On February 7th, Razom Book Club gathered to discuss Victoria Amelina’s book “Dom’s Dream Kingdom” (Дім для Дома), and the following afternoon they met with Victoria Amelina virtually.
“As if we’ve been reading the same book for several years,” said Irena Chalupa, “a book about memory, how to prevent forgetting.” Indeed, in the book Dom’s Dream Kingdom, the Tsiliik family, who live in Stanislav Lem’s old apartment at 4 Lepkoho Street, do not know how to talk to each other about the past. How to tell about the fact that people who are no longer in Lviv used to live in this apartment, how to remember a family history that you want to forget so much, how to find out who you are, if your parents have been trying to forget for many years.
This is how Yana Zavada, another member of the Razom Book Club, described the conversation: “In our book club we have already read about the heterogeneous Donbass in “The Death of Leo Cecil Made Sense”. Now it was a topic of heterogeneous Lviv (some in the club were very surprised by this, by the way). In these literary parallels, I see a movement towards each other. We are the one country. Cool. Original.”
In the words of the novel: “The house where you are remembered is scattered like the wreckage of frozen rivers above the Earth. I can now say “my city”, but it is as absurd as saying “my air”. Even the air we breathe has already been someone’s and will be. Our air while it is with us. Our house, our home while it is with us. And we are all always in this home – each at our own depth.”
These topics were discussed with to Victoria among others, such as why she is not writing now as much as she is preparing for the New York Literary Festival and what she is planning to do in Poland with the Conrad Scholarship that Victoria won earlier this year. will begin in April. We invite you to watch this conversation, and if it inspires you, then read Victoria Amelina’s book “Дім Для Дома”.
Learn more about Razom Book Club and join the Facebook group to stay informed about the upcoming readings and meetings with Ukrainian authors.
In 2021 we continued our work in Ukraine with the Co-Pilot Project with one formal trip (led by Mariya Soroka and Luke Tomycz) during which we performed several epilepsy and brain tumor surgeries with surgical partners in both Kyiv and Lutsk. A highlight of this trip was an anatomic hemispherectomy – the first to our knowledge ever performed in Ukraine – on a little girl in Lutsk who had a recurrence of her seizures, but again is seizure free and doing very well after this repeat surgery. We also traveled to Uzhgorod where we had a busy day of consultation with the local epilepsy team on various complex epilepsy patients who came from all around the country.
Unfortunately, because of the COVID pandemic, trips by both Dr. Matthew Geck (from Austin, Texas) to perform scoliosis surgery and Dr. James Liu (from Newark , NJ) to perform skull base surgery were canceled this year. But we hope to reschedule both of these trips as restrictions loosen. Furthermore, several of the Ukrainian surgeons who were slated to visit Dr. Forbes in Cincinnati have had their fellowships delayed.
Thanks to connections made by Dr. Vitalii and Yulia Shama and Oleksa Martinouk, we were able to speak with two new surgical partners in Europe, Drs. Schmitz in Germany and Dr. Rocka in Lithuania, both of whom are interested in training Ukrainian residents and setting up an international fellowship/observership in coordination with our team.
Finally, with the help of Maria Borisovska PhD, we were able to locate and purchase an EEG amplifier and this was transported to Dr. Kostiuk, the chief of epilepsy surgery at Romadanov Institute. He has already used this for intraoperative electrocorticography and we hope to assist them in their first extra-operative mapping case. This technology should substantially improve this center’s capabilities to offer surgery to a wider number of patients with drug-resistant, refractory epilepsy.
We hope during the next trip which is planned for April/May of 2022 we will reach and surpass an exciting milestone: the 100th major neurosurgical operation conducted by our team in Ukraine in cooperation with our partner surgeons! We hope to plan an annual dinner and fundraising event in 2022 following this trip.
