The COJECO BluePrint Fellowship
Literature & Book Publishing
“The Secret Society” A Russian Language Picture Book
Yevgenia Nayberg is writing and illustrating a Russian language children’s book about the contemporary immigration experience through the eyes of a child. The book, titled “The Secret Society,” approaches the subject of being different metaphorically, through the story of a left-handed little girl and her “secret leftie society.” The story resonates not only with children, but […]
Yevgenia is an award-winning illustrator, painter and stage designer. A native of Kiev, Ukraine, she graduated from The National School of Arts. Yevgenia’s paintings have been featured in solo exhibitions in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles and Moscow as well as in numerous international group art shows. She designed sets and costumes for over 40 theatrical productions and received a number of prestigious awards for her stage designs. Her illustrations appeared in magazines and children’s books as well as on album covers, book covers and theatre posters.
Cheburashka Wears a Kippah
As a Russian speaking, Jewish, queer couple who wants our future children to be fluent in Russian and know about their cultural roots, we notice that there’s a deficit of Russian-language books with characters who look and live like we do. We see English language children’s literature grow more diverse and inclusive, but find that […]
Born in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Tatyana immigrated to the US with her family at age 11. She received her BA in Sociology Summa Cum Laude from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Master’s in Instructional Technology and Media from Teachers College Columbia University where she focused on the use of games and social media in education. She has been an educator for 12 years, the past 5 of them at The Jewish Education Project working with day schools and congregational institutions all over North America to innovate classrooms and make learning more engaging and personalized. She currently works at an all boys school on the UES teaching coding and STEAM. She shares a home with her wife and about as many books as could comfortably fill a small public library.
Cheburashka Wears a Kippah
As a Russian speaking, Jewish, queer couple who wants our future children to be fluent in Russian and know about their cultural roots, we notice that there’s a deficit of Russian-language books with characters who look and live like we do. We see English language children’s literature grow more diverse and inclusive, but find that […]
Valeriya is a second grade teacher in a NYC public school, working primarily with English language learners. She immigrated to the US with her family in 1999 from Yekaterinburg, Russia. She received her BA in Literary Studies from The New School and a Master’s in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages from CUNY Hunter College. Her short play The Frequencies of Love was put on as part of The Headcase Showcase through The New School in 2012 and was part of a reading series at La MaMa theater.
Cultural Tips for New Americans
For Cultural Tips For New Americans project, Alina Bliumis gathered advice to help recent arrivals assimilate and understand their new home. She took advice from published guides, public forums, streets questionnaires, social websites, and friends to create tips like: “Never refuse gum if an American offers it to use. Offering gum is a polite way to tell someone that they have bad breath.”
Alina Bliumis is a New York based artist, working in collaboration with Jeff Bliumis since 2000. Alina and Jeff Bliumis's body of work explores cultural standards, foreignness and national identity through sculptural installations-often placed in public sphere and incorporative of public dialogue. They were both born abroad, but have been living in the United States for over twenty years. Alina received a BFA from the School of Visual Art, New York and Jeff received a BA from the Columbia University, New York.Their early projects were predominantly based on their own experiences of immigration. Over last ten years, their interest has gradually shifted into processing communal experience-defining social structures, considering cultural standards/norms and exploring foreignness as a condition that gives a new perspective to the familiar.To see her works please visit www.bliumis.com
GOGA
Multidisciplinary performance, a play with music and live readings based on a memoir book about coming to American in 1988 as a young Soviet girl.
Happiness the Jewish Way
Happiness the Jewish Way is a published self-help book about happiness through the lens of Jewish wisdom. Happiness is the most important thing in our lives. But how do we actually hold on to this great happiness feeling at all times, despite the fact that the world in not perfect? Happiness skills are not taught in […]
Olga Gilburd lived in Russia and Ukraine before coming to the United States. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing and a Master’s degree in Public Service. She worked with teens and adults at The Jewish Agency for Israel and also with kids in a Jewish Sunday school. As a nurse, she interacted and helped predominately Russian-speaking immigrants. Listening to many life stories, she realized that although pursuit of happiness is the main reason for immigration, the emotional well-being skills and happiness are mostly overlooked in everyday challenges. Olga studied positive Psychology and created a blog about happiness. www.olgarythm.blogspot.com
In the Eighteenth Minute: A Short Story Collection
‘In The Eighteenth Minute’ is a short fiction collection — stories set in the Russian Jewish community, mostly amongst emigres, but also some set in the former Soviet Union. The collection celebrates not only Jewish culture in Russian translation, but also Jewish religion in Russian translation. Becoming observant is, in many ways, an immigration experience, always being an […]
Avital Chizhik is a journalist living in New York City. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tablet, and the Forward, and she is a frequent contributor to Haaretz. Her fiction has received recognition from the Atlantic Monthly, Moment Magazine and the National Young Arts Foundation. She lives with her husband Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt in New York City.
