Category: Interviews

Waiting to Exhale: A Q&A with Natalie Oceanheart, author of Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir, by Katya Cengel

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Natalie Oceanheart begins Life Beyond Fear: A Ukrainian Woman’s Memoir (Potomac Books) with the escalation of fighting in Ukraine in 2022. At the time, Oceanheart is just starting out her adult life and yet the choices she makes as a daughter, wife, and mother — as well as a recent college graduate — are made amidst the chaos, despair, and danger of war. Born in eastern Ukraine, Oceanheart experienced the war from Russia’s first hybrid attack in 2014, and she backtracks to explain this, as well as the difficult choices she and her nuclear family make as they become internal refugees and then later leave Ukraine. At its core this is a coming-of-age story, which despite the bleakness of the situation offers hope through Oceanheart’s desire to act as a healer. I hold onto that hope as I once held onto the hope I saw while reporting on the protests that led to the Orange Revolution.

— Katya Cengel

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Poetry of Place and Displacement: A Q&A with Natalya Sukhonos by Valerie Bandura

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Natalya Sukhonos’ third collection of poems, Sunlight Trapped in Stone (Green Writers Press, 2026), is an act of witness. At the center of the book are questions about history and place in the face of loss and displacement. Sukhonos was born in Odesa, Ukraine, and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of nine. The immigrant experience, its practical struggles, and the sense of belonging to multiple communities, languages, and histories is explored in each poem, most poignantly expressed in “Tunnel Vision”: “We’re all intact, but barely.”

Sukhonos introduces us to an intimate album of characters and visceral images: a grandfather reliving the past through Soviet-era movies, the hands of a mother raising her dead child from the crib, old women shelling sunflower seeds in a chestnut-lined courtyard, and the sweetness of apricot ice cream. These poems describe the past as vividly present, passing forward intergenerational trauma as much as creating a historical record.

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Narrating a Violent Childhood: A Q&A with Fiona Bell and Margarita Vaysman about Avdotya Panaeva’s The Talnikov Family

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 4 Comments

Avdotya Panaeva was born in 1820 and first began publishing her work in one of Russia’s premier literary magazines, Sovremennik, in 1846. The author of numerous short stories, novels, memoirs, as well as collaborative projects, she has only recently begun to achieve the recognition that she deserves in the English-speaking world.

On October 8, 2024, Columbia University Press published Fiona Bell’s translation of Panaeva’s first novel, The Talnikov Family. This became the second full-length translation of Panaeva’s work to English. In my review of the book in On the Seawall, I mention several social and historical factors that have kept this delightful novel from English-language readers for so long. In writing about this book, I have relied, in part, on Bell’s introduction to the novel and on the research by Margarita Vaysman, whose book Self-Conscious Realism: Metafiction and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Novel devotes a section to Panaeva’s work, including an excerpt that ran in Punctured Lines.

Today, it is my pleasure to discuss this novel and Panaeva’s work more broadly with her translator Fiona Bell and scholar Margarita Vaysman.

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Responding to Marat Grinberg’s The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Marat Grinberg’s academic volume The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf (The Tauber Institute Series for the Study of European Jewry, Brandeis UP, 2022) is an important book for the authors of this blog for personal and professional reasons as it reflects on a large body of work that we grew up with and have returned to in professional contexts. In its contributions toward re-defining Soviet Jewish identity in positive terms–as thick and multidirectional–it allows us to reshape our personal narratives and forge a path toward future research and creative projects.

Today we’re highlighting our responses to this book and encourage our readers to continue this conversation.

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I Think that Everything I Do Is a Form of Translation: A Conversation with Michele A. Berdy

~ Yelena Furman ~ 8 Comments

We at Punctured Lines are thrilled to feature a conversation with Michele A. Berdy, longtime editor and columnist for The Moscow Times, now living in Riga, Latvia. Given both the political and personal upheavals of the last few years, this interview was long in the making. We are so glad to now publish this wide-ranging discussion about, among other things, cataclysmic changes, Soviet life hacks, art and culture, and of course, the war in Ukraine; there are many organizations you can support, including this one. This interview was conducted over email.

Yelena Furman: Let’s start with your intriguing reverse immigration story: you left the U.S. in 1978 to live in what was then the Soviet Union (the same year, as it happens, that my family left Soviet Ukraine for the U.S.). What inspired you to make that move, several years before the country began opening up under Gorbachev?

