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. A book of his poems in English translations, The Country Where Everyone’s Name Is Fear: Selected Poems, was published by Lost Horse Press in 2022. He is widely regarded as one of Ukraine’s most prominent Russian-language poets.
Nina Kossman’s eleven books include three books of poetry in English, two books of poetry in Russian, two collections of short stories, a memoir, a novel, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, and two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poetry. Her English-language work has appeared in over ninety magazines and anthologies and has been translated into many languages, including French, Italian, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, Persian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her plays have been produced in several countries. Her work in her first language, Russian, was published in Russian-language periodicals in and outside of Russia. She is a recipient of an NEA fellowship, UNESCO/PEN Short Story award, grants from the Onassis Foundation, the Foundation for Hellenic Culture, etc.
A new book of poems by New York poet, journalist, 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.
