Tag: Ukraine

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

~ 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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Video from Eastern European Voices for Resistance and Reinvention

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to those of you who could attend our event, Eastern European Voices for Resistance and Reinvention, hosted by Library Nineteen in Baltimore on March 7. We loved having you as our audience and hope to continue the conversations in various ways.

Ukraine needs all of our support. While there are many ways to help, we’re asking for donataions to Ukraine TrustChain, an organization that helps evacuate civilians out of war zones: https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/

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“everybody knows . . .” An Excerpt from Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

Today, in the US, we welcome a new book by Ukrainian-born American and French author Yelena Moskovich. Innovative Dzanc Books is bringing to us Nadezhda in the Dark, a novel-in-verse, previously published in the United Kingdom by Footnote Press. We’re deeply grateful to independent presses that make great books accessible to readers across the world. Please support Dzanc Books by ordering your copy today!

When asked to contribute our responses to this book, Yelena Furman said:

“Brimming with references from Russian and Ukrainian literatures to Alla Pugacheva and the Moscow 1990s gay club scene, Nadezhda in the Dark is a poetic disquisition on global history and self-identity. Discussions of Soviet anti-Semitism and the war in Ukraine merge with explorations of immigration and queer love. In language simultaneously lyrical and sharp, Moskovich shows how the personal and political, the present and past, are inextricably linked in ways that are often traumatic but also occasionally hopeful.”

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Owning Fear, Reaching for Freedom: Post-Soviet Writers + Translators Speak Out

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment
A flyer displaying ten author's photos alongside three quarters perimeter. In the center left, in black, title of the event: OWNING FEAR, REACHING FOR FREEDOM: POST-SOVIET WRITERS AND TRANSLATORS SPEAK OUT on the right, in red: LIT CRAWL SAN FRANCISCO Below, in Blue: Sat OCTOBER 25TH 5-6 PM AT RUTH'S TABLE 2160 21st Street Sponsored by California Humanities and Ruth's Table

Dear Punctured Lines community — please help us spread the word about the next San Francisco Bay Area reading by writers born in the former USSR. This event is a part of San Francisco’s annual Lit Crawl festival and will take place at Ruth’s Table (3160 21st Street) on October 25, 2025 at 5 pm.

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Seven Forty: Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine by Mikhail Goldis, translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Marat Grinberg

~ Yelena Furman ~ 3 Comments
Memoirs of a Jew who prosecuted criminals in Soviet Ukraine – The Forward

We are happy to feature an excerpt from Mikhail Goldis’s Memoirs of a Jewish District Attorney from Soviet Ukraine (Academic Studies Press, 2024), translated by Marat Grinberg, professor of Russian and humanities at Reed College and Goldis’s grandson. Grinberg’s previous book was the highly informative The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (Brandeis University Press, 2022). The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf makes the original argument that, in the anti-Semitic Soviet Union, Jews circumvented the proscriptions on public expression of Jewish identity “through their ‘reading practices'”: they built up home libraries of books on Jewish subjects, which, given “the heavy censorship of Jewish content,” they often had to read “between the lines” (the citations are from my review). Olga interviewed Marat about his book, and you can listen to their rich conversation here, which includes reading suggestions of the various writers the book discusses.

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Video from Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

Thanks to those of you who could attend our event, Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War, hosted by the Wende Museum on March 28. We loved having you as our audience and hope to continue the conversations in various ways.

Thank you for donating to Ukraine Trust Chain. Ukraine needs all of our support. Please continue to spread the word and donate here: https://www.ukrainetrustchain.org/

The video from our event is now online:

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Born in the USSR: Diaspora Writers Against War

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ 2 Comments

This one of a kind reading brings together Soviet-born writers as they weave together an intricate story of identity, memory, cultural intersections, immigration, and war. From fiction to poetry, memoir and journalism, and work in translation, the reading presents a deep dive into the individual and collective experiences of the Soviet-born diaspora in the U.S. This free event includes a fundraiser in support of humanitarian aid in Ukraine and aligns with The Wende Museum’s current exhibition “Undercurrents II: Archives and the Making of Soviet Jewish Identity.” Autographed books will be on sale, courtesy of Village Well.

Hosted by The Wende Museum, readers include poets, writers, and translators: Katya Apekina, Yelena Furman, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry, Julia Kolchinsky, Arina Kole, Maria Kuznetsova, Olga Livshin, Ruth Madievsky, Ainsley Morse, Luisa Muradyan, Jane Muschenetz, Asya Partan, Irina Reyn, Diana Ruzova, Timmy Straw, Vlada Teper, Sasha Vasilyuk, and Olga Zilberbourg.

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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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Punctured Lines Authors at San Francisco’s Lit Crawl

~ Olga Zilberbourg ~ Leave a comment

San Francisco Bay Area readers, take note: for the second year in a row, Punctured Lines is producing an event during San Francisco’s Lit Crawl.

On Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia, a group of Bay Area authors will come together with poetry, stories and essays centered on Ukraine. Several of these authors have been regulars on our blog, and we’re delighted to introduce a few new names to our line up from last year.

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