SPRING 2025

Psoy Korolenko and Polina Shepherd. "The Stranniki in New York." Concert
January 28, 7 pm

PKHENTZ! A book launch and reading by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky
February 6, 6:30 pm 

Benjamin Nathans. "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause." Book Talk 
February 27, 6:30 pm

Martin Nekola. "Cold War Czechoslovakia and Exiles in the U.S." Lecture 
​March 27, 6:30 pm
Psoy Korolenko and Polina Shepherd. The Stranniki. Concert. Tuesday, January 28, 7 pm. Elebash Recital Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center. Free and open to the public. Co-sponsored by Tamizdat Project and CUNY Academy for the Humanities and Sciences. RSVP required. 

The Stranniki is a collaborative project of Polina Shepherd and Psoy Korolenko, two multilingual, cross-genre artists and authors, prominent in the Yiddish music scene for over two decades. Soon after their initial mini-tour and presentation at the conference “Mediating a New Cold War in the Digital Age” at Dartmouth College (2016), the duo embarked on a cross-US tour, followed by more international concerts. Central to their repertoire is the concept of a wanderer, and the associated archetype of “road/path.” The Stranniki draw upon, feature, and fuse elements of poetry and songs from Yiddish and Russian literature, folklore, and popular culture of the 19th and 20th centuries, organically weaving in their own original material. Their first mutual album unveils a distinctive continuity of texts, melodies, paths, and destinies, inspiring and informing in the peculiar 2020s as much as it ever has - if not more so.

Polina Shepherd is a Siberian-born, UK-based composer, singer, choir leader and educator, specializing in Yiddish and Russian music. Her unique style blends East European Jewish, Slavic and Turkic influences. She has collaborated with her husband, klezmer clarinetist and band leader Merlin Shepherd, Lorin Sklamberg of The Klezmatics and Psoy Korolenko, among others. She has served as program director for many festivals, including the large pandemic-time online project Step Forverts, featuring over 50 artists from around the world. She also co-produced Undzer Yiddishkayt, a collection of new songs by Eurasian klezmer artists. Polina is the artistic director of the Caravan Orchestra, a German-Israeli/Palestinian youth collaboration. Her work spans choral direction, improvisation and theatre, advancing Jewish music worldwide.

Psoy Korolenko (Pavel Lion) is a multilingual singer-songwriter, translator, journalist and scholar, currently a Visiting Lecturer at Dartmouth College. He is a former scholar/artist-in-residence at Trinity College (Hartford, CT), University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Dickinson College. He has released numerous albums, both solo and in collaboration, as well as several books of essays, lyrics and translations. His style blends Soviet urban folk, guitar poetry, Yiddish theater songs, French chanson, Tropicalia and more. A Recording Academy voting member, Psoy co-organizes the international festival of music and arts JetLAG in NY state and co-created the Grammy-nominated Yiddish Glory, a project reviving lost WWII-era Yiddish songs from Ukraine in collaboration with the historian Anna Shternshis, Professor of Yiddish Studies at the University of Toronto.

Address & directions: CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016. Elebash Recitall Hall is located on the first floor of the CUNY Graduate Center, to the left past the security desk. 
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Photo by Keith Wolzinger
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PKHENTZ! A Book Launch and Reading by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky. Thursday, February 6, 6:30 pm. Hunter College, Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East Building). Free and open to the public (please bring a state ID to enter the building). RSVP required. 

Please join us for the NYC launch of Tamizdat Project's first book and a bilingual reading of Abram Tertz's PKHENTZ by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky! 

This iconic Thaw-era tale of loneliness and alienation relates the miseries of a mid-level Soviet accountant—pseudonym Andrei Sushinsky—who is actually an outer-space alien. A classic misunderstood hero, he struggles daily to keep himself alive (his cactus-like body requires abundant water and has been debilitated by years of concealment) and to avoid the constant threat of exposure. Repulsed by the gross physiology and petty concerns of his Soviet neighbors and fellow-citizens, Sushinsky dreams of reuniting with his lost planet and treasures the faint traces of it that remain: scraps of his long-lost language (hence the title word PKHENTZ, a barely remembered sacred name) and his own extravagantly nonhuman body. Meanwhile, years of life among humans and concerted efforts to assimilate have worn Sushinsky down and caused him to question his sense of reality and existence overall.

​Written in 1957, the story was first published in the West in the wake of the infamous Moscow show trial of 1966, when two Soviet authors, Andrei Sinyavsky (aka. Abram Tertz) and Yuly Daniel (aka. Nikolai Arzhak) were sentenced, respectively, to seven and five years of hard labor for publishing their “slanderous” works abroad. While ostensibly addressing the experience of living with various covert identities in the mid-century Soviet Union (Jewish, dissident, political prisoner), the story’s subsequent wanderings broaden its purview to include refugee, émigré and queer experience. This inaugural publication presents the story for the first time as a freestanding edition and in a new English translation.

