

3/18 TALK | Writing Trauma, from the Holocaust to the Pandemic: Poetry from Immigrant Jewish Writers from the Former Soviet Union
Thursday, March 18, 4:00 pm PDT - 5:15 pm PDT
In a combined conversation and reading, writers Julia Kalchinsky Dasbach and Luisa Muradyan will discuss their poetry and the ways in which it speaks to traumas past and present with Sasha Senderovich, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Slavic Languages & Literatures.
About the event
In one of the poems addressed to her friend and written on Holocaust Memorial Day (Yom HaShoah) in April 2020 — as many parts of the United States were entering the second month of lockdowns necessitated by the spread of the Covid-19 virus — Julia Kalchinsky Dasbach queried:
Just imagine, one day we will ask our children,
Remember when the whole world stopped
touching? They’ll hug us and answer, No.
Remember when the whole world stopped
touching? They’ll hug us and answer, No.
In her poetic response later the same day, Luisa Muradyan, answering her friend — a fellow one-time immigrant from the Soviet Union and, like her, a mother of two young children born in the United States — speculated:
I can’t decide what I’m more afraid of. My son
barreling across the room to hug strangers,
or my son barreling back away from others,
permanently terrified of touch.
barreling across the room to hug strangers,
or my son barreling back away from others,
permanently terrified of touch.
I know you’ve had
such days, and far worse. It’s not
that bad, we tell ourselves, and hours later,
we read poems about our dead ancestors
while our children scream in the background,
raging against our history, already inside them,
against an isolation that is the antonym
of Jewish family.
such days, and far worse. It’s not
that bad, we tell ourselves, and hours later,
we read poems about our dead ancestors
while our children scream in the background,
raging against our history, already inside them,
against an isolation that is the antonym
of Jewish family.
In their work, written both on their own in numerous publications over the past decade, and, recently, to each other, the poets Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach and Luisa Muradyan — each in her own unique style — explore their experiences as Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union; stories of their families in relation to the Second World War and the Holocaust; thorny questions of thinking and writing in English as a second language; and the overwhelming responsibilities placed on women and mothers in the United States today, during the era of detentions and deportations of immigrants and immigrant children, movements for racial justice, and the pandemic.
In ways that are often provocatively quirky and brimming with U.S. American pop culture references (Muradyan) and influenced by theories of trauma (Kolchinsky Dasbach), each poet’s body of work dwells on the experiences of loss — of people, lands, words — across generations, continents, and languages.
This online event is generously co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
About the speakers



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