I’m heading to the East Coast for a conference next week, and am using an opportunity to present my work and (re)connect with writers and readers in Washington, DC area. On December 16 at 6 pm, come to “A Literary Lagniappe,” a reading and open mic by friends of Bergstrom Books, a foreign-language books purveyor in Kensingon, MD.
This event, hosted by a nearby Kensington Row Bookshop (3786 Howard Ave, Kensington, MD), will have a Central and East European focus, and will include original work, translation, and music. As you can tell from the flyer, we’re planning to keep it festive! Please register on Eventbrite and share with friends.
Translator and poet Katherine E. Young might read from her translations of Azerbaijani writer Akram Aylisli. Ena Selimović, Yugoslav-born translator and a co-founder of one of my favorite literary magazines, Turkoslavia, will read from Tatjana Gromača’s novella Black, newly translated. Roman Kostovski, a translator, musician, and publisher of Plamen Press, that specializes in books in translation from Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe (and published Aylisli’s PEOPLE AND TREES), might perform some music as well as read! Greg Bergstein, my fellow St. Petersburgian who takes inspiration from both James Joyce and Daniil Kharms might read one of his fictions.
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In other news, check out Lina Turygina’s essay “Thinking Reeds and Foolish Weeds: On Emigration and Adaptation.” In it, Turygina (a Harvard Ph.D. student!) compares my stories with the work of Nina Berberova (!!!) –an iconic writer of the first wave of Russian emigration. “Navigating her position as a bicultural writer, Zilberbourg moves fluidly between languages, omitting details in one version, using grammar creatively in another, and always finding new ways to adapt.” My next story is going to have to feature the burdock plant — I have so many associations!
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As some of you know, in the 60s and 70s, my dad was in a popular student rock band in Leningrad, “The Green Ants.” They performed at his university and also toured the country in the summers as a part of student work brigades.
The members of the band worked with difficult teens in Karelia, built an oil pipeline in Kazakhstan, worked on railway construction, entertained locals at a restaurant on the Kola peninsula, and at nights played rock shows, bringing Western music to Soviet audiences. They also composed their own songs and fell in love and got in trouble with authorities over set lists. Playing rock music in the USSR meant making their own electric guitars, “borrowing” amplifiers from official organizations, and creatively adapting material for approval by the censorship bureaus.
Recently, my parents started taking creative writing classes and transformed my dad’s oral stories about the band into a novel WHEN ROCK-N-ROLL WAS GREEN. The book is now available for sale in Russian–look for it wherever books are sold. And if you’re in San Francisco, come to the presentation at the Richmond Library on Sunday, January 11 at 2 pm. (In Russian language, mostly. I expect songs!)
One last good thing for today: a tiny, three-paragraph-long essay on my recent reading helped me win Jewish Book Council’s Jewish Book Month & The Betsy Hotel Writer’s Contest (scroll for the essay) — and later this year, I’ll be spending a few days at the Betsy Hotel in Miami, working on my new novel.
Olga Zilberbourg 