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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.
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.
Julia Wiener was born in the USSR a few years before the Second World War; her youth was spent during the “Thaw” period, and her maturity coincided with the years of “Soviet stagnation”, which, in her case, ended with her emigration to Israel in the early 1970s. Her wartime childhood, her Komsomol-student youth, her subsequent disillusionment, her meetings with well-known writers (Andrei Platonov, Victor Nekrasov, etc.) are described in a humorous style and colorful detail. Julia brings to life colorful characters – from her Moscow communal apartment neighbors to a hippie London lord, or an Arab family, headed by a devotee of classical Russian literature. No less diverse are the landscapes against which the events unfold: the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Garden of Gethsemane, New York, Amsterdam, London.
Julia Wiener’s novels focus on those moments when illusory human existence collapses in the face of true life, be it spiritual purity, love, old age, or death.