Our second fundraiser in support of Ukrainian hospitals fighting COVID-19 is going strong. As yet another spike in new cases has swamped the country, medical institutions and non-profit organizations from all over Ukraine are in search of life-saving oxygen for patients who cannot do without air support. Your recent donations helped purchasing the three more oxygen concentrators that were delivered to clinics and hospital in three different oblasts, all specifically focused on treating the coronavirus patients.
Thus, one concentrator was delivered to the Vorokhta outpatient clinic (Ivano-Frankivsk region), one more to the Shiryaiv CDH (Odessa region), and another one to the Bilokorovytsia outpatient clinic (Zhytomyr region).
We thank everyone for your support, generous donations and information sharing! We are also thankful for the outstanding cooperation with the non-profit Patients of Ukraine (Patsienty Ukrainy), who have been working hard to find, purchase and deliver the much-needed medical equipment to various Ukrainian cities, towns and villages!
Razom volunteers and supporters stand with courageous Ukrainian doctors, outpatient and health departments’ staff. We are deeply grateful for your tireless work! You are not alone. We are – razom – together!
It is unbelievable, but our Kickstarter campaign to publish Rafeyenko’s book in English has reached the initial goal amount of $5,500 — just two days after we launched it!
We THANK everyone so very much for incredible support of this important book.
Kickstarter campaign will still run for another month as per the site’s rules. The amount collected will cover the absolute minimum necessary to complete the translation, but the overall cost of the translation and rights to the book are a lot higher. And so every cent we collect above the initial goal amount will still go towards supporting the work of Volodymyr Rafeyenko and towards fully covering the cost of the translation so that the writer and the translator can continue their work!
Volodymyr Rafeyenko had to leave his home city of Donetsk immediately after the occupation by Russian-sponsored forces has begun. He started writing about the traumatic experience right away, too: first in the novel ‘Longue Duree’ (Dovhi chasy), which appeared in Russian and in Ukrainian (in Marianna Kiyanovska’s translation), and later in ‘Mondegreen.’
Volodymyr left his home when he was 45, having to abandon everything he had worked to achieve, and beginning from scratch in Kyiv. In one of his interviews, he compared the process to what Johann Sebastian Bach must have experienced when he had to bury four children from his first marriage, and then seven children from his second marriage. That experience of excruciating pain always accompanies Volodymyr, who now lives at a fellow writer’s dacha in Bucha near Kyiv, where he continues to write and from where he teaches literature courses online.
We believe that it is incredibly important for the world to learn more about such experiences that many Ukrainian citizens have gone through as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Your contribution allows us to change the way the world perceives Ukraine — and it will hopefully generate more support for our young democracy. There are many facets to Ukraine’s history and culture, and not all of them are tragic. With this campaign, we’re beginning with what’s very critical right now, but we hope to be able to count on your support in the future, too, when we campaign to translate and publish other works of Ukrainian literature in English.
Passionate about Ukrainian modern literature? – Join our Razom Book Club.
And learn more about and support Razom Culture which promotes awareness of Ukraine’s vibrant art and culture through a variety of collaborations and events.
On a rainy Sunday of April 11th, Razom was honored to host Ukrainian chef Ievgen Klopotenko and Veselka’s chef Dima Martseniuk at a very special Razom Meet & Greet.
You may know Ievgen Klopotenko, who is also a Master Chef Ukraine winner and a successful restaurant owner in Kyiv, because of his ongoing effort to have borshch recognized as part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage by UNESCO. Ievgen actively works to revive centuries-old Ukrainian recipes, modernize them and show Ukraine’s rich heritage through food. He favors local ingredients in a true farm-to-table approach.
Ievgen spoke about Ukrainian self-identity, the role of food in Ukrainian history, and broke some myths and stereotypes about Ukrainian cuisine – it is not only about boiled stuffed dumplings (varenyky), cabbage rolls (holubtsi) and beet soup (borshch). He absolutely captivated the audience with his high energy, passion, and knowledge. Everyone was mesmerized!
