Category: Profile

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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Olga Krauze, a profile by Sonja Franeta

~ calisto239 ~ 1 Comment

“Обстрел прекратился в 11:30. Пока всё тихо. У нас в квартире тепло, работает водопровод и центральное отопление. Нет электричества, но светит солнце и на улице тает снег.” [The shelling stopped at 11:30. For now everything is quiet. Our apartment is warm, and there’s running water and central heating. No electricity, but the sun is shining and the snow is melting outside.]

—my friend Olga Krauze writes from Kharkiv, the second largest city in Ukraine. I was interviewing her on Zoom for this profile and we got interrupted. Olga is a poet and singer and I’ve known her since 1991. She has lived in Kharkiv for 12 years with her partner Elina, who is Ukrainian.

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A profile of Ilya Kaminsky

~ calisto239 ~ Leave a comment

The Guardian has published a lovely profile of Ilya Kaminsky, related to Deaf Republic, his second collection of poetry.

Odessa was a cosmopolitan place, a “city of laughter” in which poetry was revered, and from an early age Kaminsky wrote and learned it by heart. When he was 12 his prose writing was published in the local newspaper, after he answered a call-out to schoolchildren to contribute, because the paper had no money to pay journalists. At 15, though he thought of poetry as “a private thing”, he produced his first chapbook. He had graduated from school by the time the family was forced into exile.