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The Holocaust never occurred,
it’s a matter of perception
and logical reasoning
said a young tall guy,
PhD from MIT in artificial intelligence,
sitting on the floor with Merlot
at a literary party in Cambridge, Mass.
A condescending hint was flickering
in his mocking brown eyes.
And if it did—said, softening the point
his girlfriend, a knockout Harvard Law
in tight Donna Karan corduroys,
—it’s not virtually relevant anymore,
the train is gone, so to speak.
I got up and left the building
so as not to smash his precious head
with a Wal-Mart folding chair.
That night I woke up in my childhood:
Moscow, January frozen precipice,
through frosted window
a huge poster: People and Party Are United!
held still by a projector,
my grandma behind the wall,
tossing and turning in her bed, sobbing.
The usual: remembering
her mother and three sisters,
their fading smiles on the old photo from a letter.
In her nightmare: their last supper
of bread and carrot tea,
night before their disappearance
into historical irrelevance.
Lodz, 1943, melting gray snow,
charred carcasses, monstrous Panzer,
roaring pointlessly at one spot.
Polish policemen warming up in the yard,
passing vodka around,
cold lard and cigarette stubs:
Jeszcze Polska
Nie zginela
Poki my zyjemy.*
*From an old Polish national anthem.
Andrey Gritsman was born and raised in Moscow. He has been living in the US since 1981. He works as a physician. A prolific Russian and American poet and writer, he got an MFA degree in 1998. Author of many publications in the US, Russia and in Europe, and of fifteen collections of poetry and prose in both languages.
Four teenagers grow inseparable in the last days of the Soviet Union—but not all of them will live to see the new world arrive in this powerful debut novel, loosely based on Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard.
Every character in these twenty-two interlinked stories is an immigrant from a place real or imaginary. (Magic realism/immigrant fiction.)
A book of poems in Russian by Victor Enyutin (San Francisco, 1983). Victor Enyutin is a Russian writer, poet, and sociologist who emigrated to the US from the Soviet Union in 1975.
This collection of personal essays by a bi-national Russian/U.S. author offers glimpses into many things Soviet and post-Soviet: the sacred, the profane, the mundane, the little-discussed and the often-overlooked. What was a Soviet school dance like? Did communists go to church? Did communists listen to Donna Summer? If you want to find out, read on!
“Cold War Casual” is a collection of transcribed oral testimony and interviews translated from Russian into English and from English into Russian that delve into the effect of the events and the government propaganda of the Cold War era on regular citizens of countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
