A Year in Reading: Iľja Rákoš

Go ahead, congratulate me. As of Nov. 17 I am once again legal in Ukraine. That’s something in this place where illegality is endemic—as customary in the exceptional as it is in the mundane.

My adventure as an illegal immigrant kicked off in March of 2020. Fear not: given the very real challenges, threats to our family cohesion, our livelihood, and my wife’s capacity to handle two small boys alone, I am not insensitive to the implications of the term illegal. Still, I find it preferable to the evasive, politically charged blech of undocumented. Illegal has a nice, solid ring to it. Almost feels like an accomplishment.

So, March 2020: Covid had begun its global assault in earnest, an ailing clerk has misfiled my renewal paperwork, and with the Ukrainian Migration Service in a tailspin, my (almost) 26 years of legal residency in Ukraine went poof. My legal ability to earn along with it. For nearly 19 months my wife has carried the four of us. I hope you meet her one day. You’ll see.

With the Iron-Lite Curtain pulled, the consulates shuttered, and phone lines gone dead, I did what anyone of you would do when half-hearted cops with deportation papers show up at your door: I called in a favor. I turned to Instagram. And, navigating the intricacies