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God, Gotteniu,
I had never been taught the formal language of prayers
I can only talk to you in the voice
of a scared rabbit hiding in the bush
with his stupid little tail sticking out
I can talk to you in the voice of mama raccoon
carrying her striped offspring one by one
by the skin of their necks
away from the two screaming women
who had discovered her nest
in their country house shed.
I can pray to you like a drying out tree
stretching naked branches at night
into the tangerine sky
like the tide lapping against the side
of the wooden pier
in the moonlit sea.
In the yellowed photo ten Jewish women
half-naked
clutching each other in anguish|
standing with their backs to the pit
ready to be shot
photographed by some unknown executioner
in Ponary
where were you then, God,
you bastard?
I wish I believed that people are good at heart
like the fifteen-year-old Anne Frank.
I am a little Soviet pioneer in a red tie
saluting you.
I do believe, though,
In the synergy of a beehive
complex harmony of behaviors of ants in an anthill
the divine architecture of beaver dams
before a mad hunter shoots the female
and the male begins madly swimming in circles
mourning his mate in the bloody pond.
Anna Halberstadt is a poet and a translator from Russian, Lithuanian and English, who grew up in Lithuania and was trained as a psychologist at Moscow University and in the U.S. Her poetry in English was widely published in English-language journals, and Russian, in Arion, Interpoezia, Children of Ra and many others. Her poetry was translated into Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Tamil. She published four collections of poetry in English, and Transit and Gloomy Sun (in Russian).
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.
