Tag: immigration

“This Bone-Deep Memory of Movement”: A Conversation between Alina Adams and Irena Smith

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

It is our pleasure to present a conversation between Alina Adams, whose writing has been featured several times on Punctured Lines (here and here) and Irena Smith, whom we welcome for the first time. They happened to have crossed paths as newly arrived immigrant children in the U.S., and now they both have come out with new books. Alina Adams is the author of Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025; her essay about it is on the blog). Irena Smith is the author of Troika: Three Generations, Three Days, and a Very American Road Trip (She Writes Press, 2026). I met her earlier this year at her reading of Troika at LA’s beloved independent bookstore Book Soup; the reading was hosted by Prof. Lilya Kaganovsky, the chair of our department at UCLA, and as it turns out, Irena’s close friend from childhood. Alina and Irena conducted the conversation over Zoom and transcribed it, and it was edited for clarity and expanded in parts.

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

~ calisto239 ~ Leave a comment

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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Queering Peripheries: Lara Vapnyar’s “Lydia’s Grove”: Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

Today we are featuring an excerpt from Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction (Rutgers UP, 2024) by Karolina Krasuska, associate professor at the American Studies Center and co-founder of the Gender and Sexuality MA Program at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Starting in the early 2000s, Jewish immigrant writers from the former Soviet Union have appeared on the US literary scene in increasing numbers. While Gary Shteyngart, who can give lessons in self-promotion, is the most well known, the list comprises more women, including Lara Vapnyar (a Q&A with whom we have featured on this blog), Anya Ulinich, Irina Reyn, and Ellen Litman, to name only a few. As their books continued to be published, academics began to take note, organizing conference panels and writing on the subject (I am happy to have contributed to this field of study from its inception). The first and foundational monograph was Adrian Wanner’s Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern UP, 2011), which discussed the global phenomenon of ex-Soviet immigrant writers in the various countries to which they immigrated. Krasuska’s is the first academic volume specifically devoted to ex-Soviet Jews living and writing in the US, where the largest number of such immigrants resides.

Continue reading “Queering Peripheries: Lara Vapnyar’s “Lydia’s Grove”: Soviet-Born: The Afterlives of Migration in Jewish American Fiction by Karolina Krasuska” →

How Moscow’s 1957 World Youth Festival Inspired Me to Go On Pretending: Guest Essay by Alina Adams

~ Yelena Furman ~ 1 Comment

Today we welcome Alina Adams back to the blog with an essay about her interracial family’s trip to Moscow (before the war in Ukraine) and its connection to her recently released novel, Go On Pretending (History Through Fiction, 2025), featuring a fictional interracial family. You can read our previous conversations with Alina here and here. As one of the excerpts below shows, a key element in her novel is the 1957 World Youth Festival in Moscow, during Khrushchev’s Thaw, which was meant to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s liberalization and racial tolerance (you can guess how that turned out). The reference to the festival immediately made me think of a different novel by another ex-Soviet Jewish immigrant writer in which it is an important plot element: Petropolis (Penguin Random House, 2008) by Anya Ulinich. If you would like to know more about this lesser-known event and about the Soviet Union/post-Soviet Russia and race, let Alina explain below and then order Go On Pretending (and Petropolis).

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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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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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Embattled Homeland: Readings by Authors Born in Ukraine, Russia, and Moldova

~ Yelena Furman ~ Leave a comment

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.

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“Writing Fiction Allows Us to Build Bridges”: Ian Ross Singleton and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry in Conversation

~ Yelena Furman ~ 3 Comments

Punctured Lines is happy to host a conversation between Ian Ross Singleton, author of Two Big Differences (M-Graphics Publishing, 2021) and Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, author of The Orchard (Ballantine Books, 2022). The novels’ synopses are below, and you can listen to the writers read excerpts here. Both of these works feature post-/late Soviet space, Ukraine in Two Big Differences and late Soviet/post-Soviet Russia in The Orchard. To support Ukraine in its fight against Russia, you can donate here and here, as well as to several other organizations doing work on the ground. If in addition you would like to support Russian protesters, you can donate for legal help here.

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To Fairyland: An Excerpt from Yelena Lembersky and Galina Lembersky’s Memoir Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour (Academic Studies Press, 2022) is a rare dual memoir co-written by Yelena Lembersky and her mother Galina. Born and raised in the USSR, following the death of her prominent painter father in 1970, Galina decides to emigrate with her young daughter and aging mother. In anticipation of her departure, Galina quits her job and becomes a refusenik. Yet, once her immigration papers go through, instead of boarding an airplane, she finds herself behind bars of a Leningrad prison on a criminal charge. Her mother has already left for the United States. Her young daughter Yelena–nicknamed Alëna in the book–is left in the care of friends, in danger of finding herself in an orphanage.

The chapter below is narrated by Yelena, eleven years old at the time of these events. We are deeply grateful to the author and publisher for permission to excerpt a chapter from this revealing and touching memoir. To continue reading, please buy the book from Academic Studies Press.

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Irina Mashinski’s The Naked World, Three Excerpts

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 1 Comment

Irina Mashinski’s The Naked World, recently published by MadHat Press after many years in the making, is an impressive achievement in the hybrid genre. The collection combines pieces of original and translated poetry and prose that together illuminate not only the author’s past but also her way of seeing. Thematically, this book centers four generations of a Soviet family from the Stalin era to the 1990s and immigration to the United States. Writer, translator, and editor Irina Mashinski has penned ten books of poetry in Russian, and this is her English-language debut that also includes her Russian-language poems in translation by Maria Bloshteyn, Boris Dralyuk, Angela Livingstone, Tony Brinkley, Alexander Sumerkin, and Daniel Weissbort. Mashinski is co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry and of the Cardinal Points Journal.

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