Instead of Introduction

Time doesn’t move, we move, says Tolstoy, but I am standing still in a trolley as it moves through a provincial city in the USSR—a country that no longer exists—in which two old ladies, who look just like my deceased mother, are speaking a strange mash-up of Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian (and another language I cannot quite identify—Bulgarian?), as we ramble toward a bazaar that still exists, though it is in a different country now. There is no place on earth I’d rather be than on this trolley, moving through the stretch from the little black market for secondhand books to Privoz.

Now, as then, I look up from one of Isaac Babel’s short stories (he’s just been whipped in the face by a hand holding a dead pigeon) and behold Privoz, one of the largest food bazaars in Eastern Europe. At fifteen, I was in love with all the shopgirls, who flirted with language rather than with me, sweeping out their shops, their tempers shorter than their skirts, shouting at pigeons.

One of these miraculous girls asks me for the time in English, and before I can check my phone, a hard man with a crewcut answers, “Eleven,” in Ukrainian, his face breaking into childishness with his smile. An older man says something I cannot quite catch, in Yiddish, and all the other men standing around guffaw. Here, language is reborn every minute, rolled over the tongue with brinza cheese and sour apples.

I stand, unmoving, in Privoz, fifteen years old, and nearly forty five, a bazaar unchanged, only located now in an entirely different world. I’m listening to the words, augmented by my hearing aids into something approaching noise, but mostly I am listening to my people’s silences: how they barter and bargain with what is withheld.

So, is it too much to ask that all literary journals and anthologies become a bit like a Privoz, where goods are exchanged and language is created by the minute, while tenderness and tragedy mingle in front of us and behind us and through us as we make up new words and find silences that speak?

It is not too much to ask.

So, here is a little book of poems and stories from different languages and perspectives, from different time periods, even, and various degrees of heat.

Eat from this and live.

So, it is a pleasure to give you this little box of matches and snowstorms, of poems about motherhood in a pandemic and stories about grief for bastards, elegies and songs of praise, whispers and incantations.

So, I hope you will be delighted by words from China and Germany and Iran and Spain and Ukraine and the UK. I hope you will enjoy that a section of voices who live in Sweden also includes Spanish speakers and English speakers and Slovenians. I hope we all will see how silence speaks even when everyone refuses to see it. And in the end, may we allow grief to give us grace notes. Our world is various, and that, perhaps, is the final argument in its defense.