Alex Averbuch, "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network – Alex Averbuch on "Furious Harvests" (Harvard UP, 2026)
Host: Megan Beske
Guest: Alex Averbuch
Date: May 22, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Megan Beske sits down with poet, scholar, and translator Alex Averbuch to discuss his new bilingual poetry collection, Furious Harvests (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2026). The conversation delves into themes of displacement, memory, Ukrainian history, the trauma of occupation, multiethnic identity, and the role of poetry in preserving and interpreting personal and collective pasts amid ongoing war. Averbuch's unique background as a Ukrainian of mixed heritage, his personal ties to the war-torn Luhansk region, and his insights as a Ukrainian studies scholar inform a rich and moving dialogue.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Connection to Ukraine, Exile, and Non-Return

• On Roots and Displacement
  • Averbuch describes his ongoing physical and emotional connection to his birthplace of Novoaidar in Eastern Ukraine, now under Russian occupation and largely destroyed ([03:03–08:46]).
  • The sense of "non-return" haunts him, both as an individual and poet. He reflects on the items, memories, and people left behind, comparing locked houses to "prisoners reaching out to us, but they can't reach us and we can't reach them" ([07:20], Averbuch).
• Poetry as Mythical Bridge
  • The proximity of the collection’s original publication to the Russian full-scale invasion lends a "mythical, mystical connection" to poetry’s capacity to foresee or interpret history ([04:45], Averbuch).

2. Memory, Objects, and Loss

• Keeping the Connection Alive
  • Averbuch underscores the importance of the physical—touching, holding, and smelling items from his family's past—to maintain his ties to Ukraine ([09:00–12:36]).
  • Recurring dreams of returning to occupied hometowns embody anxiety, longing, and the precariousness of identity stripped of belonging:
    "This recurring dream of mine, which is probably not very common to people who left their houses, homes, countries, is that you return to this place, but this place does not recognize you..." ([11:45], Averbuch).

3. On War, Occupation, and Memory Work

• War’s Layers and Haunted Places
  • The interview examines the impact of Russia's invasion on the psyche, especially remembering neighbors, family, places, and objects ([12:36–15:15]).
  • A poem in progress lists all the neighbors from his apartment block—"The task, the exercise is to train your memory not to forget" ([13:50], Averbuch).

4. Documentary Poetics: Letters & Silences

• Incorporating Archival Voices
  • One cycle in Furious Harvests draws from WWII-era letters of Ukrainian forced laborers ("Ostarbeiters"), some from family and oral histories silenced under Soviet rule ([15:51–20:03]).
  • Averbuch sometimes literally co-authors these poems, collaging fragments and adding his own voice:
    "The original poem states the authorship is not only mine, but... other Alex Averbuch et al. Because these are many more authors." ([19:26], Averbuch).
  • The goal is both poetic and restorative:
    "These people were never given the opportunity to speak, to voice their traumas and pain." ([20:03], Averbuch).
• The Rhymes of Past and Present
  • Parallels between WWII and current trauma: the experience and silence of living under occupation, dispossession, and family exile ([20:03–21:23]).

5. Multiethnic Identity and Reconciliation

• Personal and National Mosaic

  • The collection’s concluding section explores Averbuch's Polish, Ukrainian, and Jewish ancestry, reflecting Ukraine’s multiethnic, multicultural identity:
    "My great grandmas and other members... are not only my family members but also others from... previous generations and great intermixing in Ukraine..." ([21:26–22:39], Averbuch).

• Language Choice and Hybridity in Poetry

  • Though Russian was a language of childhood, Averbuch asserts his deep natural fluency in Ukrainian ([22:57–27:10]).
  • Comments on linguistic hybridity:
    "I appreciate in literature and especially in particular in poetry, this hybridity, this brokenness... The purifying tendencies in poetry are very disturbing. They should not exist." ([26:25], Averbuch).
  • His shift to writing in Ukrainian after 2014 reflects a broader tendency in Ukrainian culture amid conflict.

• Reconciling Family, Trauma, and Identity

  • The reality of inter-ethnic tensions—in family and nation—appears in the poetry (e.g., secret circumcision, clashing grandmothers):
    "I call these knots of history that I somehow attempt to dissolve in my poetry... But I do want them to be visible. I do think that all these collaborations and mutual intercultural interbreedings... come along with conflicts..." ([28:16–33:42], Averbuch).
  • Reconciliation, he argues, comes through acknowledgment and facing the “dark corridors” of history.

