The Betsy Hotel and Jewish Book Council are thrilled to announce Olga Zilberbourg as the winner of our Jewish Book Month writer’s residency contest.
The Writer’s Room at The Betsy is a working studio space for visiting writers and artists to create, develop their craft and share their work through community programs, The Writer’s Room pays homage to the many “writing rooms” that existed in prewar hotels where guests recorded memories and linked to home. Alumni from the program can be found here and more information on The Betsy Hotel can be found here.
Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut, Like Water and Other Stories (WTAW Press), explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also deals with bisexuality and immigrant parenthood. Zilberbourg’s writing has appeared in Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Confrontation, Electric Literature, Lit Hub, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. Born in Leningrad, USSR, in a Russian-speaking Jewish family, she makes her home in San Francisco, California where she co-facilitates the San Francisco Writers Workshop. Together with Yelena Furman, she has co-founded Punctured Lines, a feminist blog about literatures from the former Soviet Union. She is currently at work on her first novel.
Zilberbourg’s contest-winning entry can be found below, in answer to the question: What books make up your Jewish book shelf and why?
Marat Grinberg’s The Soviet Jewish Bookshelf: Jewish Culture and Identity Between the Lines (2022) has allowed me to reshape my personal narratives and reexamine the books I’d read as a child in the Soviet Union through a Jewish lens. Among them are Soviet classics, like Yevgeny Petrov and Ilya Ilf’s The Twelve Chairs, along with translations from German literature, like Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Spanish Ballad and Stefan Zweig’s The Royal Game (also known as Chess Story). Isaac Babel and Vassily Grossman were the other important writers for me growing up.
As a cofounder of Punctured Lines, a blog on post-Soviet Literature, I’m always reading contemporary writers born in the USSR. Some recent entries include Sasha Vasilyuk’s Your Presence is Mandatory, Ruth Madievsky’s All-Night Pharmacy, Irina Mashinski’s The Naked World: A Tale with Verse, Julia Kochinsky’s and Olga Livshin’s poetry collections, and so many others.
Reading outside of my community, I have loved editor Nora Gold’s 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages, Manya Wilkinson’s Lublin, Nancy Ludmerer’s Sarra Copia: A Locked-In Life, Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika, Maya Arad’s The Hebrew Teacher, and many others.
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