This book symbolizes the responses of Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods to the tragic events of the Jewish massacres at Babyn Yar in September 1941. It is first presented here in the original and in English translation by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin.

Together, the poems in Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond aim to create a language capable of expressing the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other peoples murdered at the site.

A Ukrainian journalist ends each day “scorched by another person’s grief.” A schoolgirl in Croatia cherishes her Barbie and learns to dread air raid sirens more than her geometry homework. A poet imagines the spiritual life of a fish who escapes the hook. An exiled artist recreates her homeland in the shape of a bird.

The writers assembled in this volume dream and document and remember, they translate one another’s work and meditate on fragility and resilience in the face of nihilism and obliteration. The collection gathers poems, essays, and stories written and translated in nine languages, reflecting an ongoing effort to communicate and understand across cultures.

Both Sides Face East–Durable Words began as a response to the invasion of Ukraine, but stakes a wider claim on behalf of human value and integrity.

Poetry from the frontline of the russo-Ukrainian war. Artur asks why we need poetry and answers with poems and a further explanation.

‘For a long time I had no answer to this question. I told myself that I didn’t know. After the full-scale invasion began, I stopped writing. Since the age of seventeen, I had believed that literature was my purpose in life, I thought that being a writer was something that carried weight and hadmeaning. And suddenly it turned out that there was no meaning at all. What can you write when children are being pulled from under the rubble? In what order do you arrange words to ease the pain? I decided that writing was pointless.
But I was wrong. Time needed to pass because it is impossible to write about today in the old language. It had to be reinvented. I had to lose faith in writing, admit that literature was helpless, begin hating all writers, forget every poem. I had to give up on language completely. And start from the beginning.

Let’s go back to the beginning. Now I have the answer. Why do we need poetry in a time of war? Why do we keep writing these poems, reading them, sharing them with each other like communion wafers or cigarettes? Why do we sometimes need to read something to feel love or even hate more fiercely? Why do we need poems?

To feel less lonely.’

A term of physiology and neurology, algometry is the science of measuring pain. However, it is not physical pain that Iryna Vikyrchak examines in Algometry, but her experiences growing up in Western Ukraine in the ’90s, emphasizing emotional sensitivity and inner strength, which give way to a philosophical and lyrical reflection on pain, suffering, and empathy as a measurement of our humanness.

In Algometry Vikyrchak presents a lyrical portrait of the generation of Ukrainians who grew up and were shaped by shared and individual painful internal and external experiences, to become a resilient and brave nation. First published in Kyiv in 2021, Algometry has since acquired new resonance: the title now seems to be a premonition, an anticipation of the big pain that came to Ukraine in February 2022, one that still lingers. The poems, organized in three corridors (Algometry—Anthropology—Amnesia), take the reader through an individual past, a common future, and a lyrical forever.

The poetry is complemented with an author’s essay on love, pain, words, and what unites all living beings—a key to understanding this book. Algometry won the 2022 Kovaliv Fund Literary Prize. Volume 17 in the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series. Bilingual Edition.

Set in Ukraine, Crimea, and Israel, this unique two-volume autobiography offers a fascinating, detailed picture of life in Tsarist Russia and Israel during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Goldenshteyn (1848-1930), a traditional Jew who was orphaned as a young boy and became a shochet (kosher slaughterer) as a young man, is a master storyteller. Folksy, funny, streetwise, and self-confident, he is a keen observer of his surroundings. His accounts are vivid and readable, sometimes stunning in their intensity.

The memoir is brimming with information. Goldenshteyn’s adventures shed light on communal life, persecution, family relationships, religious practices and beliefs, social classes, local politics, interactions between Jews and other religious communities, epidemics, poverty, competition for resources, migration, war, technology, modernity and secularization. In chronicling his own life, Goldenshteyn inadvertently tells a bigger story—the story of how a small, oppressed people, among other minority groups, struggled for survival in the massive Russian Empire and in the Land of Israel.