6. Teaching Ukrainian Culture in the U.S.

• Student Interest and Dialogue
  • Averbuch recounts the surprising and gratifying response from students at the University of Michigan—including large classes on Ukrainian literature, cinema, and "culture under occupation" ([33:42–37:24]).
  • The willingness of students—many non-humanities majors—to engage personally and analytically with Ukrainian culture is a major surprise and encouragement.

7. Current and Future Projects

• Literary and Documentary Inquiry

  • Upcoming work includes a bilingual book centering on the material and human losses under Russian occupation ([37:29–41:35]).
  • One part uses legalistic bureaucratic language of property confiscation; another uses real online dialogue and chat snippets of people left behind in occupied zones—a multi-voiced, polyphonic text staged as a play.
  • The project is so personal and traumatic that Averbuch says:
    "I probably have never experienced anything like this, this sort of disconnection... I desire to publish it and to forget this book because it is very personal and very traumatic... But it must be published and released at least as evidence." ([40:44], Averbuch).

• Echoes of Past Dispossessions

  • Conversation turns to parallel histories of property loss—Soviet, Nazi, contemporary—highlighting generational trauma, reconnection, and occasional reconciliation ([41:35–44:23]).

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Notable Quotes

• On poetry as premonition:
  "The collection... symbolizes this mythical, if you want mystical connection of poetry specifically to history, to the ability to predict or to... describe events that you can only sense, but you cannot rationally explain them."
  ([04:45], Alex Averbuch)

• On non-return:
  "This recurring dream of mine... is that you return to this place, but this place does not recognize you or you return... but I know that this is my verdict that I will be either caught by the authorities, police... a lot of soldiers, policemen and so on."
  ([11:45], Alex Averbuch)

• On archival poetry:
  "You fall in love with these texts, with incarnations, with mistakes, with the poetry that is in these lines. You... want to join this group, this chorus if you want and you want to sing like them. And this is how I started writing this cycle of foster better poetry."
  ([18:30], Alex Averbuch)

• On multi-ethnic, complex identity:
  "I call these knots of history that I somehow attempt to dissolve in my poetry—to reconcile them. But I do want them to be visible."
  ([28:40], Alex Averbuch)

• On language and hybridity:
  "I appreciate in literature and especially in particular in poetry, these hybridity, these brokenness... purifying tendencies in poetry are very disturbing. They should not exist."
  ([26:25], Alex Averbuch)

• On historical darkness and reconciliation:
  "We will find ourselves in these black or dark corridor always of our history, only when we actually acknowledge what we are hiding there."
  ([32:56], Averbuch, quoting Ostaps Levinsky)

• On sharing trauma in writing:
  "I probably have never experienced anything like this, this sort of disconnection or the... desire to publish it and to forget this book because it's very personal... but it must be published and released at least as evidence."
  ([40:44], Alex Averbuch)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [03:03] – Alex Averbuch’s relationship to Ukraine and roots in Novoaidar
• [09:00] – Memory, physicality, and recurring dreams of return
• [12:36] – Objects, neighbors, and the trauma of siege and occupation
• [15:51] – Archival poetry: forced laborers’ letters and WWII trauma
• [21:26] – Family history and multiethnic Ukraine
• [22:57] – Language choices and poetic hybridity
• [28:16] – Interethnic conflict, complexity, and reconciliation in poetry
• [33:42] – Teaching Ukrainian studies in the U.S.
• [37:29] – Works-in-progress: loss, property, and polyphonic texts on occupation
• [41:35] – Parallels with past trauma, dispossession, and reconciliation
• [44:23] – Closing thoughts and gratitude for translators

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Memorable Moments

• The acknowledgment that Furious Harvests is the work of three authors—Averbuch and his two translators/co-creators, Oksana Maksimchuk and Max Rosochinsky—reinforces the centrality of collaborative, bilingual creation ([03:40], [44:36]).
• The discussion of recurring dreams and the anxiety of return, with its tense, cinematic evocation of occupied towns ([09:00–12:36]).
• Averbuch’s “list poem” of all the neighbors in his apartment block as an act of memorialization ([13:50]).
• Personal stories of reconnecting with the Jewish community of his grandmother’s village via Facebook and being greeted as part of that history ([42:25–44:23]).