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A Character with a Secret Is an Easy Sell: A Conversation with Sasha Vasilyuk, by Olga Zilberbourg

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

A new novel set in World War II enters a crowded and hotly contested field. It is a particularly remarkable feat for a debut novelist that Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury, 2024) earned universal praise from celebrated writers across the former USSR diaspora community and far beyond. Gary Shteyngart wrote, “Wonderfully written, elegiac and necessary, Sasha Vasilyuk uncovers the history behind the recent headlines with great skill and grace.” Susanne Pari, author of In the Time of Our History and The Fortune Catcher, wrote, “An outstanding novel of sacrifice, love, and forgiveness.”

We celebrate this novel’s arrival with particular pleasure. A contributor to Punctured Lines, Vasilyuk participated in a number of events we’ve hosted over the years, and we’ve heard excerpts from this novel as she was working on one draft after another. In May 2024, Olga Zilberbourg interviewed Vasilyuk during a book release event at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco. The following Q&A is a follow-up to that in-person conversation. 

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Queer Encounters in the USSR and Russia, A Conversation with Sonja Franeta

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Born in New York to Yugoslav parents, Sonja Franeta is a writer, educator, translator, and activist. In 1991, she was a delegate to the first Russian Lesbian and Gay Symposium, organized by International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC), and she helped facilitate LGBTQ film festivals in Russia.

From 1992 until 1996, Franeta collected video interviews with Russian gay, lesbian, and transgender people. Before Russia repealed its sodomy laws in 1993, some of the people she interviewed had served criminal sentences for homosexuality, while others experienced forced psychiatric treatment. In 2004, Franeta published the edited transcripts of these interviews in Russia, and later translated them to English in a book called Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews (Dacha Books, 2017). These in-depth conversations allow us to learn her subjects’ life stories, as well as to understand the way they evaluated their experiences and conceptualized questions of identity and belonging.

In her second book, My Pink Road to Russia: Tales of Amazons, Peasants and Queers (Dacha Books, 2015), Franeta collected her essays on a wide range of topics. They include her childhood in the Bronx with a Croat mother and Serb father, her coming out story, her experiences as a female machinist and labor activist, and studying Russian literature, becoming a writer, and extensive travels across the former Soviet Union and the deep friendships she has formed there. Franeta’s writing is often very personal, exceptionally frank, and deeply insightful. Coming from a working-class background, she studied at NYU and UC Berkeley before rejecting the traditional academic path. In the 1990s, she taught English in Moscow and spent several years in Novosibirsk, working on a project for people with disabilities. 

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The Soviet-Jewish Experience in North America: A Conversation Between Masha Rumer and Lea Zeltserman

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Today we welcome Masha Rumer and Lea Zeltserman back to Punctured Lines. They have both done Q&As with us previously (here and here), and each has participated in one of two different readings we organized by FSU immigrant writers (the recordings are here and here). We are extremely grateful to them for generating both the thought-provoking questions and answers in this exchange. This piece was a long time in the making, as all of us dealt, in various combinations, with the pandemic, the war, cross-country moves, and personal upheavals. We are thrilled to feature their wide-ranging and poignant conversation about immigration, writing, food, and more.

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Poems Betwixt Paths: Herb Randall in Conversation with Irina Mashinski

~ Yelena Furman ~ 2 Comments

We are grateful to Herb Randall and Irina Mashinski for bringing us this interview about poetry, translation, music, and more. Both of them have appeared on Punctured Lines previously. An excerpt from Irina Mashinski’s hybrid poetry and prose collection The Naked World can be found here (while Herb Randall’s review of it in the Los Angeles Review of Books is here). At Punctured Lines, Herb Randall has contributed a personal essay about visiting Kharkiv and looking for traces of an English woman who moved there during Stalin’s reign and a review of Sana Krasikov’s The Patriots, about an American Jewish woman who also moves to Stalin’s Soviet Union (a clearly misguided endeavor from any country). We are very happy to have them back with the following in-depth discussion.

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Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn, by Natalya Sukhonos

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Lars Horn’s Voice of the Fish (Graywolf Press, 2022) is a collection of lyric essays in which the author enters into a dialogue with ancient writers and contemporary artists, contributing personal reflections on the elusiveness of the trans body. The book is made up of 23 sections that converge on the theme of water. Most sections are further broken up into short segments or sentences set off by Roman numerals. In the first section, “In Water Disjointed from Me,” the author describes the way in which a mysterious illness upended their life and their ability to communicate. Four pages later, in “Last Night, A Pike Swam Up the Stairs,” Horn speaks to the experience of their trans body through short segments. This is the opening page of this section:

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