Deafness, Chernobyl, and Gorbachev: A Personal Narrative

"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 the first essay of the week, Ilya remembers his childhood years: "Pretty much all my childhood and adolescence was spent watching the Soviet Union fall apart, but I couldn't hear, so I followed the century with my eyes. I didn't know anything different, but now I understand that I was seeing in a language of images.

"What I remember most of all is washing Leo Tolstoy's ears. The year is 1989, the mornings of Revolution, the year when my birth-country began to fall apart. His ears are larger than my head, and I am standing on the shoulders of a boy who is standing on the shoulders of another boy. I am scrubbing the enormous bearded head on a pedestal - in the center of Tolstoy Square, one block from our first apartment."

Ilya lost most of his hearing at the age of four: "Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, is giving his speech. His mouth moves, the crowd claps, I hear nothing. I am raising the TV volume, Brezhnev makes another pronouncement, I do not hear it. It is on the day Brezhnev dies that my mother learns of my deafness, and the odyssey of doctors and hospitals begins. Strangers wear black clothes in public and I think it's for me. Thus begins the history of my deafness."

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