Follow Avital on her website: www.avitalrachel.com and Twitter: @avitalrachel
Marlo: Jewish [En]Lightning
Marlo: Book One: Jewish [En]Lightning is the second book in Chicago-headquartered Urban Pop Art Projects’ publishing imprint Urban Pop Art Books. New York artist/ videographer/ author Aleks Degtyarev expertly navigates his id to deconstruct a complicated identity: that of the post-Soviet child immigrant all grown up. Navigating questions about identity often sidelined by urges to just […]
Aleks Degtyarev could be described as a story teller. Aleks has been passionately involved in the media world for over 10 years. Among a diversified skill set his main focus has always been producing, filming and editing, combined with education. As a multi-disciplinary artist, Aleks grounds all his work from a writer’s background sealing it with his knowledge of poetry and philosophy. Working with actors/talent as a director, he is not afraid to get in front of the lens and expose his own vulnerability. Aleks believes that everyone has a great story to tell and he searches out ways to inspire his collaborators to tell their stories. His major focus is honest media that has transformative potential, seeking to strengthen communities, and evolving communication.
Spoils of War: Ode to a Refusenik Mother
“Spoils of War: Ode to a Refusenik Mother” was originally published by Tablet Magazine on June 6, 2012 (bit.ly/spoilspoem), and the panels illustrating the poem were exhibited at New York City’s National Arts Club through the Russian American Foundation’s Russian Heritage Month. The poem is accompanied by a spoken word track over a mix tape in […]
Margarita Korol is an urban pop artist, designer, and writer in New York City producing media in the publishing and public worlds including art directing, editing, and illustrating for several online and print magazines. Her writing, illustrations, paintings, and arts and culture propaganda are vibrant expressions of urban progress in directed contexts.
Born the week of Chernobyl in Ukraine to refuseniks, Korol’s focus on empowering individuals in disadvantaged struggles against their political systems is an ongoing theme in her work. Her most recent exhibit for Brooklyn’s ArtOnBrighton exhibition on the Coney Island/ Brighton Beach boardwalk featured a series of propaganda posters directed to the area’s SovJew immigrant community in Korol’s generation. Previously, Propaglasnost: The Transparency Projects series was on view at NYC’s KGB Bar May and June 2011. Meanwhile, her Berlin Wall installation Die Mauer is housed at Chicago’s DANK-Haus German Cultural Center.
Stealing Cherries
Rubin’s BluePrint project involves the publishing of her fourth book, a collection of flash fiction stories considering existentialism, Jewish identity, Russian upbringing, transcendentalism, cultural genetics, time travel, religion. Telling the stories in a style that is ”Babel meets Sholom Aleichem,” they describe the hilarious truth about being a newcomer to the American cultural house and […]
Marina Rubin was born in the small town of Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in the former Soviet Union. Her family immigrated to United States in 1989 seeking asylum. Her first chapbook Ode to Hotels(2002) was followed by Once(2004) and Logic(2007). Her work had appeared in over seventy magazines and anthologies including 13th Warrior Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Dos Passos Review, 5AM, Nano Fiction, Coal City, Green Hills Literary Lantern, Jewish Currents, Lillith, Pearl, Poet Lore, Skidrow Penthouse, The Portland Review, The Worcester Review and many more. She is an associate editor of Mudfish, the Tribeca literary and art magazine. Her work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2007 and again in 2012. She is a 2013 recipient of the COJECO Blueprint Fellowship. Her fourth book, a collection of flash fiction stories Stealing Cherries was released in November 2013 from Manic D Press and is available on Amazon, B&N and other booksellers nationwide.
