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!
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.
Here in San Francisco, the rainy season has officially begun with the first mild and fairly warm storms of the season. Who knows what new cataclysms it might bring? As my friend Gary Pendler writes in his essay “The Bike, the Branch, and the Tick”(*), after a poplar tree branch bizarrely dropped on him in Paris, we have to be prepared that “climate change might also show up in the lives of us ordinary folk and in a myriad of day-to-day incidents.”
The best place to hide from falling branches is, to my mind, a bookstore. And, speaking of Paris, I’ve been spending a lot of time there in my imagination as I’m reading my friend Bart Schneider’s book GIACOMETTI’S LAST RIDE. Giacometti, born in Switzerland, worked in Paris, and this is where Bart’s novel is set. Bart brings to life this consummate artist, in all of his human complexities and vulnerabilities. It’s a thrilling read!
Giacometti, of course, is much beloved all across Europe and the US. But when Bart first brought pages of his manuscript to the workshop that I was a part of, I had been clueless. Bart’s chapters were my first introduction to Giacometti’s legacy. Giacometti, it turns out, was one of those modernist artists who was ideologically unacceptable to the USSR, and so censored there out of existence. The first showing of his work in Russia took place in 2007. Digging deeper, I discovered this wonderful piece above by emigre artist Leonid Sokov (1987), that showcases the clash of cultures: The Meeting of Two Sculptures: Lenin and Giacometti.
In many ways Giacometti’s art, showcasing the fragility of an individual, remains political in today’s world. I’m excited to be able to talk about all this and more with Bart, who will be presenting his novel on November 8, 6:30 pm, at Telegraph Hill Books in San Francisco. I hope you can come!
I’ll also be reading from a longer essay of mine “The Richest Kid in the World” (*) that dramatizes the end of censorship in the Soviet Union.
In the spirit of continuing to unpack modernity through the post-Soviet lens while building community, I am hosting two more events this November.
1) I’m absolutely thrilled that Hamid Ismailov and Shelley Fairweather-Vega will be doing an event in San Francisco for their book WE COMPUTERS, A Ghazal Novel (Yale University Press). This book is a National Book Award finalist–the first book from Central Asia to be a finalist.
Exiled from Uzbekistan (where his books are banned), Ismailov lives in the UK. He writes in at least three languages: Uzbek, Russian, and English, and Fairweather-Vega can translate him directly from Uzbek, without going through Russian. A previous novel of Ismailov’s that Fairweather-Vega translated, GAIA, QUEEN OF THE ANTS, did a fantastic job of telling contemporary stories set in the Western world, yet tying them both to immediate Soviet and post-Soviet history of Central Asia as well as to mythological history and philosophy. It offers a truly unique and fascinating perspective on the modernity–as I expect WE COMPUTERS does as well.
Come to see this stellar duo on November 9, 6 pm at The Sycamore (2140 Mission St)!!
2) On Tuesday, November 4, 4:30 pm, I’ll be introducing a feminist philosopher from the former Yugoslavia, Senka Anastasova, at Philosophers Club (824 Ulloa St).
Anastasova is a professor of aesthetics and political philosophy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts and Humanities, at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. She will be introducing her Routledge Press book, POLITICAL NARRATOSOPHY: From Theory of Narration to Politics of Imagination (on Nancy Fraser, Jacques Ranciere, Paul Ricoeur).
She promises to speak on her history of “displacement, philosophy of narrating – in – the – zones – of transition, pain, dead bodies / and not – yet – dead displaced bodies, poetics of displacement and immigration, history /herstory, historiography, women’s studies and borderlands, types of exiles from one regime to another, about memory, resistance against totalitarian regimes, capital, historical materialism, freedom to choose, freedom to express today.”
This will be absolutely wild! Come.
(*) And yes, this message comes with a footnote! Gary’s essay “The Bike, the Branch, and the Tick,” and mine “The Richest Kid in the World” both appear in the same issue of the Chicago Quarterly Review. There are so many goodies there!
The Question is my new short story, published by the wonderful Scoundrel Time magazine that has previously published my story Bananas for Sale, included in my collection LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES. Huge gratitude to Scoundrel Time editors Karen E. Bender and Paula Whyman.
The Racket is a reading series where I’ll be reading my work on July 25, at 7 pm. No official flyer for this event yet, but do show up at The Sycamore, 2140 Mission St in San Francisco, and help a group of us to celebrate Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel YOUR PRESENCE IS MANDATORY. The theme of the event is ALL OVER THE MAP, and what a map this is that includes Sasha, Rita Chang-Eppig, Jacqueline Doyle, Yalitza Ferreras, and Lee Kravetz!
*** The Sycamore is currently my favorite bar in the city, where I hang out Tuesday nights with the crew from the San Francisco Writers Workshop. IMHO, it’s the friendliest watering hole for writers in town. Happy for you to try to convince me otherwise, but first come to the reading!
Olga Zilberbourg 