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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.
Nina Kossman’s nine books include three books of poems, two books of short stories, an anthology she edited for Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her work has been translated from English into French, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Danish, and Dutch. Her Russian work was published in Russian 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Kossman
This collection, compiled, translated, and edited by poet and scholar Ian Probstein, provides Anglophone audiences with a powerful selection of Mandelstam’s most beloved and haunting poems.
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!
