Tag: Sasha Vasilyuk

Your Presence is Mandatory

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, Publication, Readings, short storyLeave a comment

Thank you so much to those of you who have been able to participate in my events in the past month. Lit Crawl was a huge success and I have really enjoyed introducing books of my writer friends to others in the bookish community.

I have one more event this holiday season to invite people in the Bay Area to. On Tuesday, December 9, come to The Sycamore (2140 Mission Street) to celebrate my friend Sasha Vasilyuk’s paperback release of her award-winning novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY (such a good title — I just had to use it as the subject of this message).

This novel tells a story that’s very personal to me. Sasha based the book on her grandfather’s experience of being a Soviet Jewish prisoner of war in a Nazi camp. He managed to escape, and then had to hide the fact of his imprisonment from the Soviet authorities in order to avoid the Gulag. This secret came to bear on the rest of his life — and it’s an experience that my grandfather Isaac also shared. (I wrote about my grandfather in this essay for Narrative Magazine.)

Sasha is a great reader and organizer, and this event is bound to be great. Come if you can!

A poster with book cover in the middle and six author photos arranged in groups of three on both sides. YOUR PRESNENCE IS MANDATORY Tuesday, Dec 9 at 7 pm The Sycamore, 2140 Mission street Paperback party With Sasha and Friends Molly Antopol Jacqueline Doyle Lee Kravetz Sasha Vasilyuk Heather Grzych Olga Zilberbourg

In other publishing news, a story of mine called “Yes” was published in an anthology Immigrant in the City by the London Group of Multilingual Writers, led by Darya Protopopova. Stories in this book alternate between Russian and English, and include writing by my friends Maragarita Meklina and Vlada Teper, as well as work by other established and recent immigrant writers from the former USSR. Many stories address Russia’s ongoing, brutal war against Ukraine and political persecution. My contribution is an older, humorous piece about a recently divorced woman trying to be open to advances of an admirer, whose attempt to woo her with high culture (Pushkin) fails miserably.

Spring Events

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, Links, Publication, Readings, short story, TranslationLeave a comment

“My son wants to take the streetcar. My daughter doesn’t. She doesn’t want to walk, either.” A new fiction of mine, “A Train is Coming,” appears in the upcoming issue of Mom Egg (MER) Review 23, copy available for purchase as a PDF and in print. If you want to hear me read it out loud on Zoom, register for the issue release party (free), where I’m delighted to share the stage with my friend, poet Olga Livshin, among others.

If you can only make it to one Zoom-based Olga Z event this month, I strongly encourage you to come to the translation salon I’ll be MCing on April 17th. Coorganized by translator Ilze Duarte and hosted by WTAW Press (that published my collection), this event will bring to you some of the leading literary translators of the English-speaking world, representing writers from Brazil, India, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and China. Readers of this newsletter will recognize the names of Boris Dralyuk, who translates Andrey Kurkov, and Katherine E. Young, the translator of Akram Aylisli. It so happens that all of the translators on this reading are also writers and poets themselves, and I only wish I had the time to interview them about how they combine their own writing with their translation projects. One thing for sure, they’re masters of the English letters, opening worlds into other languages and cultures for us. Register (it’s a virtual, Zoom-based event)! This will be fun.

Bay Area locals: I have one more event to invite you to. On May 4, at 1 pm, I’ll be taking a part in a brand new Jewish Arts & Bookfest, being organized at the UC Berkeley’s Magnes collection, “one of the world’s preeminent Jewish museums” (I’m just learning about it too). I’m moderating a panel we called Between War and Peace, on the role of Russian literature in the work of Soviet-born Jewish American writers, featuring Margarita Meklina, Tatyana Sundeyeva, and Sasha Vasilyuk. How did we get from worshipping Pushkin, Akhmatova, and Bulgakov to writing about Soviet Jewish–and often female–experiences? How do the structures and ideas of Russian and Soviet lit continue to affect our own storytelling? How does the popularity of Russian lit in the US intersect with our USSR-formed experiences of it, and what do we do with the image of a “Russian writer” as a bearded white (and ethnically Russian) man? Following my conversation with Marat Grinberg, I have ever more questions. Please join me.

And to continue the theme of Soviet-born writers, I’m leaving you with the recording from the event that took place in Los Angeles in March, a reading by this amazing group of writers born in the USSR, and translators working with the post/Soviet experience. Thank you to Olga Livshin for capturing and editing this video. We called this event Diaspora Writers Against War, and we’re continuing to do what we can to raise funds in support of Ukraine. Please donate to Ukraine TrustChain.

Recent Publications and a Submissions Opportunity

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Book review, Newsletter, Publication, Publishing, TranslationLeave a comment

Friends, one day when we’re all old and gray, please remember to ask me what it takes for a Soviet-born Russian speaker to establish herself not only as a writer of English, but also as a translator into English.

