All Articles by Date

"Well, let's fly . . ." "Why, a geologist of course, no question about it," said the rector with a scowl. "A spy wouldn't throw himself under a train because of a broken heart." "Bravo, correct! And Winnie-the-Pooh? That's a tough one." "Hmm, Winnie-the-Pooh, well, I would say a spy," said the rector thoughtfully. "The geologist is probably Piglet." "You see?" said Lednev cheerily. "You can already classify the examples correctly. But your one mistake is that you...

Me and Perestroika Now I will tell you how perestroika collapsed. To be more precise, it hasn't collapsed yet, but it definitely will due to the archaic institutions of the family and marriage, which dominate in times of real socialism. To be fair, one must add that history recalls a few cases when trivia stood in the way of great achievements. Such was the case with the emperor Peter Fedorovich, who didn't succeed in carrying out his reformist program only because, several...

LV Democracy's secret In free, general elections, with secret ballots There, too, is music's concealment, its inaccessibility, eye to eye Where coercive power, over the other, does not exist This is music's secret When music moves, sovereign, in time, its own time For that is what defines it South African faces, in the first free election The dignity, the...

The eighties began with the Olympics in Moscow. In spite of the boycott by many western countries, Leonid Brezhnev, who was General Secretary at the time, was determined to prevent the whole thing from turning into a pure propaganda show. The Olympic Games were going to be turned into a giant cultural and political event. Moscow was to be cleansed of parasites of all kinds, and new electronic billboards bought from the Americans through Pakistani middlemen would be put up in the stadiums....

Now I will tell you how perestroika collapsed. To be more precise, it hasn't collapsed yet, but it definitely will due to the archaic institutions of the family and marriage, which dominate in times of real socialism. To be fair, one must add that history recalls a few cases when trivia stood in the way of great achievements. Such was the case with the emperor Peter Fedorovich, who didn't succeed in carrying out his reformist program only because, several times, in public, he...

Nancy was this woman. From America. A woman general. And not just a general, but an advisor to the president. Rumor even had it she could do the same amount of push-ups as any other American general and advisor to the president. And here she was coming all the way to the great Russian North to pay us a visit. Back then our country was in the throes of perestroika, and she was visiting us just to see whether we were doing as bad a job of it as the rest of the world was inclined to think....

By chance, the first roulette player I ever saw escaped with his life. Since then, for many years in a row, I attended hundreds of roulettes and I saw many times an image that cannot be described: the human brain, the only veritably divine substance, the alchemical gold which contains everything, scattered on the walls and on the floor, mixed up with splinters of skull. Think about bullfighting or gladiators and you will understand why this game soon infused my blood and changed my life....

Boris Fishman interviewed Wladimir Kaminer September 3, 2003. Boris Fishman: Did you start writing before emigrating to Germany? What did you do in the Soviet Union? Wladimir Kaminer: In the Soviet Union, I graduated from music school, with a concentration in music for theatre and television. I worked for a year, then went into the army, got out in 1989. By then, perestroika was in full swing, and many of my colleagues were rushing to take advantage of the increased freedom of movement by...

New Year, don't come to our homes, for we are wanderers from a ghost-world, denied by man. Night flees from us, fate has deserted us We live as wandering spirits with no memory no dreams, no longings, no hopes. The horizons of our eyes have grown ashen the gray of a still lake, like our silent brows, pulseless, heatless, denuded of poetry. We live not knowing life. New Year, move on. There is the path to lead your footsteps. Ours are veins of hard reed,...

All I have left from this story is a white Caribbean suit, a Panama hat, and a cassette tape that I've carried persistently in my left shirt pocket. And a pair of white shoes which, if I hadn't lost them in the course of my journey, would complement the suit, which I'm wearing now. It must have been in the autumn. October, to be more exact. Spring doesn't tend to go on for very long in Basra, and one could wear clothes such as these only in a moderate season. It almost...

So that I can speak of myself and to this time, and even further-so that I can converse with days gone by, I find nothing more fitting than the parable of migration. Maybe because migration is another name for exile made gentler by the alphabet. Maybe because migration is another name for passage. Maybe because it is another articulation to inaugurate a place and adopt it. Maybe because it is another embodiment of loss. As if migration is another matter. Isn't the word hejira the...

Iocasta: What is an exile's life? Is it great misery? Polyneices: The greatest; worse in reality than in report. Iocasta: Worse in what way? What chiefly galls an exile's heart? Polyneices: The worst is this: right of free speech does not exist. Iocasta: That's a slave's life—to be forbidden to speak one's mind. (Euripides, The Phoenician Women; author's translation) Writers in exile often face the question of why they left their countries, and whether this...

The kid who sells roasted chestnuts at the end of the Ponte Garibaldi gets down to work. He sits in a groove in the parapet of the bridge with a small stove between his legs, looking no one in the face, as if his relationship to the rest of humanity were at an end, or as if he had been reduced to only a hand, not the physical hand of a small boy or an elderly lady, but an abstract hand, a mechanism for accepting payment and delivering merchandise in a rigidly calculated and predetermined...