Ainsley Morse is a scholar of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature from the former USSR and its many republics, including Russia and Ukraine, as well as the former Yugoslavia and present day Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro. She is the author of Word Play: Experimental Poetry and Soviet Children's Literature (2021) and a translator from Russian, B/C/S and Ukrainian. Her co-translated volume Permanent Evolution: Selected Essays on Literature, Theory and Film (by Yuri Tynianov) won the 2021 AATSEEL Best Scholarly Translation award. She is also a coeditor (with Anastasia Osipova) at Cicada Press, a small independent publisher of translated poetry.  

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet, translator and professor at NYU. He was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and currently lives in New York and Berlin. His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, were published in the NYRB Poets series. His translations include Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think and The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, among others. 

Address & directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Benjamin Nathans. "To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement." Book Talk. Thursday, February 27, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Beginning in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was unexpectedly confronted by a dissident movement that captured the world’s imagination. Demanding that the Kremlin obey its own laws, an improbable band of Soviet citizens held unauthorized public gatherings, petitioned in support of arrested intellectuals, and circulated banned samizdat texts. Soviet authorities arrested dissidents, subjected them to bogus trials and vicious press campaigns, sentenced them to psychiatric hospitals and labor camps, sent them into exile—and transformed them into martyred heroes. Against all odds, the dissident movement undermined the Soviet system and unexpectedly hastened its collapse. Taking its title from a toast made at dissident gatherings, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause is a definitive history of a remarkable group of people who helped change the twentieth century. Benjamin Nathans’s vivid narrative tells the dramatic story of the men and women who became dissidents—from Nobel laureates Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn to many others who are virtually unknown today. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, personal letters, interviews, and KGB interrogation records, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause reveals how dissidents decided to use Soviet law to contain the power of the Soviet state. This strategy, as one of them put it, was “simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”

An extraordinary account of the Soviet dissident movement, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause shows how dissidents spearheaded the struggle to break free of the USSR’s totalitarian past, a struggle that continues in Putin’s Russia—and that illuminates other struggles between hopelessness and perseverance today.

Benjamin Nathans is the author of Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia, which was awarded the Koret Jewish Book Award, the Vucinich Book Prize, and the Lincoln Book Prize, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in History. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, Nathans is the Alan Charles Kors Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Martin Nekola. "Cold War Czechoslovakia and Exiles in the U.S." Lecture. Thursday, March 27, 6:30 pm. Elizabeth Hemmerdinger Center (706 Hunter East). Free and open to the public. RSVP required. 

Czechoslovakia was liberated from the Nazis in May 1945, and was soon subjected to sovietization and the rising dominance of the Communist regime, which lasted for more than four decades, after the complete takeover in February, 1948. Thousands of Czechs and Slovaks (up to 300 000 in 1948-1989), who sought the return of freedom and democracy to their homeland, left. First, they found themselves in the so-called displaced persons camps in Germany and Austria, where their first periodicals were published and the first seeds of political activity were planted. Almost seven dozen newspapers, magazines and newsletters, and nearly two hundred Czech institutions, including political organizations, parties, academic clubs or thinktanks, operated in the free world after 1948, above all in the U.S. But despite such a promising start and international support, the Council of Free Czechoslovakia, established in Washington D.C. as an umbrella organization for this community of exiles, writhed in crisis and fell apart, until it revived years later. As time passed, the atmosphere in exile changed, bringing new topics, new challenges, and new leaders. Dr. Nekola will discuss these and other aspects of the Czechoslovak Cold War exile, with a focus on the American context.

Martin Nekola holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Charles University in Prague. His research is on non-democratic regimes, the era of Communism, Czech communities abroad and the East-European anti-communist exiles in the U.S. during the Cold War. From time to time, he participates in the election observation missions organized by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). He is a member of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) and author of more than three hundred articles and dozens of book-length projects. He is also the coordinator of the Czechoslovak Talks Project.

Directions: At the reception desk of the Hunter West Building, please present your ID to get a pass. From there, take the escalator to the 3rd floor, turn right and walk across the sky bridge to the Hunter East Building, then take the elevator to the 7th floor. Hemmerdinger Center is at the end of the hallway past the turnstiles. 
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Hunter College, CUNY
Russian and Slavic Studies Program
695 Park Avenue, Suite 1425 HW
New York, NY 10065
Email: [email protected]