Little more than a month ago, Yana Miroshnychenko, a thirty-four-year-old Ukrainian, said goodbye to her husband and walked across the Romanian border with her five-year-old son in tow. She was six months pregnant, carrying a single credit card and wearing a bright-green tracksuit.
Today, Miroshnychenko is in New York, sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn and preparing to give birth to her second child in Lenox Hill Hospital. She was tired but awestruck by the tumultuous turns her life has taken in the past two months. “I’ve come a very long way,’’ she told me.