Writing is the Closest We Will Ever Get to Time Travel: A Guest Essay by Dana Kanafina

January 28, 2026February 19, 2026 ~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

Today we are featuring a personal essay by Dana Kanafina, a writer from Kazakhstan, currently living in Germany. Although I have never been to Kazakhstan, I have (an admittedly tenuous) connection with it: my grandmother and her family were evacuated to Alma-Ata (now Almaty) from Ukraine during WWII, which is how she and my great-grandmother survived. In a more recent and less life-and-death way, Almaty is where students from our department at UCLA have been going to study abroad, given that, even before the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, they have been unable to study in Russia (I “entertained” the first cohort of such students by telling them that I was sure their experiences would be much better than my grandmother’s). We have previously highlighted contemporary Kazakhstani literature on Punctured Lines; the essay by Dana Kanafina focuses on Kazakhstan’s literary scene, both what it looks like today and what it might look like in the future.

Writing is the Closest We Will Ever Get to Time Travel by Dana Kanafina

In April of last year, my short story came out in Aina Journal, a Kazakhstani literary magazine for women. A week after that, I was at a meeting of a poetry club I was running at the time. This was on a weekday because on Saturdays I was busy with a writers’ group, a completely different set of people, and the two never wanted to interact with one another. The reasons were understandable. There was an age component that couldn’t be overlooked. Everyone in the writers’ group besides me was my parents’ age. The poetry club was “queer-friendly,” which, around here, of course, simply means “gay,” whereas people at the writers’ group didn’t understand labels of that sort. That I also understood: I suppose some self-exploration loses relevance by that point in life, or at least it does in Kazakhstan, where same-sex marriage is illegal and doesn’t look to become legal anytime soon.

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We Have to Go Back: Speculative Fiction, Nostalgia, and the Ghosts of Bookshelves Past, Guest Essay by Kristina Ten

September 16, 2025October 9, 2025 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

We’re delighted to welcome Kristina Ten on the blog with an essay about some of the origins—personal, familial, cultural, and political—of her debut short story collection. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine will be published by Stillhouse Press on October 7, 2025. Please pre-order the book and ask your local and academic libraries to purchase it. Authors and publishers depend on advance orders! And please don’t forget to rate and review.

— Punctured Lines

History Without Guilt

Part of putting a book out into the world is asking people to read it, and part of asking people to read it is letting go of whatever carefully assembled artist statement lives in your head—how you would describe what your work is circling around, grasping at—and embracing that every reader is going to define their experience with your book for themselves.

That’s what I’m currently doing with my debut story collection, Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine. And the definition early readers keep landing on is the word “nostalgic.”

Knowing these readers, I can tell they mean it as a compliment, or at least a helpful neutral statement. All the stories in the book revolve around games and the childlore of the aughts: the divinatory power of cootie catchers, the electrifying lawlessness of the early internet, bonfire legends whispered with a flashlight held under the chin. About half the stories feature young protagonists. Many are set in schoolyards, summer camps, and locker rooms. Others are set in the kind of far-off realms that would feel right at home in a child’s imagination—even as the book itself is unquestionably adult, preoccupied with the horrors of, one, being controlled; and, two, the constant vigilance some of us (girls and women, immigrants, queer people) learn to exercise against it.

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My Mother’s Teeth by Anna Fridlis

February 15, 2024May 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

My Mother’s Teeth

were prone to cavities from childhood.

In my mind’s eye, I see her gaps-for-teeth, hand cupping mouth, handkerchief clasped to lips after an extraction — that euphemism that stinks of silent Soviet disappearances, people pulled from dark rooms at night, never returning.

Once healed, the gaps were filled variously with dental implants and partial dentures: my mother’s mouth is not quite her own.

The extracted people were never returned, which my mother made it her duty to remember. If she is passionate about anything, it is decrying Stalinism and its travesties. For years, her stories transfixed me, but by my teens they stoked a growing rage. There was not much more to her mothering than the passing down of Soviet horrors. I was starving for something which she couldn’t give.

My mother drilled her coming-of-age, late-1970s, music-conservatory-student revelations about the Soviet dystopia — learned at the knee of a rather radical anti-communist professor — into my brain, into the new millennium, into a new hemisphere.

