"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 fourth essay, he tells the story of a visit to Ukraine during the early months of the 2022 invasion: "At the border, an endless line of cars. Between them weave women wheeling bulky suitcases, children following behind, dragging their stuffed toys which look both curious and afraid. Grannies in wheelchairs sit at the side of the road, drowsing off as soldiers check their papers. Two women spread their breakfast on the hood of a parked Zhiguli. The line is going so slowly I can see what they are eating—brinza cheese, bread, cups of coffee, and hard-boiled eggs. Next to them, a couple of stray cats begging. They’re everywhere: atop anti-tank fortifications, under the bushes, in the arms of the children. Pretty soon, we’re motioned forward, but the women and the cats remain behind us. Perhaps they’re still waiting."
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