Survivor: Aron’s Story
This unique project is part graphic novel and part historical education in one book. The first part of this book shares Aron’s (my grandfather) experience, living in Odessa, Ukraine (part of the former USSR) and his survival as a teenager under the Romanian/Nazi occupation during WWII. Aron’s story, visually depicted in the graphic novel form, […]
Alex Teplish was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Alex graduated from Stony Brook University and has since become a leading expert in Web/Mobile Technologies, Graphic design, and Digital Marketing. His work has enabled him to architect applications and campaigns for major corporations, international brands, as well as startups. He has also had a significant role in the ever-developing internet since its inception, including the founding of Brower Based Solutions (BBS), a web/mobile-focused, digital agency. Alex collaborated with a colleague and co-authored the Finance/Investment strategy book, “When Buy Means Sell”, with his chapter concentrating on the history and future of investing. The work was published by McGraw Hill, in September 2003. Most recently, Alex published a science-fiction graphic novel titled “In The Beginning: The Epic of the Anunnaki.”
The Egypt In My Looking Glass: A Novella
Yuri Kruman’s BluePrint Fellowship is a book of short stories about Russian Jews who grew up as kids in New York and have become urbane American adults. Summary: Twenty-five years after their hellish emigration – thirty from their famous father’s exodus – a sister and her brothers hear his voice again. All three have long […]
Yuri Kruman is an American entrepreneur, author and blogger based in New York. Yuri has published two books of fiction, including a novel, “Returns and Exchanges” (2013, Author House) and novella, “The Egypt In My Looking Glass” (2014, Author House). He has made appearances at the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, JCC of Manhattan Salon Series, Russian American Cultural Center and Roger Smith Hotel Creative Program. He is a recipient of the UJA Shapiro Family and COJECO BluePrint Fellowships (2012-2013) and is also a member of the Asylum Arts International Jewish Artist community and the Jewish Book Council.
The Hidden Matzo Chronicles
The Hidden Matzo Chronicles is a culinary exploration of the Soviet Jewish Identity recounting the plight of Soviet Jews in an effort to retain their Jewish traditions through food, culminating in a cookbook, which will includes recipes and related personal stories. The event took place on June 23, 2015, at Loft 172, Brooklyn, NY. https://www.facebook.com/The-Hidden-Matzo-Chronicles-337091416453091/timeline/
Olga Benis was born in 1978 in Kharkov, Ukraine and immigrated to the Unites States with her family in 1991. While Olga had pursued a career in Accounting, she had always exhibited a creative sense. Her creativity expressed itself through cooking and it became her passion and outlet. This culinary journey aroused an insatiable desire to explore the world, connect to others and has led Olga to develop Holy Schmear – a small family venture of jam and spread. Food has become a central element in Olga’s family, connecting four generations, from her grandmother to her daughter.
The New Wave of Russian Jewish Cultural Production
Over the past 15 years, young Russian-speaking Jewish writers such as David Bezmozgis, Sana Krasikov, Gary Shteyngart, and Lara Vapnyar, have captured the attention of the American reading public. However, their work has not yet received the proper acknowledgement in the academic world and does not appear in college anthologies. For her community project, Anna […]
Anna Katsnelson immigrated to New York from Leningrad in 1989 when she was 10 year old. In 2011 Anna received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation “Ethnic Passing across the Jewish Literary Diaspora” is an interdisciplinary, transnational study that examines history, culture, and literature. The dissertation shows that sociological identification with the hegemonic group and nativist influences in the United States, Brazil, and the USSR, led a number of ethnically Jewish writers, to create a literature which was completely devoid of ethnic markers. In 2007-2008 Anna was a Fulbright IIE Scholar to Brazil. Anna teaches in the English Departments of the Lander College for Women and Medgar Evers College.
The Russian and the Jew: Спасите наши души (A Play)
Staging of “The Russian and The Jew,” an original physical theater piece that explores anti-Semitism and misogyny through a female friendship in the Soviet Union in 1969 that underlines the eternal question of fidelity to oneself, to one’s partner, and to one’s country. Drawing on autobiographical material, this piece focuses on blending and re-visiting Russian […]
