Exodus-22: Linor Goralik in Conversation with Yasha Klots
Fri 24 October 202524 Oct 2025
06:30—08:00 PM
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Book Livestream Tickets
Description
In March 2022, Linor Goralik travelled from Israel to Tbilisi, Yerevan and Istanbul, documenting the mass exodus of people from Russia following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She presents their testimonies in Exodus-22 / Исход-22, a bilingual publication from the Tamizdat Project, translated by Ainsley Morse, Daniela Maksin, Leonard Volchek, Venya Gushchin and Yasha Klots. Linor Goralik will join us to discuss Exodus-22with Yasha Klots, director of the Tamizdat Project.
Among many other things in her prolific writing career, Linor Goralik is known for chronicling modern urban life in micro-prose which blends ethnography, oral history and anecdote. Now, she applies this style to the acute crisis of emigration, in chronological snapshots that capture the fleeting early days and weeks and the kaleidoscope of emotions and experiences as people deal with their new reality. There are echoes of writers who chronicled previous waves of emigration, such as Teffi, and those who recorded pivotal moments of societal trauma, such as Svetlana Alexievich or Elena Kostyuchenko.
In Exodus-22, a seismic catastrophe meets the mundane everyday. People cling to normality, trying to do something, anything to combat uncertainty and hopelessness. It is a time of profound conflict and isolation, where individual crises appear incongruous against the unfolding invasion.
“History itself speaks to us from the pages of Goralik’s book. Initially inarticulate, labored and abstruse, history finds its voice through Linor’s efforts… Years from now, when we want to understand what happened to us, we will look to these pages with wonderment and melancholy. The fact that this book exists, offering us testimony and knowledge that are sometimes very difficult to face, makes us feel both gratitude and awe – the awe that is felt when time and catastrophe speak to you directly.” – Polina Barskova
Speakers
Linor Goralik
Linor Goralik is a Ukrainian-born author, poet, artist and essayist who lives in Israel and writes in Russian. Goralik wrote for various media as a columnist, taught fashion theory, published poetry, flash fiction, short stories, novels, comics, kids’ books, and non-fiction – more than 20 titles in total. She also translates poetry and prose from English and Hebrew into Russian. In 2022, Goralik founded ROAR: Resistance and Opposition Arts Review. She also has an oppositional news-based Russian-language podcast for teenagers and creates handmade art pieces and jewelry, part of the proceeds of which goes to Ukrainian charities. In August 2023, Goralik was declared “foreign agent” by the Russian government despite never having held the Russian citizenship.
Yasha Klots
Yasha Klots is an associate professor of Russian literature at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests are book history, Russian and East European émigré literature and culture, urbanism, and Gulag narratives (particularly Varlam Shalamov). He is the author of several books, includingTamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era(Cornell UP, 2023), and the director of theTamizdat Project, a public scholarship and charity initiative for the study of banned books from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.