My mother’s mouth is filled with ghosts.

My own cavities began before elementary school. Baba took me to the dentist, an old friend of hers, Eleanora Aleksanna, whose son had long before been Baba’s elementary school student. We entered a large open hall full of dental chairs and short-haired women in white lab coats and face masks leaning over screaming children.

I was praised for being so good and so brave and for my beautiful braid only to bite Eleanora Aleksanna’s finger to bleeding moments later.

We returned to her several times, without incident, before our own great extraction from Russia found us in the United States.

American dentists peered into my mouth, as into my mother’s, in awe, studying its contents as though it were an archeological site revealing pre-modern dental composites.

I was taking after my mother.

***

In 2019, a year after my mother and I became estranged, I had to have an incisor pulled. It had gotten infected and pain had grown beyond the treatment of all available drugs.

The procedure took hours. The dentist coaxed out my tooth little by little from my numbed gum. My partner held my hand, then drove me home to mashed potatoes and tea.

I smiled big for my phone, beaming almost to a scowl into the camera. It was tooth number 4 that they took — I had been so worried about how the gap would look — but it was barely visible on my American smile. I sent pictures to everyone but my mother.

The gap left by my mother is surreal. It throbs and whirls to Tchaikovsky, it weeps to Chopin; it weeps so much more than it dances. I shut my mouth on the commotion.

The gap left by my mother is older than our estrangement.

It is a socket dressed in layers of scarlet and mauve scar tissue, pulsing and aching from time to time but calming, calming as the years tick by.

I exorcise the ghosts from my mouth, my mother’s legacy, through the power of my breath, the vibration of my voice, the speaking of myself into being. I was never supposed to do these things: she raised me to carry on her burdens, to be an organ of her body, a part of her, not out of malice but limitation. A limitation I am still trying to parse.

Sometimes I Google potential diagnoses to explain my mother’s absence — the way she seemed never really there even when she stood in front of me, the way she needed me to lead, even as a child, to parent her. When I find myself doing this futile exercise, I have learned it means I’m hurting, struggling, and it’s time to take care of me.

In broad strokes, I know the problem: a combination of Soviet political oppression, anti-Semitism, patriarchy, family dysfunction, and a prolonged separation from Baba in Mama’s toddlerhood. When you put it all together, it’s called complex trauma. I know a lot about it because it was passed to me. Unconsciously, unintentionally, brutally, ceaselessly.

My teeth, my mother’s teeth: tombstones to the bones of Soviet ghosts who couldn’t find a way to scream but through our mouths.

Anna Fridlis is a memoirist, poet, and essayist based in Newark, NJ on indigenous Lenape land. She lives and writes at the intersection of multiple identities: Jewish, Soviet immigrant, white, disabled, neurodivergent, and queer. Her work addresses the impact of intergenerational trauma on the trajectory of a life, tracking trauma’s creeping effects on mental and physical health, family relationships, creative output, and the scope of the imagination. Anna’s work captures one version of a Soviet Jewish immigrant story that both faces its utter devastation and searches for answers and deep healing in self-expression, nature, and somatics. Anna teaches first-year writing at Parsons the New School for Design and cohabits with her bunny Willow, who also happens to be her muse.

Vinegret, a Recipe for Disaster by Jane Muschenetz

November 14, 2023February 15, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

I want to tell you something small, in the great turning of this world, intimate as your grandmother’s soup. When you boil beets, carrots, and potatoes together, the potatoes will soften first, even if they are bigger than the other vegetables.

It is summer 2020, and my hands are Shakespearian (“out, damned spot!”)—beet stained. Our mid-century dining table is a stage set for “Salat Vinegret,” the Soviet-era culinary staple featuring ingredients that are readily available and inexpensive, even in wintertime. The supporting cast of bowls, knives, etc., isn’t from the old country, but is well practiced in recipes that travel back to my early childhood in L’viv, Ukraine.

