This has been an exciting week for me on the publishing front. Academic Studies Press sent out marketing postcards for our book, which is coming out in about a month.
The cover of the new book. Note the cool design elements! |
I have read and loved this book for thirty years, and I've been working with one or another version of the essays with students for almost five. Now the full translation of Russian Cuisine in Exile will finally offer English-speaking audiences a chance to explore these forty-four essays (with recipes) for themselves.
Original Cover |
My well-loved copy of How We Write |
Including Russian Cuisine in Exile. I would love to know the history of his republishing this book, which had only come out in Los Angeles one year earlier. I assume it was the cheeky tone and anti-nostalgic musings on the motherland and Soviet cuisine that captivated him. Jousting with official Soviet culture at a distance was hard work, and it's nice to think of him embracing Vail and Genis as his comrades in the task. I am still grateful that Chalidze introduced me to the book.
Vail and Genis wrote Russian Cuisine in Exile with one voice. Indeed, they wrote many pieces together, including articles for the newspaper they and Dovlatov founded, The New American (Новый американец). (They, along with Dovlatov, probably penned the funny slogan for their paper, pictured here. The New American: "We chose freedom, and now our happiness is in our own hands.")
Publishing a weekly newspaper for the Russian-speaking community in New York and beyond was quite an endeavor, and it lasted just over two years. It's fun to imagine the collective--young, energetic, idealistic emigres, some even exiles, who left the Soviet experiment to embark upon one of their own.
The 1-year anniversary of The New American. Photo taken in Brighton Beach. |
First-wave emigres had a popular saying: “We are not in exile, we are on a mission.” That’s why we particularly liked the heading Ksana Blank (Dovlatov’s half-sister) thought up for us: “Russian Cuisine in Exile.” The title belongs to her. We were trying to reduce the pathos that reigned in the Russian community abroad. In our struggle with the “savage seriousness” (in Aksyonov’s words) of émigré rhetoric, we crafted our culinary columns to be both parodic and practical. Every dish was tested at literary dinners to which we treated virtually every writer of the third wave. Except—it goes without saying—Solzhenitsyn, who really did believe he was on a mission.Parodic and practical. Getting that tone across in English was no easy task.
But in the twenty-first century, we are living in a new world, a world of migration and movement, of communities struggling to maintain their heritage while sometimes also striving not to take it too seriously, trying to find a place for themselves in new environments and to bridge gaps to meet those who already live there.
I've taught pieces of the book in English and in Russian, and written about it on this blog. (Search Russian Cuisine in Exile). Tom Feerick, my co-translator, originally studied the book with me in class, and our partnership--like Vail and Genis's, I imagine--was a back and forth negotiation all the way through.
Now is the perfect time for this little book to find new audiences in English-speaking places across the world. We hope our readers will agree.
Adding to wishlist!!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations!! Wow!!
ReplyDelete
Deletepretty cool, eh?