout the novel, Halik weaves in Ukrainian and Slavic folklore with unassuming grace. There’s the figure of the rusalka, the lake spirit who drowns men with her hair. There’s the domovyk, a household spirit who warns of death through cold drafts. And there’s bread—always bread. Irina recalls the last time she saw her brother, handing him a crust and watching him disappear into the smoke of the forest: “The bread crumbled like snow. He didn’t look back.”
The book is filled with the physicality of hunger: hunger for family, hunger for land, hunger for touch. Halik lets us taste every grain and thorn: “We chewed the air like rye. We counted calories in war stories. We salted the tea with our tongues.”
Though much of Embers in the Birchwood is shadowed by loss, the novel is not without heat. In fact, it quietly burns with rage—especially at the limitations placed on women’s bodies, voices, and desires. In a pivotal conversation, Irina’s granddaughter asks her why she never told anyone about what happened during the war. Irina replies, “My voice didn’t matter. Not then. Not after.” But the granddaughter, full of fire, replies: “Then why are you whispering now?”
That line rang through me. Why are we whispering now?
If there is a flaw in the novel, it’s that Halik occasionally drifts into impressionism a little too far—some of the middle chapters blur, the metaphors pile up like driftwood, and a few narrative threads are left trailing. But these are minor quibbles in a book that otherwise glides between past and present like a violin note echoing in an empty church.
In the final chapters, Irina returns to the woods of her childhood—physically and metaphorically. What she finds there is not closure, but possibility. “The birches never forgot me,” she says. “Even when I tried to forget myself.”
That’s what Embers in the Birchwood offers: not a tidy ending, but a reminder that our stories—especially the ones we try to bury—are always waiting for us in the trees, in the smoke, in the bread, in the silence.Author Bio
Mira Levin is a writer, teacher, and folklorist based in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Fog & Lantern, Spindle, and The Ashwood Review. She is currently at work on a novel about intergenerational hauntings and the stories we inherit like heirlooms.
