To wit: Poet Ilya Kaminsky, who is Russian by ethnicity, was born in Odessa, and came to the US with his parents in 1993 his latest book, Dancing in Odessa-a modest, chapbook-length volume of 56 pages-is being published by Tupelo Press with the announcement, For, clearly, many Russians are unhappy with this sad turn of events, not to mention its brutal instigator Putin. Now, I would hope that readers rightly appalled by the current, scorched earth policies of the Russians in the Ukraine do not so easily lump enemies according to broad categories of ethnicity or nationality. Such connections, I am not even sure how-such connections make the current events in Ukraine seem even more immediate. He was also too far to the left for the politics of the country, then under pre-Soviet Russian rule. (Sadly she is no longer with us to correct my vagaries.) The story is that the family left for the US when her father was asked to join the Russian (Czar's) army: "You people have visited too many pogroms upon our people," he was supposed to have said. when it was subsumed into Russian territory. My beloved mother-in-law, Rachel's, Jewish family came from-in or around-Kyiv.
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