Let me just say that I’m exorbitantly proud of myself for publishing my translations in two more US-based literary magazines. I’m so grateful to the Kyiv-based poet Olga Bragina for trusting me with her work and to the editors of the magazines for seeing what I saw in Olga’s poetry. It is so relatable and so heartbreaking.

Here are the links:

Two poems by Olga Bragina in World Literature Today

Three poems by Olga Bragina in Consequence Forum

Those of you who are writers might be interested to know that WTAW Press has asked me to be one of the jurors for their second annual Kevin McIlvoy Book Prize. If you have an unpublished prose manuscript (novels, memoirs, narrative nonfiction, essay and story collections, and hybrid works), the submissions are open until December 31, 2024. Please submit — I’d love to read your work!

As many of you know, WTAW Press published my collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. This book turned 5 years old in September — and it’s not too late to buy it, read, and review on Goodreads and Amazon. All comments are always appreciated. Historically speaking, I haven’t always taken criticism well, but you know, I’m learning, and it’s good for me!

Three more links to this month’s publications:

My review of Shahzoda Samarqandi’s delightfully complex novel Mothersland, written originally in Persian and Tajik and translated to English by Shelley Fairweather-Vega from Russian by Youltan Sadykova. To write this review, I had to study up on the history of Soviet cotton production and the Aral Sea disaster.

On Punctured Lines, the blog that I co-run with Yelena Furman, we had two new pieces this month. First, my Q&A with Sasha Vasilyuk, whose novel about a Soviet WWII soldier with a secret Your Presence is Mandatory I highly recommend. Second, Yelena’s Q&A with Michele A. Berdy, a translator and editor extraordinaire who moved from US to the USSR in the 1970s. Wow, does she have stories to tell!

May Events and a New Interview

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn Event, interview6 Comments

I recently talked to Jack Boulware about my journey as a writer, growing up in the USSR and Russia and moving to the US, cultural differences, Russia’s recent history and its descent toward war on Ukraine, literary community, and particularly Punctured Lines and my collaborations in bringing together writers from the former Soviet Union writing in English.

Jack co-founded Litquake with Jane Ganahl and co-ran it until last year, providing an amazing platform for some of the events that I have helped organize. At the end of last festival, Jack retired from Litquake and moved on to other things, among them is this Substack newsletter with a particular focus on West Coast’s news and culture. Subscribe! It’s always entertaining and there are so many amazing characters. And read our conversation here.

Speaking about writers community, please join me for two upcoming events.

On May 23, at 6 pm, I’ll be interviewing Sasha Vasilyuk at Telegraph Hill Books (1501 Grant Avenue, SF) about her new novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY. Sasha and I share a bit of family history: both of our grandfathers fought in the Red Army against Germany in WWII, both were captured and became POWs, hiding their Jewish identities to survive in the Nazi camps. Later, upon returning to the USSR, they had to hide the fact of their captivity from the Soviet authorities to avoid being sent to the Gulag. They went about this differently, and therein lie the particularities of character and family circumstances that Sasha so wonderfully explores in her novel. I am so happy to see this book out in the world, and I can’t wait to talk to her about it!

Please register for this conversation on Eventbrite!

May 23, 6 pm
Telegraph Hill Books
1501 Grant Avenue, SF

It is also my pleasure to invite you to a reading that San Francisco Writers Workshop–the Tuesday night group that I’ve been attending since 2008 and co-moderating since 2015–is hosting for the benefit of our venue, Noisebridge Hackerspace. Noisebridge has been letting our use their space for free, but they certainly have a large monthly bill. This is our chance to help!

We’ve got an incredibly strong group of regulars whose names on book jackets will undoubtedly very soon grace your bookshelves. I will also read one of my new short-shorts. Come to listen and support us, and I can promise you that you will be entertained and inspired! There will also be a participatory literary game, food, (nonalcoholic) drinks, and a raffle! I think of this event as a giant party, but if I say so, don’t expect dancing. Details below.

May 31, 7 pm
Noisebridge
272 Capp Street, SF
Suggested donation $10

Lit Crawl: Building Community in the Face of War

On By Olga ZilberbourgIn EventLeave a comment

Bay Area friends — come out to our Lit Crawl event on Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia.

This event was a long time in the making. As Ukraine approaches its 600th day of defending its sovereignty against Russia’s assault, it remains paramount to continue to tell our stories and to refute the propaganda narratives that are festering in the social media spaces.

I’m really looking forward to hearing the poems, stories, personal essays and more from this group of Bay Area writers with deep personal connections to both Ukraine and Russia.

Lit Crawl is a part of San Francisco’s Litquake festival going on right now. Make sure to check out the full program and to participate in other events. It’s an amazing experience!