It has been a while since we were able to meet in-person like this, so thank you to everyone who RSVPed, masked up, and showed up. We hope you enjoyed meeting Ievgen and Dima and we hope to host many more events like this in the future.
We’re also grateful to Andrew Stasiw for allowing us to host this event at Saint George Academy, a center of Ukrainian life in New York.
And although the rain forced us to spontaneously move the scheduled rooftop event indoors, we especially thank Maryna Prykhodko, Dora Chomiak, and all of the amazing volunteers who helped make this event run as smooth as possible, while adhering to all safety guidelines! We get things done when we work RAZOM.
Our special Thank You to Volodymyr Shahay and Olesia Pryshlyak for capturing all the unforgettable emotions in such wonderful photos.
Learn more about and support Razom Culture that celebrates and promotes awareness of Ukraine’s vibrant art and culture through a variety of collaborations and events.
We are thrilled to share with you that our Co-Pilot Project which aims to raise the bar of neurosurgery training in Ukraine has been described and published as a learning case in the scientific journal Science Direct.
“About 5 years ago, I first travelled to Ukraine to meet and operate with neurosurgery colleagues in Kyiv. – writes Dr. Luke Tomycz, the leading neurosurgeon of the Co-Pilot Project team – Since then, our team of surgeons from the United States have assisted colleagues in Ukraine with over 80 major operations on the brain and spine, in addition to consulting on countless hundreds more. I want to thank my friends from the U.S. who have taken time away from family and work to travel to Ukraine, colleagues in Ukraine who inspire us with their resilience and ingenuity, members of our administrative “Co-Pilot” team who meet monthly to work on this project, and members of Razom and the greater Ukrainian community who have supported and donated to this work. We are humbled by your continued support as we look to build epilepsy surgery capabilities at several centers around Ukraine.”
You can find the article available online and for free here.
Earlier, in Fall 2019, the CPP program was also presented at the Princeton University. Read more about the presentation here.
Learn more about the Co-Pilot Project and support neurosurgery training in Ukraine here.
We were very excited for the amazing concert that took place on January 2nd – Koliadky Reimagined: Ukrainian Carols in the 21st Century. Traditional folk met contemporary classical music in this stunning survey of Ukrainian Carols (Koliada) across generations. Ukrainian Village Voices were joined by musicians from the Aeon Ensemble. They performed centuries-old carols passed down orally and contemporary imaginings of these works by Ukraine’s finest living composers. The concert was broadcast live in both HD and 360° Virtual Reality so audiences could enjoy a completely immersive experience.
“I have to say I am loving every aspect of this – the programming, the performance, the music, the mix” – shared Dmytro during the concert. And we definitely forwarded these words to the artists, volunteers and everyone who made this happen.
Huge thanks to all of you who could join and so supported the bigger goal! The concert was part of a larger fundraising series to help with the production of a centenary concert celebration of Shchedryk’s first performance on the grand stage of the Carnegie Hall in 2022! All proceeds from the tickets are going toward our big vision and huge goal – learn more about and support the 100th anniversary of Shchedryk.
Learn more and support RazomCulture. Let’s share the incredible Ukrainian culture with the world!
We are thrilled to announce a new member to the Razom Board of Directors: Maria Genkin.
Maria has been deeply involved with Razom since 2017 and has been an enthusiastic supporter since 2014 when she attended a concert by Taras Chubai in New York. It is Maria who co-founded and is now managing the Razom Book Club. It’s Maria who initiated and built the partnership with the Serhiy Zhadan Charitable Foundation in Ukraine. It’s Maria who recommended Razom to PEN America as an organization to host an open community meeting with Oleg Sentsov in New York, where Maria moderated the conversation from the stage in January this year.
Born and raised in Lviv, Maria grew up speaking Russian. She was drawn to Razom because the volunteers and the projects reflect the multi-dimensional characteristics of a modern, forward-looking Ukraine, and she is looking forward to promoting Ukraine by encouraging connections among various groups and regions around the common goal of establishing a successful and self-reliant European Ukraine.
