You cleaned buckwheat in Ukraine and you’ll continue in America. You even brought a sack of groats with you. Were you afraid you’d starve in this great capitalist country?
Tag: Russia
This week, ACM is posting poetry every weekday.
And they continued with more world history examples
where a victim lived happily ever after next to her executioner,
having forgiven and forgotten.
(poetry/translations)
I tried to envision walking down old cobblestone streets, but my memories drowned in darkness: My brain clasped shut. The doors that were so hard to close when I was leaving twenty-two years ago were even harder to reopen now. But I had to. I had to go back and face the ghosts and the memories. Had to shine a light into all corners of the old dark closet. I was planning a trip to visit my mother in Russia, and as the trip got closer, I decided I was ready to go home. I tacked on a few days in Kharkiv.
(nonfiction/Dispatches from Ukraine)
All that’s left of the baby is the rattle. / All that’s left of the granny is her knitting.
It doesn’t matter which language you speak, because language does not influence your way of thinking.
The older generation of course, they didn’t teach their kids about the horrors of Stalin, because they didn’t want them to have that memory.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
There was an air alarm, so an ambulance couldn’t get to us and bring this child to the hospital, so we decided to treat him right there.
(Dispatches From Ukraine)
Now I remember it like a dream, but it was terrible.
(Dispatches from Ukraine)
The Russian lived with his parents and grandparents on the other side of town in a tiny crumbling apartment near the library.
(fiction)
“In Stepanova’s voyage there is life and death, silence and narrative, memory and oblivion” writes reviewer Marek Makowski.
(fiction review)
Another Chicago Magazine 