The Essay - 2. Departure
"Each remembered moment is a keyhole. Time doesn't 'flow like a river', doesn't exist in Odesa at all; the numbers of years, 1986 or 1989 or 2006 are like signs hanging about the corner grocery shop, with names of owners, swaying. In these streets, everything is ever-present. There are places like this on the planet: you can stop in the middle of the street and stick a finger into the skin of time, tear a hole, and see through."
Across a week of personal essays, the Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic, writes about the city of his birth and reflects on fatherland, mother tongue, memory, Deafness, exile and oppression. He writes about the Odesa of his childhood and his family's flight from Ukraine to the USA in the early 1990s. He writes of invasion, war, regimes and revolution. Of Odesa's poets, past and present (editing their poems in the bomb shelters). Of the statues in the city squares - Leo Tolstoy, Taras Shevchenko, Catherine the Great.
In his second essay of the week, Ilya reflects on his complicated relationship with the country of his birth. In 1993 Ilya's family fled the anti-Semitism of post-Soviet Ukraine and was granted asylum by the American government: "The story of our coming to America begins with a burning door."
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odesa, Ukraine in 1977, and arrived in the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books, including Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins), In the Hour of War: Poems from Ukraine (Arrowsmith), and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books). He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.
Read by Ilan Goodman, with introductions by the author
Producer: Mair Bosworth for BBC Audio Assistant Producer: Melanie Pearson Mixing Engineer: Ilse Lademann
Published on Tuesday, 21st November 2023.
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