Maria has kindly shared with us her personal path of establishing her identity as a Ukrainian, which you can find below.
We heartily welcome Maria at the Razom Board of Directors! Looking forward to amazing collaborations and fun while building a prosperous Ukraine project by project RAZOM.
My story by Maria Genkin
As I am beginning my tenure as a member of Razom for Ukraine Board, I want to reflect on my background and the path I took to being involved in an organization working for a Ukrainian cause. It is not a straightforward path as in the last fifteen years I have started a Russian language school in NYC and served on the board of the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund. Nevertheless to me it is part of the same story and it really comes down to my identity.
I have always considered myself a Ukrainian, but growing up Russian speaking in Lviv had made this identification somewhat difficult. Ukrainian and Russian communities in Lviv were not well integrated. In the late 80s and early 90s, with the resurgence of Ukrainian Nationalism and disintegration of the Soviet Union, these differences became especially apparent. To be a Ukrainian meant to speak Ukrainian exclusively, have relatives that fought for independencе, go to the newly resurrected Greek Catholic Church, own a vyshyvanka, that may have been passed down from a grandma, don’t eat meat at Christmas Eve dinner, and hold off all housework on Sundays. At least this was my perception of what ‘being a Ukrainian’ was at the time.
I did not fit that mold. My name was Maша Кiсельова. Even though my Ukrainian speaking grandparents lived only 200 kilometers east of Lviv, I spoke poor Ukrainian, went to a Russian school (coincidentally the same one where Ruslana Lyzhychko went at the time), and had mostly Russian speaking friends. My Ukrainian grandparents came from the other side of Zbruch, were ambivalent about Ukrainian nationalists, loved their socialism, and while they celebrated Christmas, nobody remembered that you were only supposed to have vegetarian dishes on the table.
My Ukrainian speaking mom from Khmelnytska oblast, met and subsequently married my Russian speaking dad, when they both attended Lvivska Polytechnica. He has lived in Lviv for most of his life. When she moved in with him, she also moved in with his dad, my grandfather. Grandfather was not a greatly educated man, who moved to Lviv after his retirement in 1959, and he did not speak a word of Ukrainian. Hence my mother switched to Russian, and when I was born, continued to speak Russian to me. The theories of bilingualism being beneficial to brain development were not yet popular at the time.
My high school was a Russian high school, which was not that unusual. At least 35% of the population of Lviv was Russian speaking, and for the most part, it was not Russified Ukrainians, but transplants from Russia itself, that, like my grandparents, filled in the vacuum left by Holocaust and the post-war reallocation of Poles. I was fortunate to have amazing teachers of Ukrainian, but I am saddened to say that at that time of our lives we felt very removed from what was happening around us because of the language and our backgrounds. Many of my classmates felt like unwelcomed outsiders. The local brand of nationalism to us seemed quite outdated and unrelatable.
That was the time of ambiguity for me. Can I be a Ukrainian when I don’t fit here? Russia is now a different country, but I still have relatives there, and I feel cultural affinity, but at the same time, I do not feel as I fit there either, and there is a lot in Ukrainian culture that still matters greatly to me. Who am I?
After I enrolled in Lvivska Polytechnica, I started traveling in Ukraine more. I became a co-founder of the Lviv chapter of the International Student organization, AIESEC. Being in that organization introduced me to students from Kyiv, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Berdyansk and Kherson. Under the auspices of Bohdan Havrylyshyn, AIESEC Ukraine has established itself as an independent entity and I have attended our first congress in Donetsk in the winter of 1994. With this experience came a realization that there is a Ukraine bigger than our local Lviv version of it and with all of the differences in the regions, we have a common goal to build a prosperous Ukraine. Around the same time I also made a lot more Ukrainian speaking Lviv friends and I realized that I have had certain prejudices and they do not hold true once you meet real people and you start working on the common goal.
