In both dichotomies, the latter is always considered to be removed from the present and located at a safe distance, allowing for a privileged examination and dissection of it.
The collective “we” addresses the fact that, even today, our responses to the horrors happening elsewhere are “not enough.” Since we, the assumed readers, are living in “our great country of money,” we are not living through that reality of danger and suffering that others are and can therefore escape from it whenever we want, “liv happily during the war.” The “Dramatis Personae,” which is located right after the opening poem and lists the various “characters” in the collection as if in a play, further heightens this tension between us and them, reality and fantasy. In the opening poem, “We Lived Happily during the War,” Kaminsky points out that distance appears to influence our level of empathy. Kaminsky draws our attention to the way history continues to repeat itself, despite both the allegorical and historical examples we readily have at our disposal that should prevent us from making the same mistakes, reminding me of the Russian expression “stepping on a rake,” which refers to the perpetuation of past mistakes and the inability to learn from them. Together, they serve as the backdrop for an exploration of the ways in which we are sometimes willingly deaf, whether socially, culturally, or politically, to the hardships of those next to us, to say nothing of those living on another continent. In Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), Kaminsky repeats this success, transporting readers to the fictional town of Vasenka, which is in an unnamed and occupied country. In his 2004 debut Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press), the way Kaminsky wove cultural identity and politics together spoke to my experience as an immigrant whose parents lived through the disappearance of the Soviet Union, as well as my own questions of identity and the legacy of trauma.
I did not know I craved poetry about Eastern Europe until encountering Ilya Kaminsky’s work.
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