Yelena akhtiorskaya biography
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American View
Life + Style
“It was definitely not a nice, clean amputation,” declares writer Yelena Akhtiorskaya, whose family emigrated from Ukraine to the United States when she was a child in 1992.
Yelena akhtiorskaya biography
”A part of me is still there.”
That longing and displacement are evident in her 2014 debut novel, the acclaimed Panic in a Suitcase. The family story is set in both post-Soviet Ukraine and Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and centers on a Russian clan split between those who immigrated and those who stayed behind.
“Ties hadn’t been severed. Odessa remained theirs,” Akhtiorskaya, 32, writes in the book about the family who chose not to emigrate.
Similar sentiments grip Ellen Litman, who moved from Moscow to the United States while in college.
“The presence of that life is still in my head. There is always this question: What would my life be like if I was there?” says Litman, 44, whose 2014 novel, Mannequin Girl, about a Jewish girl who struggles with scoliosis as her