However, what changed it all was a scholarship from the Ukrainian Professional and Business Persons Organization that I received in the summer of 1994 to attend the Summer School at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI). Bohdan Vitvitsky, a former Federal Prosecutor, was one of the sponsors. I took courses with George Grabowicz, a professor at HURI, and Virko Balley. Natalia Khanenko-Friesen, who is currently a director of the Canadian Ukrainian Institute, became a lifelong friend. I met Halyna Hryn, who is currently a president of НТШ, and Virlana Tkacz. But most importantly, I listened to a lecture on national identity by Roman Szporluk, at the time a professor of History at Harvard, and it was all of a sudden very clear to me. Identity is not something that is imposed on me by others – I define what my identity is. And no matter what language is dominant for me or what my background is, I have a right to choose to be a Ukrainian. And I have never changed that.
A year later, in 1995, I came to the states on a scholarship to attend Cornell University and met my husband. When his friend, himself a refugee from Moldova, came up to me asking “where in Russia are you from?”, my reply was very clear: “I am not from Russia, I am from Ukraine.” My future husband thought this was hilarious, as very few from his Russian speaking circle were actually “from Russia” and this was used generically to really mean “Where in the Soviet Union are you from?” However, for me even back then this was not an appropriate question.
The other story my husband likes to tell is that he first noticed me when I showed up at some “Russian” movie festival soon after arriving in Cornell. When he asked around who I was, he was told not to bother: “She is from Ukraine”, was the answer, and the implication was – she is a strange one for sure.
But yet we clicked. My husband emigrated here in 1992 with his family as a refugee from antisemitism. His mom is a daughter of “rozkulachenykh” – four of her older siblings died in the forced movement of the family to Siberia from the Urals. And his father is a Ukrainian Jew from Dnipro. What connected us and still connects us is values, and not languages, religion, or identities. We both consider the current Russian government criminal. We both would like to see Ukraine freed from corruption. But we do continue speaking Russian at home and when our children were born, we spoke and continue to speak to them in Russian. At the same time, we have not given them a Russian identity. They have visited Ukraine every year since they have been born. They have spent the traumatic summer of 2014 in a summer camp in the Western Ukraine with refugees from Donetsk. My son and I spent the summer of 2019 volunteering for Go Camp in Kharkiv oblast. While their connection to Ukraine is not built on the language, I like to think that it will be long lasting.
After my son Aaron was born in 2004, I realized that I wanted to take a break from the corporate world, and stopped working in Goldman Sachs in the spring of 2005. Many of my friends were getting married and getting pregnant at the time, and we realized that there was no Russian school in the city of New York at the time. And if we want the children to continue to speak the language we speak in the family, and know how to read and write, we need to build some structure for it.
There is a separate question on why preserving Russian was important for us. And I can honestly say that if we had children after 2014, it would not be. But prior to 2014, there was not as much of a dichotomy for me between the language I grew up speaking and my identity, which was very clearly Ukrainian, even prior to 2014.
I organized the school with three friends, two of whom immigrated from Ukraine in the 1980s with their parents as Jewish refugees, and one who came from St Petersburg in the early 90s.
The school is a private business, not an NGO, and is fully funded by tuition. We have never taken a penny from the Russian government or a Russian oligarch, and this is by choice. Neither I nor my partners were comfortable with the Russian government involvement even prior to 2014. This is not to say that the Russian government has not approached us in one way or another or tried to work with us. We have always refused the offers and stayed the course. We are a school of Russian language, not a Russian school. We teach the language, not the politics. When we start exploring the history, we shy away from contemporary style patriotic history, and instead explore the topics more relevant to american families attending our school. One of the books that we read with twelve year olds explores the issue of antisemitism in the Soviet Union, and the other, Elchin’s “Breaking Stalin’s nose” is about a child that is left an orphan because of Stalin’s purges.
