Join us for the next meeting of our reading group. We chose Klotsvog (available in our online bookshop here) by Margarita Khemlin, which covers themes including Soviet everyday life, Jewishness, womanhood and the trauma of World War Two. The meeting will be hosted by our bookshop co-curator Sasha Padziarei.

Maya, the first-person narrator of Klotsvog, combines the historical and the personal in a narrative that explores one Jewish woman’s experience of the twentieth century: from her childhood in a centre of Jewish culture in Ukraine, to her war-time experiences in Kazakhstan, to her post-war life touched by hardship and antisemitism. The chatty narrative style, combined with the ambiguity of the narrator and the powerful retelling of her experiences, makes this a unique and gripping novel.

’In giving voice to this complex, wounded character, Khemlin invites us to empathize even as we judge and to better understand our own common, terrified, irrational humanity.’ - Phoebe Taplin, Los Angeles Review of Books

2021 saw the opening of Pushkin House’s very own physical bookshop in addition to our online store. While it is still being honed and developed, we are keen to highlight literature that inspires, encourages, moves and validates our readers. We also want to amplify the voices, writers and readers that historically didn’t get and, perhaps, still don’t get the visibility, power and appreciation they deserve. Most of all, we want to create a physical (and an online) place for connection where people can come and share their views.