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Conclusion

Alex Averbuch’s appearance on the New Books Network is a rich meditation on poetry’s power to register displacement, bear witness to trauma, and preserve the complexity of Ukraine’s story—linguistically, ethnically, and historically. The discussion is both scholarly and deeply personal, offering insight into writing from and about the rupture of exile. Averbuch’s approach—bridging languages, genres, and generations—renders Furious Harvests a vital literary document for understanding the ongoing Ukrainian experience.

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Transcript

[Alex Averbook]

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[Megan Beske]

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[Alex Averbook]

Welcome to the New Books Network

[Megan Beske]

hello, welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Megan Beske. My guest today is Alex Averbook. Alex is the author of a new collection of poetry called Furious Harvests, which was recently published by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and a Ukrainian English bilingual version with the English translation by Oksana Maksimchuk and Max Rosochinsky. Alex is an interdisciplinary scholar, poet and translator whose research explores intercultural and trans apocalypse phenomenon in Eastern European and Jewish literatures and cultures from the 18th century to the present, with a special focus on Ukraine. He is currently Assistant professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan. Alex, welcome to the New Books Network. It's wonderful to be in conversation with you today. This furious harvest is a deeply personal connection. You weave together a number of connections between ancestry, history, violence, silence and expulsion. Exile in modern Ukraine. You were born in Ukraine, I believe you left as a teenager and you couldn't go back if you wanted to. One of the striking poems in the collection begins with the line Hadi returned to a town that it does not exist, which I believe is a reference to your native town of Novo Aydar, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is in the Luhansk region of Eastern Ukraine and has been leveled as part of Russia's full scale invasion. Can you tell us a little bit about your relationship to Ukraine?

[Alex Averbook]

Yeah, of course. Hi Megan. First of all, thank you for the invitation and your kind introduction. And maybe before we go into a discussion of this poem and other poems that are substantively connected to the occupied territories, both contemporary occupied territories, but also the occupied territories of Ukraine, Ukrainian SSR during the Second World War, which is one of the central topics of this collection. I need probably not probably for sure to emphasize to reemphasize that this collection has actually three authors. I am the author of the originals and we have two co creators. This is how I prefer to call them, because I perceive translation as not merely mechanical process, but as a highly creative one. And being myself a translator, I know how it is done. And I appreciate the innovation and the very careful ear of my colleagues Oksana and Max, who co authored this collection with me. But going back to the original collection, which is slightly different from what we have here in 2020, the original collection was published weeks before the full scale invasion. And for me it also signals. Symbolizes this mythical, if you want mystical connection of poetry, specifically poetry to history, to the ability to predict or to. To describe events that you can only sense, but you cannot rationally explain them. So the collection that we are discussing today is if you want a brother or a cousin of the original one, because it has some kind of relations with the Ukrainian collection. But as full scale invasion started, I couldn't resist but to add many more poems, new poems that in fact appear in this collection for the first time. Furious Harvest and all these poems, they pertain to these eastern territories of Ukraine which are currently occupied. And as you brought in the Novodar and Luhansk in general, Luhansk Oblast, Crimea. Less relevant to me, although I have relatives and my grandfather is great there. But Novaidar is this. It became this focal point for longing, which is. Navaidar is not in fact is not a city, it's not a town, it's a settlement which is approximately 5,000. Yeah, it's quite small, so we can call it safely a village. But when I write or when I wrote about Navaidar, about the city that you cannot return to, this was probably reflection on many more cities that potentially that has. Have this threatening potential of non return. And I had other poems that I actually. I did not visualize any particular region or any particular city. I did visualize the Donbas as this last, for now at least, territory that I am highly anxious to not be able to return in the future. And as a consequence of these thoughts, emotions, I write both about the people who were left there under occupation, about the items, the objects. We have still a house there full of my. My belongings, my. My toys, my everything. Yes, and. And it's locked. And I have one time about these locked houses that are like prisoners reaching out to us, but. But they can't reach us and we can't reach them. So Navaidar Reflection is indeed about Navaidar, but I think that it describes a wider phenomenon of this experiencing of a loss of your motherland, loss of this connection, physical connection. Obviously the emotional connection stays there, but the physicality of being, of this potential of non return is very, very threatening.

