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MASHIACH WON’T COME
Mashiach won’t come
shells explode
in the land
where my ancestors lie
Mashiach won’t come
my ancestors rise from shooting pits
in Chernihiv, Sumy
Donbas
Mashiach won’t come
gunshot wounds
are healed
in my ancestors
Mashiach won’t come
my grandparents
are fighting for the freedom
of lying in undisturbed graves
МАШИАХ НЕ ПРИДЁТ
машиах не придёт
землю
в которой лежат мои предки
разорвали взрывы снарядов
машиах не придёт
мои предки встают из рвов
в чернигове сумах
донбасе
машиах не придёт
у моих предков
затянулись
огнестрельные раны
машиах не придёт
мои дедушка и бабушка
воюют за свободу лежать
в не растревоженных могилах
* * *
BETRAYAL
so many hunters
do not join their chiefs
in killing mammoths
not much food in smaller game
but a lot less fear in catching it
so many moseses
but no one
follows them
they’d hand you flatbread from behind
while ahead
nothing but desert
sunburn, starvation
so many sing
“hosanna” today
and shout “crucify him”
tomorrow
don’t shout in vain
soon a legion will come
and the temple will be no more
ПРЕДАТЕЛЬСТВО
сколько охотников
не пошли за вождями
на мамонтов
в мелких животных не столько еды
но не страшно ловить каждый день
сколько моисеев
но за ними
нет никого
сзади лепёшку дадут
а впереди
только солнце
пустыня и голод
сколько сегодня
поющих осанну
а завтра кричащих
«распни его»
зря не кричите
скоро войдёт легион
и храма не станет
Translated from Russian by the poet
Gennadi Kazakevitch was born in Moscow and grew up in Siberia. He graduated from the economics department of Moscow State University. He lives in Melbourne, Australia, where he teaches economics at Monash University. He is a columnist in Australian media on matters of economics. He authored two collections of poetry in Russian with translations, and his Russian poems were published in various literary journals and collections. He won the first translators’ prize at a literary competition “Emigrantskaya Lira 2019” in Belgium.
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.
