The Memory Picture

Women are often tasked with the act of remembering and memorializing their families’ and their communities’ histories. This is part of the “mental load” they bear, which manifests in labor and expectations. Immigration further complicates this task, as it entails ruptured connections and lost documents. And trauma, personal and historical, makes the process of reconstruction fragmented and fraught.

Join four Jewish-American Ukranian-rooted women wroters as they explore the possibility of turning the burden of remembering into an act of artistic practice and an invitation to reflect on alienation and belonging , along with the complicated sleights of hand that help conjure a coherent self. How does a focus on tiny, quotidian details help us remember days, practices, and traditions that could easily be lost in the fray of grand historical narratives? Sharing poems, stories, and memoirs during this event, they will consider the complex interplay between art, memory, identity, and imagination.

Featured writers:

Olga Zilberbourg is a fiction writer and an essayist who focuses on the literatures of the former Soviet Union and diaspora with a passion for drawing out the ways contemporary writers and poets draw inspiration in the storytelling and poetic traditions of the past. Her English-language debut Like Watere and Other Stories (WTAW Press) deals with bisexuality and immigrant parenting. She explores structure and language as well as questions of what types and whose stories and poems are included in literary memory. She is particularly interested in stories traditionally transmitted by women that are now being developed by writers in various genres.

Maggie Levantovskaya's book, Foreign Body: A Memoir of Lupus, Academia and Belonging, is about negotiating chronic illness while attempting to become a scholar and process long-held feelings of alienation as a Jewish Ukrainian immigrant. The book traces how the struggle to attain health, gainful employment, and social comfort ultimately leads her to embrace contingent identities and carve out a space as teacher, writer and activist.

Bela Sas' Milk in an Eggshell is a dual timeline memoir that traces her family’s roots to the town of Zbaraż (now in Ukraine, formerly Poland) and connects her family’s story of survival to their struggles after immigration to the United States. Women’s stories of survival, of hiding in plain sight, of those small quotidian moments in the midst of macro–historical events that don’t usually get counted as part of history: all these things bubble forth in this true, intergenerational story of love, loss, and coming out of hiding.

A native of Odessa, Ukraine, Natalya Sukhonos speaks Russian, English, Ukrainian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard. Natalya is a poet, scholar, and teacher deeply committed to the power of language to uplift, inspire, and defamiliarize the ordinary. Nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2015 and 2020 and the Best New Poets Anthology of 2015, Natalya was a finalist for the June 2025 Reading Period of the Black Lawrence Immigrant Writing Series. Her books include Parachute (Kelsay Books of Aldrich Press, 2016) and A Stranger Home (Moon Pie Press, 2020). Sunlight Trapped in Stone (Green Writers Press, 2026) is her third book.

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