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A rabbi in heaven sits on a golden throne.
On his left shoulder sits Moses, on his right shoulder, Aaron,
they whisper wisdom in his ears from both sides,
this is the oral Torah, the unbreakable law.
A kosher fish swims in a river of honey.
A cloud of milk grazes in a cloud of meat in the distance.
No one dares to boil a baby goat again in the milk
of a hussy goat bought for pennies at a town fair.
It was a good fair, and the town was not bad at all,
and its goat was a good, milking floozy,
and its synagogue was wide and east-facing,
and its mustachioed policeman sported a whistle in his crooked teeth.
Now they are all here, in the sky, where the challah is laid out on the table,
and yet I wonder about what’s left down there on earth,
how are the neighbors’ children, are they well off and warm,
do they still find gold crowns in the ashes.
If they do, they probably believe they are lucky!
A girl leans on her paddle in a park where the cemetery used to be.
In a synagogue, there’s a dance club or maybe a church—Christ is Risen.
Pity that from your heaven you cannot see these details.
Boris Khersonsky was born in Chernivtsi in 1950. Khersonsky has published over nineteen collections of poetry and essays in Russian, and most recently, in Ukrainian. He is widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets.
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.
