Set in the summer of 1979 at the height of the movement to free Soviet Jewry, “Farewell, Mama Odessa” is an autobiographical novel whose intertwined storylines follow a variety of people—dissidents, victims of ethnic discrimination, and black marketeers among them—as they bid farewell to their beloved hometown of Odessa, Ukraine, and make their way to the West. At the book’s center is Boris, a young writer thwarted by state censorship and antisemitism. With an Angora kitten for his companion and together with other émigrés, he puts the old country in his rear-view mirror and sets out on a journey that will take him to Bratislava, Vienna, Rome, and New York on his way to Los Angeles. Will Boris be able to rekindle his creative passion and inspiration in the West? Will other Jewish émigrés fit into the new society, so different than the one they left behind?
Boris Khersonsky and Ludmila Khersonsky write poetry that speaks to the crisis of our time, when refugees run from bombardments, and nonstop propaganda flows from TV. The setting is Ukraine at the start of the twenty-first century, but it is eerily recognizable anywhere.
A new book of poems by New York poet and essayist Sergei Shabalin. In Russian.
Sailor, artist, lawyer, and writer, Dmitri Bystrolyotov was one of a team of Soviet spies operating in the West between the World Wars. He seduced women to learn great secrets of foreign states, but was then arrested and tortured in the Gulag, where he began to document the crimes against humanity of the regime he had served.
This book features biographies of the author’s family members, detailing with the effect of the war on their lives.
The first bilingual collection of Ukrainian verse by Borys Khersonsky. In these poems, heaven is often the setting: Jews who perished during pogroms and in the Holocaust continue with their daily routines, whereas on earth, displacement has become a constant, and collective memory has been cleansed of the Jewish past.