[Megan Beske]

And you've lived, you've lived a lot of places in your life since you left Ukraine. How do you kind of maintain a relationship to Ukraine amid all of those travels and changes in residence?

[Alex Averbook]

First of all, I kept visiting Ukraine all the time. And as I mentioned, we. We kept our apartments in Nevadar, which now became a subject for another poetry collection. I mean, not only the apartment, but the occupied space in general, both people and things, items, objects. So this connection feels very much beyond spiritual, emotional. It is also physical. And I appreciate physicality and reflection on physicality in poetry and literature in general, in art. In this very collection, the Furious Harvest, there is one poem where I reflect on my familial history. And indeed I published it a few years after my grandmother passed away. And I describe what I kept after her passing. Not only after her passing, after my great grandma, passing items, even remnants of their bodies like the hair, nails or so. And so this, this keeps me connected beyond the. This, you know, emotional connection to the. I like holding objects, I like being. I like touching them, I like smelling them. And I still can imagine sometimes when I. When something very disturbing happens. So my meditation is to imagine this space of our locked up apartment and how the things are there and how I sleep there, how I suddenly appear there, although it is in Mandar occupation. And this recurring dream of mine, which is probably not very common to people who left their. Houses, homes, countries, is that you return to this place, but this place is. Does not recognize you or you return. Especially. I have this recurring dream that I returned to Luhansk and somehow I managed to go through all the block paths and borders. Border. But then when I am there at this location, I do not understand how I got there. And I'm threatened by the. The fact that I Can't. I won't be able probably to leave this place because I don't have documents. And this kind of temporal limbo that I returned because I want so much to return there. Because we still have graves, we still have apartments, we still have relatives and friends. But once I return, I do want to leave. But I know that this is my verdict that I will be either caught by the authorities, police. I see a lot of in my dreams, a lot of soldiers, policemen and so on.

[Megan Beske]

Wow, that's interesting. I'm curious. When Nohu Aydar was under siege, what were you, what did you. What pieces of the settlement came to mind? What did you sort of treasure the most in your mind that was in the process of being destroyed? Were there things that haunted you?

[Alex Averbook]

Actually it was not as destroyed as nearby cities and towns. Again, we are talking about all the toponyms ruby LC chunks. These are places that I know not from news. These are places that are located equally distant by well, 15, 20 kilometers. So I know this is my. My. My space, my end. So, so to. To answer your question, what actually I was thinking about, I think mostly remembering recalling this space. One day I had one poem which will enter the upcoming book. And it. It's simply a list of all the neighbors in our block and how I remember them, what. What sizes of the apartments they used to have. So for example, Lisa from entrance one, floor two. And you know, this is the. The task, the exercise is to train your memory not to forget. And this is kind. It was very possibly that only these memories will be. Will remain for me and even if the place remains not destroyed fully. But sometimes I am in touch with people from there with distant relatives and I ask them to make a photograph of this place, of a school of garden my great grandma planted. Still they sent me photographs and I still I see the flowers that she. She planted and it was passed away 1995.

[Megan Beske]

That's very moving. This collection has a couple of different sections. So there's the part that goes into kind of here, the Novo Aidar. But then there's also sections that seem to be at least fragments or verbatim copies of World War II era Letters from Ukrainian forced laborers, as well as death notices of Ukrainian Jews. And then there's also a kind of prolonged section about reflections on your own mixed ancestry, which has Polish, Ukrainian and Jewish components. How are all of these things connected for you?

[Alex Averbook]

Well, that's a tricky question to explain how the chapters correspond with. With each other. And this is always a challenging task when you Assemble a book. The correspondence of Ukrainian forced laborers, the so called Ostar biters in the Nazi Germany during the Second World War is a very dense, highly poetic texture. These texts are indeed documentary. They rely heavily on documentary sources which I found that there's archives also familial archive. Back in Ukraine. I was as a pupil of probably I was 10, 11 years old. We were occasionally sent to from our school sent you help elderly people, but primarily veterans, especially those without any means of support, without family. And I will send to one lady who was by then 74 years old as a veteran. And when I came I understood that she was not a veteran. She was former ostar fighter disabled woman without completely alone, without her husband passed away. And this is when and how I saw for the first time both photographs of these Ostroviters letters, diaries, but also listen to their stories, which during the second World the Soviet rule were completely completely silenced. Because these people were perceived as alleged collaborators with the Dietz regime. But the. What attracted me in these texts, in these short messages, short postcards that they sent from Germany to the occupied Ukraine was the multi layered density which combined both folklore, popular music of the time, jargon and mix of surgeon. Of course, the language of these letters is not. Is surgical. Pure surgical, very ag. And I somehow. And I read many letters like these and later after I left Ukraine also. And you know, when you read a lot of stuff that belongs to the same genre and when you like it, when you love it and you fall in love with these texts, with incarnations, with mistakes, with the poetry that is in these lines. You at some point you want to join this, this. This group, this chorus if you want and you want to sing like them. And this is how I started writing this cycle of foster better poetry which I not only assembled and you know, cut the lines to the poem, but sometimes I. I added my own voice. And this is why the. The original poem states the.