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

September 22, 2023March 1, 2024 ~ 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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Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn, by Natalya Sukhonos

January 12, 2023March 1, 2024 ~ calisto239 ~ Leave a comment

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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A Motherland of Books: An Essay by Maria Bloshteyn

May 23, 2022March 1, 2024 ~ Yelena Furman ~ 14 Comments

Taking your beloved books with you into immigration is intimately familiar to those of us who left the Soviet Union. My parents’ двухсоттомник—”200-volume set”—of Russian and world literature, was quite literally my lifeline to the language and culture that I may have otherwise forgotten, and they are still the editions I turn to today. The covers of the volumes are different colors, and some key moments of my life are associated with them, such as the dark green of Gogol’s Мертвые души (Dead Souls) when I started college. Reading Maria Bloshteyn’s essay was genuinely heart-wrenching, because the experience she describes is that of an acute loss of books that mean so much to us, not just for their content, but perhaps even more so because they have made the immigrants’ journey with us and sustained us in our new homes. In the current moment, this poignant essay is framed by the war in Ukraine, where people like us are losing not just their books, but their lives. If you are able to help, please support translators who are struggling due to the war and this initiative to give Ukrainian-language books to refugee children in Poland. Ukraine’s cultural sphere has been badly damaged by Russian forces, and we will continue to look for ways in which those of us in the West can help. Maria recently participated in the Born in the USSR, Raised in Canada event hosted by Punctured Lines, and you can listen to her read from an essay about reacting to the war in Ukraine while in the diaspora.

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You Never Know When Speaking Russian Might Come in Handy …: An Essay by Alina Adams

January 18, 2022March 1, 2024 ~ Yelena Furman ~ 3 Comments

It would be hard to overstate my love of both figure skating and detective fiction, which admittedly isn’t something one normally thinks of together. It is therefore beyond thrilling to feature this personal essay by Alina Adams, who has written a series of five figure skating murder mysteries (yes, really, and I plan to order every one of them). A prolific writer with several fiction and non-fiction titles, Alina’s most recent novel is The Nesting Dolls, which you can read about in the poignant and humor-filled conversation between her and Maria Kuznetsova that Olga recently organized on this blog. I loved reading the story Alina tells below about working as a Russian-speaking figure skating researcher (she must have had a hand in many of the broadcasts that I avidly watched), and I confess to losing, in the best possible way, some of my time to being nostalgically taken back to 1990s figure skating coverage through the two videos in the piece, one of which features Alina translating (for Irina Slutskaya! You all know who she is, right?! Right?!). Let yourself be transported to that marvelous skating era, get ready for all the figure skating at the Olympics next month . . . and watch out, there’s a murderer, or five, on the loose.

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Olga Mark’s “The Lighter”: An Excerpt from Amanat, a Collection-in-Progress of Recent Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan

June 23, 2021March 1, 2024 ~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Shelley Fairweather-Vega on Amanat: Women’s Writing from Kazakhstan

The idea to translate and publish a collection of recent women’s writing from Kazakhstan grew out of my collaboration with Zaure Batayeva, a Kazakh writer and translator living in Belgium. Zaure contacted me in October 2016 when she wanted to hire someone to edit her English translation of a novella by Aigul Kemelbayeva. We eventually submitted the final version to Words Without Borders, whose editor, Susan Harris, was looking for “post-Soviet” literature from different places. Excerpts from the Kemelbayeva novella and two other pieces appeared in a WWB feature in January 2018. By that time, Zaure and I were thinking seriously about collecting writing by more authors and publishing an anthology. Ever since, she and I have been trading stories, checking each other’s translations (she translated the Kazakh-language stories, and I translated the Russian-language pieces), and querying publishers. We won some much-needed funding and publicity from the generous RusTrans program, and our collection is now nearly complete.

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Readings on Blackness, Racism, and Russian and Eurasian Studies

July 21, 2020July 21, 2020 ~ hkohen ~ 1 Comment

This post reproduces and documents a Twitter thread that began on June 3, 2020, with articles by Aisha Powell, Sarah Valentine, B. Amarilis Lugo de Fabritz, and Jennifer Wilson. Various members of the Eurasian Studies community gradually added to the thread, creating an informal list of resources that, while useful, would also be ephemeral and difficult to find if left on social media. Here, in Punctured Lines’s more easily searchable archive, these resources are available for you to use and remix through a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This license applies only to the tweets by Hilah Kohen below and not to any of the content linked to them. You can use the license to create your own version of this resource list for a specific community or publication.

