The Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky draws images from the depths of his memory that are eerily attached to those of the war in Ukraine. And he celebrates a special form of resistance.
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Marie Schmidt
For him, the Soviet Union, says Ilya Kaminsky, was a country without a sound. He heard them disintegrate with his eyes. In 1993 his parents left Odessa with him and the family went to the USA. The following year his father died, and only after that, at the age of 16, Ilya began to wear hearing aids. “I will never hear his voice,” writes Kaminsky as an adult American poet in the magazine of New York Times. He tells how he himself went back to Odessa 25 years after emigrating and the year after his mother’s death: “I don’t really have the feeling that I’m back until I switch off the hearing aids.” The stories he had read from the lips of adults as a boy only returned to the silent city.