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.
Continue reading “The Soviet-Jewish Experience in North America: A Conversation Between Masha Rumer and Lea Zeltserman”Poems Betwixt Paths: Herb Randall in Conversation with Irina Mashinski
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.
Continue reading “Poems Betwixt Paths: Herb Randall in Conversation with Irina Mashinski”What Drives Me Nuts: Fiction by Naomi Marcus
I met Naomi Marcus through a mutual friend in San Francisco last year. Speaking fluent Russian, Naomi shared that in her youth she’d spent many years in the Soviet Union as a tour guide and interpreter. A journalist by training, when she returned to the US in the 1990s, she translated a book by a veteran of the Soviet-Afghan war; more recently, she has been reporting for Mission Local and San Francisco Senior Beat and helping Ukrainian refugees find their footing in the US. She told me that as she first landed in the USSR back in 1979, Leningrad was experiencing purportedly the coldest winter since WWII, a shock for a Californian. She felt very scared and alone, but soon fell in with underground rock musicians, and they helped her survive that winter. On her guitar, Naomi played for me Boris Grebenshchikov and Bob Dylan in alternating couplets, illustrating the paths of “influence.”
Continue reading “What Drives Me Nuts: Fiction by Naomi Marcus”Three Poems from Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya
Today we feature three poems from the Russian-language anthology Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems (edited by Julia Nemirovskaya; various translators; Smokestack Books, 2023). We are grateful for the following introduction written for Punctured Lines by Maria Bloshteyn, one of the translators of the collection. As she notes below, one of the featured poets, Galina Itskovich, is a therapist helping those in Ukraine; you can donate here to support this work.
Continue reading “Three Poems from Disbelief: 100 Russian Anti-War Poems, edited by Julia Nemirovskaya”Olga Krauze, a profile by Sonja Franeta
“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.
Continue reading “Olga Krauze, a profile by Sonja Franeta”Aikanush: An Excerpt from Akram Aylisli’s Stone Dreams, translated by Katherine E. Young
On February 9, 2013, Akram Aylisli’s books were burned in his native village. For more than six decades, Azerbaijan’s most prominent writer has written fiction about the mountain village of Aylis, from which he took his pen name; Aylisli called the day of the burning “the most terrible day of my life.” Why were his books burned? Aylisli had published a novella, Stone Dreams, that challenged official propaganda erasing the role played by Armenians in the history of Azerbaijan, a country currently dominated by ethnic Azeris (Azerbaijan and neighboring Armenia have engaged in military hostilities since before the collapse of the Soviet Union). Stone Dreams is among the first fictional works in the greater Turkic-speaking world to depict both historical and contemporary violence against ethnic Armenians, and it includes sympathetic portrayals of Armenian villagers residing in Azerbaijan. The novella also portrays the corruption and authoritarianism of modern-day Azerbaijan. In the uproar that greeted the novella’s publication, Aylisli was stripped of his presidential honors and pension. An empty coffin was paraded around the courtyard of his residence, and a bounty—later rescinded under international pressure—was offered to anyone who would cut off the writer’s ear. In 2014, international supporters nominated Aylisli for the Nobel Peace Prize for “his efforts to reconcile Azerbaijani and Armenian people.” In 2016, trumped-up legal charges were filed against Aylisli by the Azerbaijani government, a case that is still pending. Ten years after his books were burned, Akram Aylisli continues to live under de facto house arrest in Azerbaijan, unable to leave the city of Baku. He is 85.
Continue reading “Aikanush: An Excerpt from Akram Aylisli’s Stone Dreams, translated by Katherine E. Young”Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn, by Natalya Sukhonos
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:
Continue reading “Perpetual Instability: An Interview with Lars Horn, by Natalya Sukhonos”Embattled Homeland: Readings by Authors Born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova
Punctured Lines is happy to announce an in-person reading by seven women writers who emigrated from the former Soviet Union and now live in (or in one case, coming to visit) Los Angeles. This event follows the original Embattled Homeland reading during LitCrawl in San Francisco in 2022, with ex-Soviet immigrant writers living in the Bay Area. Like its San Francisco predecessor, the Los Angeles event is in support of Ukraine, which has been defending itself against Russia’s unprovoked attack for nearly a year. While the reading is free, we encourage people to donate to the vetted organizations below. Many thanks to Sasha Vasilyuk for organizing this event.
The reading will take place on Friday, January 20, 2023 at 7 pm at Stories Books & Cafe (1716 W. Sunset Blvd.). Please RSVP here.
Every Story Deserves a Beautiful Happy Ending: A Review of Contemporary Queer Plays by Russian Playwrights, Edited and Translated by Tatiana Klepikova, by Dante Matero
Today’s review gives me special pleasure to feature on Punctured Lines, as Dante Matero was my student several years ago at UCLA. As he discusses below, Putin’s Russia is virulently homophobic, while as he also notes, the U.S. has its own share of highly regressive elements. In a heart-breaking and maddening coincidence, this review is coming out just after Russia has enacted its most far-reaching anti-LGBTQ law and in the aftermath in the U.S. of another mass shooting targeting LGBTQ members. Words cannot prevent homophobic laws or stop bullets. What they can do is offer a space of community and solidarity and to amplify marginalized voices. We at Punctured Lines stand with the LGBTQ communities in our old and new homes and are grateful to Dante for highlighting this unique and necessary collection. To support LGBTQ organizations, you can donate to RusaLGBTQ, which helps former Soviet immigrants in the U.S., and which, because of Russia’s attack on Ukraine, has started a GoFundMe for Ukrainian refugees in the U.S.
Continue reading “Every Story Deserves a Beautiful Happy Ending: A Review of Contemporary Queer Plays by Russian Playwrights, Edited and Translated by Tatiana Klepikova, by Dante Matero”Readings by Authors Born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl
Update: there has been a venue change. This event is now happening at Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street.
Punctured Lines is co-hosting a Lit Crawl reading by six Bay Area writers born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova. Shaken by the horrific tragedy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we will read pieces exploring our connections, direct and indirect, to the part of the world we associate with home and exile, and where many of our friends and relatives are suffering as a result of the war. We work in the genres of nonfiction, literary and historical fiction, YA, flash, and other literary forms to tell our stories, and will read excerpts from our published and new work.
This event will take place at 5 pm on October 22nd at Blondie’s Bar Stage Werx Theatre, 446 Valencia Street in San Francisco .
Punctured Lines 