I was approached with a proposition to join the Board of the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund in 2013 and came fully on board in 2014. I joined the board as I was quite impressed with the people on the board and because I agree with the mission of supporting those Russian artists that build the bridges with European culture and western values. Amond my fellow board members was venerable Bob Silvers, an editor of New York Review of Books, a universally admired person.
I was not aware of Brodsky’s poem about Ukraine when I joined the board but found out about it shortly after. I have explored the circumstances around writing this poem with Ann Kjellberg, Brodsky’s literary executor, and I hope to eventually be able to foster a discussion about this poem in Brodsky’s legacy with the involvement of the Ukrainian intellectual community.
Everyone on the board has been very supportive of Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, and I do not have any reason to think that Brodsky today would have felt differently.
There were also some stark intersections between our Fellowship recipients and Ukraine. Elena Fanailova, a major Russian poet, and Radio Freedom host, is very vocal about her position. She has spent some of her fellowship translating Serhiy Zhadan into Russian. Boris Khersonsky, who as many of you know, is a Ukrainian poet based in Odesa, is also a Fellow. I have met Boris through the Fund and hosted a discussion with him in 2014 where we mostly spoke about Maidan and the situation in Ukraine.
I first met Zhadan through the Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund. We have hosted an evening with him for the NY literary world. Bob Silvers came and asked him to write for NYRB. The Head of the US Poetry Foundation was there as well as some other American poets and writers.
Joseph Brodsky Fellowship Fund has never taken money from Russian government. In the last couple of years, their support has been coming from Zimin Foundation, a fantastic organization with a record of supporting exiles from Russia.
As for many of us, the last part of the transformation of my identity happened during the Maidan and years that followed. In 2014 I protested annexation of Crimea in front of the Russian Consulate, I posted obsessively in social media, and I also discovered a new organization coming together during the Maidan, called Razom. I quietly supported some of their initiatives and watched in awe how passionate and organized this group of people was.
It was not until 2017 that I finally met some Razomtsi and organized a fundraising event with them benefiting Yara Arts. I then helped to organize yet another event that year with Slava Vakarchuk. With every event and every project, I met more and more wonderful young and passionate people that have the same goal that I have and that represent modern Ukraine in all of its diversity. This finally felt like home for my Ukrainian identity here in New York. I am proud to join the Board of this organization and to contribute to unlocking the potential of Ukraine.
We had a fabulous time at our first in-person event in many months and the two nights of our Films on the Roof / Кіно на даху mini- film festival!
Thank you to everyone who joined us Friday and Saturday nights – thank you for getting tickets, wearing your masks, distancing yourselves, being so kind and respectful, and even volunteering to help clean up afterwards. We were so happy to see our Razom community is as strong as ever. The location was perfect; the sounds of New York and the view of St. George Church complimented the gathering so well. And the films! We are so proud to have the Razom premiere of the film Mr. Jones on the Friday night. The film was moving, beautiful, and so important. If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s on Amazon. And the screening of Hutsulka Ksenya and Julie Blue was just the following night, when we even got to hear from special guests Roxy Toporowych, writer and director of Julia Blue, and Maks Lozynsky, who played Yaro in Hutsulka Ksenya! It was an unforgettable experience. We laughed, we cried, we delighted in the treasures of Ukrainian and Ukrainian-American cinema. And all that on the Ukrainian Cinema Day.
Lots of thanks to the Razom Culture leader Leah Batstone for organizing the event, and to our volunteers – Maryna Prykhodko, Dora Chomiak, Mariya Soroka, Olya Yarychkivska and many others – for helping out. A big shout out to the St. George Academy for hosting us, and Streecha for the delicious kompot!
Thanks to the financial support of the International Renaissance Foundation and European Union in Ukraine within the humanitarian initiative “Humanity and Mutual Assistance”, as well as the IT companyBWN Group, Razom for Ukraine is expanding its Veteranius project to help Ukrainian veterans, volunteers and internally displaced persons master programming skills. Project participants will also be taught English and provided with psychological support.