Set in an Iraqi village during the Iran-Iraq war, Scattered Crumbs critiques a totalitarian dictatorship through the stories of an impoverished peasant family. A father (Hajji Ijayel), a fierce supporter of Saddam Hussein--here called only the Leader--clashes with his artist son, who loves his homeland but finds himself literally unable to paint the Leader's portrait for his father's wall. The novel evokes the deterioration both of the country and of the individual characters...

Why do we fear words when they have been rose-palmed hands, fragrant, passing gently over our cheeks, and glasses of heartening wine sipped, one summer, by thirsty lips? Why do we fear words when among them are words like unseen bells, whose echo announces in our troubled lives the coming of a period of enchanted dawn, drenched in love, and life? So why do we fear words? We took pleasure in silence. We became still, fearing the secret might part our lips. We...

The wind gasps with the midday heat, like a nightmare in the late afternoon And on the masts, it continues to fold, to spread for departure The gulf is crowded with them--laborers roaming the seas Barefoot, half-naked And on the sand, by the gulf A stranger sat--a baffled vision wanders the gulf Destroying the pillars of light with the rising wail Higher than the torrents roaring foam, than the clamor A...

Set in the border triangle of Iran, Irak, and Turkey, Im Grenzland [At the Borderline] is the story of an Iraqi Kurd who makes his living as a smuggler. Having bought a map of landmines from a former soldier, the smuggler negotiates a path through the war-torn border region to bring items that have become luxuries (due to embargo) back into his country. On each trip he unearths land mines on his way out of the country and buries them on his way back. He reads the empty landscape like a...

Throughout medieval Europe Arabic had a far more powerful impact on the transformation and shaping of culture than most narratives of our history reveal. This was true not only in Spain, where Arabic was the lingua franca of educated people of all three religions for many centuries, but far beyond. The new and often revolutionary cultures of twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe were often provoked or shaped by an Arabic culture that traveled throughout Europe in many guises, in...

I remember as-Sayyab screaming into the Gulf in vain: Iraq, Iraq. Nothing but Iraq. And nothing but an echo replies I remember as-Sayyab, in that Sumerian space A woman triumphed over the sterility of mist She bequeathed to us earth and exile . . . For poetry is born in Iraq, So be Iraqi to become a poet, my friend. I remember as-Sayyab . . . He didn't find life as he imagined it Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and He didn't think of the herbs of immortality Like...

He never considered himself an exiled politician. He abandoned his country out of a strange impulse that was forged in three stages. The first was when he was approached by four successive beggars on the Avenue. The second was when a minister said the word Peace on television and his right eyelid immediately started to tremble. The third was when he entered his neighborhood church and saw that a Christ (not the most divine one, crowded with candles, but another, crestfallen, on a side...

Dreams don't come to us without being provoked externally, which is what happened to me yesterday when I woke up at five in the morning, precisely the hour I had intended to get up. I found myself on someone's trail and soon I saw Kassem and said something as I approached him, even though I was astonished that I would be able to talk to him while he was no longer among the living; then I realized that it wasn't Kassem but my faithful servant Sha'aban and that I wanted him to...

This interview appeared in slightly different form in Keys to the Garden: New Israeli Writing, edited and translated by Ammiel Alcalay (San Francisco: City Lights, 1996). Ammiel Alcalay: Starting with education, practically and in a wider sense, how were you formed as a writer? Shimon Ballas: One has to go very far back, to early childhood. I was always attracted to writing. I connected it to stories told at home and I used to try and write them down for myself. I was always a little...

In this 1995 story, Bun-nyo is an elderly superintendent at a reservoir in the countryside. She devotes much of her time and effort to taking care of a flourishing flower garden that she has planted in honor of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung, who visited the reservoir once in her younger days. The story begins as she hears the devastating news of Kim's death. "Grandma, Grandma, get up." Bun-nyo heard voices, choking with tears, and felt small, desperate hands shaking her shoulders....

Two or three years after Partition, the governments of Pakistan and India decided to exchange lunatics in the same way that they had exchanged civilian prisoners. In other words, Muslim lunatics in Indian madhouses would be sent to Pakistan, while Hindu and Sikh lunatics in Pakistani madhouses would be handed over to India. I can't say whether this decision made sense or not. In any event, a date for the lunatic exchange was fixed after high level conferences on both sides of the...

The narrator, a manager at a factory in the city, is sent on an urgent business trip to his wife's hometown. As the hapless narrator sets out on his journey, his wife pressures him to visit his in-laws while he is there, to take care of various family matters including playing matchmaker to her younger sister. *** It makes me shudder just to look back on that day's journey. I had been walking for about half an hour when the fickle mountainside weather suddenly brought on rain....