Both the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL) have also published organized lists of texts, lectures, and podcasts relating to race and racism. While these databases intersect with the Twitter thread reproduced here, they focus on offering additional materials that are relevant to scholars and teachers of Eurasian languages and cultures.

To keep things maximally readable, we chose to preserve Twitter’s format for some posts and to transpose others to a text-based layout. We welcome all feedback and links to additional resources. To access the thread below directly on Twitter, click here.

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268328735612207109

Especially for fellow Eurasianists just starting out, tho, this is work to read as we wade into the bs going forward. Not comprehensive– just what comes to mind re: student experiences, teaching, and what our field does on a systemic level. Less material here on research. /2

“Black Bread: A look inside the world of black Slavic studies scholars” by @AishaPowell_ for @trumplandiamag /3

“Russian Studies’ Alt-Right Problem” by Sarah Valentine for the Chronicle (paywalled but important– if anyone has a non-paywalled link or is willing to share access, please say so) /4

“Race, Diversity, and Our Students in Russia” by @boricuaslavist for @NYUJordanCenter /5

.@JenLouiseWilson‘s 2014-2015 series “Teaching Race in Russia” plus “Is Slavic ready for Minorities?” for @NYUJordanCenter (more links below) /6

“Teaching Race in Russia: Dispatches from ‘The Harlem Renaissance: From New York to Tashkent'” by @JenLouiseWilson /7

“Teaching Race in Russia Part II: From Harlem to the ‘Soviet South'” by Jennifer Wilson /8

“Teaching Race in Russia Part III: Sartre, Jazz, and the Cossack Dance” by Jennifer Wilson /9

“Teaching Race in Russia: Some Conclusions” by Jennifer Wilson /10

Material for listening & then further research: “The Global Alt-Right: Race and U.S.-Russia Relations” @NYUJ ordanCenter: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4DeKIKG-HX0… /11

Loads of posts and articles on @raceineurasia /12

Please add more if you have time/energy somehow (I’ve only read narrowly & also haven’t included any books here) and add your essential readings related to research on race in Eurasian and Russian studies /13

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268328811612921856

One last “goes without saying” is that this thread is an addendum to concrete monetary/physical/logistical action right now and in the coming weeks. Thanks for reading /15

Adding “#BlackOctober Reading List: The Russian Revolution and the African Diaspora” by @JenLouiseWilson and @mightykale. Super thorough starting point for reading on the Black diaspora and the USSR plus some temporally broader pieces

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268387753902964737

Am learning that I don’t know how to keep up with Twitter replies very well, so I’m sorry if I miss something! I really appreciate the words of thanks, but they should be directed elsewhere. I respect all of you beyond words, but there’s a misunderstanding of scale here.

For white scholars who want the field to change, these conversations about race in the field have so far meant working on ourselves, supporting students, and responding to individual incidents. Necessary steps. This category of responses to the thread is passing by another:

Black scholars and scholars of color have worked constantly for years against the racism of a thousands-strong field and gotten crap in return. Our field’s record is one of forcing all Black scholars out. That there are still meaningful experiences to be had doesn’t change this.

That’s the scale we’ve got to be on. I don’t know how to frame this rhetorically– I fit into the first tweet above, not the second. This is just a total split in the responses to this thread, and it’s also (quite sickeningly) evident in the thread itself.

Our colleagues have pushed the field’s leadership & their mentors out of personal necessity and at daily personal cost; built successful, growing programs at their institutions from precarious positions; written numerous papers about the concept of them having room in the field.

Sometimes, we don’t know we even can do things on that scale because we don’t have to be on that scale to stay in the field, plus the field doesn’t ask it of us. Meanwhile, there’s prolific work being done under extreme pressure. We have to be on that scale.

I feel ill writing these things in this bizarre tone and as if from outside. Obviously, nobody has denied all this; you know this; everybody here is being so supportive. The question is what’s next & can it possibly be enough.

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268434837599379457

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268439132742791175

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268623254341574656

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268631078568411141

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268636170415673344

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268677013273030656

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268678903184457728

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1268681294441058313

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1269021500184682497

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1269021502931972096

https://twitter.com/hilahkohen/status/1269021505523982339

I should add– useful assuming a considerate and broadly informed approach.