Volume two begins in 1873, when Goldenshteyn obtains his first position as a shochet in Slobodze, and it follows him to the Crimea, where he endures 34 years of vicissitudes. In 1913, he fulfills a dream of immigrating to the Land of Israel, hoping to find tranquility in his old age. Instead, he is met with the turbulence of the First World War, as battles rage between the retreating Ottoman Turks and the advancing British forces.

Informed by research in Ukrainian, Israeli and American archives and personal interviews with the few surviving individuals who knew Goldenshteyn personally, The Shochet is a magnificent new contribution to Jewish and Eastern European history.

This book offers a nuanced exploration of Donetsk and Luhansk regions prior to the 2014 Russian invasion. While the region, collectively known as Donbas, frequently appears in news headlines, it remains under-researched by scholars, and myths about it abound. Combining rigorous research and captivating narration, Kateryna Zarembo debunks common myths about the region, such as its long-standing gravitation towards Russia and its rejection of everything Ukrainian. Through multiple trips to the region and interviews with the locals, the author paints a very different picture of the region than the one often seen in the media: Donetsk and Luhansk have been shedding their Soviet past and reestablishing themselves as Ukrainian up until the 2014 invasion.

Kateryna Zarembo takes the reader to pockets of the region most of us will never see, and amplifies the voices of locals whose agency has historically been denied first by the Soviet myth of Donbas, and then by the political elites of Ukraine. Since the 2014 Russian invasion, and especially since the full-scale war, the region has become the site of the most intense fighting, and many of the places mentioned in this book are now reduced to ruins. This book is an essential read to get to know the Ukrainian East and its people, now forever altered by the Russian invasion.

What was it like to work as a Jewish district attorney in provincial Soviet Ukraine in the post-Stalinist eras? What role did antisemitism and Holocaust memories play in solving and investigating the criminal cases? How does a detective’s mind work? The answers to these and many other fascinating questions are found in this book. Mikhail Goldis (1926-2020) worked as a detective and district attorney for 30 years in Ukraine and wrote his memoirs after immigrating to the US in 1993. Translated by Marat Grinberg, a prolific scholar of Russian and Jewish literature and cinema, the memoirs tell the rich and poignant story of Goldis’s life and what it took for a Jew to navigate and survive in the halls of Soviet power.

What happens to language during war? Does it become superfluous to actions? Is it twisted? Broken? Lost? In wartime, even the meaning of simple words can change, expand, contract, acquire new resonances and sounds. A Ukrainian Dictionary of War began with the fragments of experiences spoken in the new language of life under war and became a way to document a nation’s shared losses, pain, and belief in victory.

In 2022, poet Ostap Slyvynsky undertook the role of wartime lexicographer, carefully collecting and compiling a dictionary of witness to Russia’s invasion and war against Ukraine. Among the voices represented in A Ukrainian Dictionary of War are those who were forced to leave their homes and venture into the unknown, aid volunteers, medics, soldiers, social activists, and artists. All very different people connected by the experience that war has appeared in their lives.

A documentary project published in conjunction with the Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series, Volume 15. Bilingual Edition.

This title tells the story of four families whose world undergoes radical changes when the Soviet Union suddenly collapses, an independent Ukraine emerges, and neo-imperial Russia starts a war by occupying Ukrainian Crimea and part of Donbas.

This novel is a must-read for those who seek to deepen their understanding of Ukrainians from the Donbas and how history and local identity have shaped the current war with Russia.

This novel is about being human in the modern world and tells the story of Yora, an immigrant from Ukraine to the United States.

A gentle soul with a keen sense of human relationships’ nuances, Yora falls in love with Sebastian, a charming acquaintance who hints at a deep connection between them. But their relationship ends, sending her into a period of despair and grief.

Filled with mystical allusions, Love Life is a compelling story of self-discovery amid the challenges of adapting to a new life.