[Megan Beske]

The.

[Alex Averbook]

The authorship is not only mine, but I. I added other Alex other book et al. Because these are many more authors. But. But another reason for. For bringing these texts into my book was precisely because of this historical injustice that was done to these people. And we are Talking about roughly 3 million of Ukrainians revolt there. So it's.

[Megan Beske]

It's.

[Alex Averbook]

It's a lot. It's. It's. Every. Almost every single family in Ukraine has a history of. Of this forced labor of exile. And this is one of the most significant traumas. But it was silenced for the political reasons during the Soviet period. And these people were never given the. The opportunity to speak, to voice their traumas and pain. And so these are two reasons to include this. But of course in relation to the current war, in relation to the occupation, there are a lot of rhyming situations between these two. And I think that the Second World War teaches us a lot about. In general, a lot. But in particular what I am curious about, about the perception of the occupied territories and the. How we perceive, how we treat, how we. What do we know about the populations that are located on that live under occupation. Whether we chat them, we don't the try to understand what kind of information we possess and so on.

[Megan Beske]

Yeah.

[Alex Averbook]

And the last cycle in this book that actually in Furious Harvest, it's the last one that deals with this familial history which I hope tells a little bit to the Anglophone reader about the multi ethnicity of Ukraine which is inherent to this country. And I, I think I'm pretty much confident that my story is. Is not only my. I'm. It's my great grandmas and, and. And other members of the family are not only my family members but, but also others from, I mean from this generation, previous generations and great intermixing in Ukraine, which is a very, very positive way to think about Ukraine as, as a truly multicultural, multilingual entity.

[Megan Beske]

Yeah, absolutely. I imagine you being from Eastern Ukraine that your first language or your primary language is Russian, but most of this collection is in Ukrainian. Do you want to talk a little bit about your choice in doing that?

[Alex Averbook]

It is indeed a choice, but as for the first or second language, I would not. I grew up in. In the 90s which were even in the. In. In. In in the Donbass very highly saturated with Ukrainian content. So tv, radio, newspapers, even sometimes instruction of certain subjects in the. In the high school was in Ukrainian. So I would not say that Russian is my first language. I probably used it more in my childhood years. But. But Ukrainian is not a learned language. I, I do not have an accent in Ukrainian. I can speak right about anything in Ukrainian. I was although I was taught most of the subjects in Russian, but probably because this was also a rural setting. The hybridity, the linguistic hybridity was more. Was more present compared to for example to, to the big city Luhansk, which was predominantly Rostov, but. And my first two books were in Russian. But actually the second book which was published in 2017 was partially in Russian. Few poems in Ukrainian, but most of the poems were in this hybrid. It was not sur. But it's for kind of broken language. Not, not Pure Russian language, which I always resisted. I mean, not because it's Russian, because I appreciate in literature and especially in particular in poetry, these hybridity, these brokenness. When I teach creative writing for foreign language learners. This is my favorite, favorite course to teach people who want to. Students who want to. To study Ukrainian as a foreign language. But not through conventional books and. And approaches, but creative writing. From the very first week they. I had students who wrote me poems of three words very. But this is something that. That I can tell about this Russian book published in 2017. But I started writing in Ukrainian after the war has begun in 2014. I have publications poems in Ukrainian. Technically these poems will liquor then. So we are talking also about the mechanics and the professionalism that you need to gain. But I think in this book I'm doing pretty well. No, but seriously, I think that especially when we talk about poetry, this ability to switch between codes, between registers, between ser. Russian, Ukrainian. This is. This is the mastery you should not. I mean not you melan. But in general the purifying tendencies in poetry are very disturbed. They should not exist. And this is why students like taking these courses creative rank because you can make many mistakes and you will be give an even better grade.

[Megan Beske]

I want to go back to what you were saying about the multiethnic sort of aspect of Ukraine. And I thought this collection was such. As you pointed out, such a powerful expression of that. And you were talking about how that can be sort of a powerful and positive way for Ukraine to express itself. But I think in your collection there's a lot of sort of opposition around these different elements. There's one, you know, there's a part where you describe being circumcised in secret as an infant and of being shunned by your various grandmothers for, you know, one for being Jewish, the other for being Polish ancestry. So I'm curious how you think about that aspect of the multi ethnic dimension of Ukraine. How far from your pers. From your perspective has Ukraine gone and sort of reconciling those complexities and is there more work to be done?

[Alex Averbook]

When I think about Ukraine, I think about myself. I think about my friends, my relatives, people whom I know. And I tend to think about all of them, including myself, as not ideal, as not perfect. Because this idealization, it is a very, very risky exercise to not perform close reading of culture that you belong to, to not see critically see what this culture has to offer. And not always only positive narratives. As any country, as any region in the world. This country has probably even More controversies and points to reflect on. I call these knots of history that you somehow. That I somehow attempt to dissolve in my poetry to reconcile them. But I do want them to be visible. I do think that all these collaborations and mutual intercultural interbreedings not only cultural, as this poem suggests, they are along with conflicts with planes of confrontation with a complex Ukrainian history which involves not only Ukrainians and Jews, but also Ukrainians and polls Ukrainians and Tatars, Crimean Tatars, Ukrainians and Russians. And so this is something that we have to reflect. And when we acknowledge this diversity, however complex it is, we have more. We have a fuller picture and more raw material to. To work with. And this applies actually not only to creativity, which tends to be probably at times more exaggerating these polarities. But I also like to. This is my motto also for teaching. I teach a course. My. One of my core courses is Cultures of Ukraine and Cultures in Plural, because this is how I see these. This Ukrainian Mozambique, which consists of many cultures, many languages. Of course, Ukrainian is a dominant language, but Ukrainian culture is the dominant culture in this region. But this does not cancels other cultures as well as claims by these cultures to Sovan cultural legitimacy in Ukraine. And this is something that you mentioned, the secret circumcision and the clashes between my ancestors. But if we extrapolate it to a larger picture of Ukraine in general, they do reflect on the Ukrainian history and. And the way to reconcile these narratives is only one, I believe is to face them, to acknowledge them and to find as Ostaps Levinsky wrote a blurb of my Ukrainian book. He rightly pointed out that we will find ourselves in these black or dark corridor always of our history, only when we actually acknowledge what we are hiding there. So this is a very psychoanalytic probably approach the culture which is. Which is probably the right way to treat Ukrainian culture with this post colonial heritage, with the very complex relations with Russia. And you know this as late Yuri Taranovsky in his wonderful poem Russia called Maternity Complex of Russia. So we have the maternity complex, but Ukraine also has its own complexes, or so that's something that we should reflect as well, both in the larger context, but also maybe only within the narrow Ukrainian, multicultural, multiethnic one.

[Megan Beske]

You mentioned your teaching and you hold one of the few tenure track positions in Ukrainian studies in the United States. How's it been going? What surprised you about teaching on Ukraine and what has excited you?

[Alex Averbook]

I think there are many surprises in becoming a professor of Ukrainian literature and culture. It's a huge university, university of Michigan. I think that my main major surprise is how students are interested in Ukrainian culture and literature and politics. And I teach a whole range of courses from literature to this last semester I taught a course on culture under occupation, which we actually read with the students texts and watched movies that are produced in this space that are unknown, largely unknown to the wider public. I had 60 students in this class. And this class was so formative for me as well, because the topic is new to me, like my students, but it is very close to my heart. So I was trying to communicate something very, very personal through this analytical framework. And I think that the students. The students will comfortable enough also to share stories from their personal life. So this is kind of. This is what surprises me, the openness of students when it comes to the topics of cultural interpretation. And I have many students who are not from the humanities, from sciences, engineers. I have all kinds. And they bring very sharp, very new ideas to. To. To the material that I teach. I taught also the Ukrainian cinema course. The wonderful group of. Unfortunately, I limited it to 20 students only. But. But this is. This is the moment when you feel. And you see that there is an interest. And there is interest in. In. In. In Ukrainian. Everything I would say, because many times I had to teach history or politics, as with the course on occupation, although it is about culture and the occupation, but you have to provide enough material for that. So these 170 students that I taught last year are probably the biggest surprise for me because to teach almost 200 students in your first year as an assistant professor of Ukrainian without. Without being settled properly is probably not. Probably it is an enormous gift and the responsibility, of course, I feel like I'm very much satisfied by what I do.

[Megan Beske]

And what are you working on now in terms of your poetry and scholarship?

[Alex Averbook]

Well, in poetry I work on multiple projects. This is why they always take so long. But then you get suddenly a few books published at once. Currently we are finalizing. We, me and Oksana and Max, finalizing another translation of a book that is dealing with. With the occupied territories of Ukraine with Anbas. It has two parts. One part is more descriptive about what I mentioned, the apartment and the items that left there. But also it is framed within the more legal language said by the. The occupation administration as part of their attempts to. To confiscate the property of those who are not. Who. Who. Who are not present there. Ah, so this is. This is a very sad, unsettling tendency.

[Megan Beske]

Have they tried to take your property?

[Alex Averbook]

Yes. And I elaborate using this Exact language in these notes And. And the second part deals with the Withel. It draws on conversations by Ukrainian citizens who found gravely the finding themselves under occupation since the full scale invasion. I. For one one year I followed on multiple online platforms, chats, groups, conversations by people who left there in. When the Ukrainian army left certain localities, people didn't know what was going on. People didn't know whether they are still under Ukraine or already under Russia. And this. This was a second. This will be a second part of this book. We staged it last year and at the New York Ukrainian Culture Festival by Rasa. Yeah, it was essential. It's a play, very polyphonic one, because every line is a different voice, different chat. Essentially. This book is about what was left under occupation, both people and items, objects. But I have. This is. In terms of translation, you have a book in Ukrainian that is also forthcoming. And. Yeah, so that's. That's what I want to. To complete. Although the Occupation Left Under Occupation book is highly disturbing, unpleasant, I. I probably have never experienced anything like this, this sort of disconnection or the. The desire to. To publish it and to forget this book because it's. It is very personal and it is very traumatic and it is very. It speaks about something that I truly don't want to happen, even for the sake of art and. But. But it must be published and released at least as evidence.

[Megan Beske]

Right. It strikes me as another thing that. Another aspect of the current situation that rhymes with what's happened in the past in terms of all of the families in Ukraine that lost property and so on during the Second World War. And even in my family, I mean, my parents, my grandparents were exiled to Siberia and we can go back to the village where they came from and see the house that, you know, is now occupied by a very local resident. Yeah, exactly. And within the village, you know, there's a number of these houses, you know, Jews who lived in the village who were killed and you know, these. There's knowledge within the community of like, whose houses these had been at one point. So. But this is.

[Alex Averbook]

This is very interesting that you managed to go there. And this book has two. Two locations, two localities. But I speak about the Novaydar where I was born and Dashi in Vinny region where great grandmother from the Jewish side was born. And then this place is also kind of lost for us because she left. And many these short correspondences that are included in this book, they pertain to Dash are about the community that was destroyed, that was killed, but very lucky to reconnect social media with the community in the ship. And once it's a village, it's probably even smaller than by there. And I very, very carefully joined the Facebook group and then I posted a couple of photographs of my great grandmother from the 20s of the 30s of the previous century taken in dashi. And people were very surprised. But also they, well, accepted me. I, I felt really good despite my hesitations. And, and they accept. They, they admitted that this is, yes, this is part of our village history, which we were not aware or we are partially. But this reconnection is also in a way, for me, for my family's reconciliation, which is a positive outcome, I believe.

[Megan Beske]

Yeah, absolutely. Well, all of that sounds fascinating and we'll look forward to seeing all of that come together. Thank you so much, Alex, for your time today. Anything else you want to add before we sign off?

[Alex Averbook]

No, just many thanks. And once again to emphasize the great and valuable work of Oksana and Marx. I see that those who will be reading the book will be reading their works based on some derived from my originals. And those who know both languages can enjoy both persons because Facebook is bilingual.

[Megan Beske]

Wonderful. Thank you.

[Alex Averbook]

Thank you so much.

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