CANCELLED! European Voices: A Reading & Conversation with Olga Grjasnowa

Regretfully, this event has been cancelled. We look forward to inviting Ms. Grjasnowa at a later date.

Join us for a reading and conversation with Olga Grjasnowa, author of Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (All Russians Love Birch Trees), and translator Eva Bacon. Set in Frankfurt, Olga Grjasnowa's astounding debut novel follows a young immigrant named Masha. Fluent in five languages and able to get by in several others, Masha lives with her boyfriend, Elias. Her best friends are Muslims struggling to obtain residence permits, and her parents rarely leave the house except to compare gas prices. Masha has nearly completed her studies to become an interpreter, when suddenly Elias is hospitalized after a serious soccer injury and dies, forcing her to question a past that has haunted her for years. Olga Grjasnowa has a unique gift for seeing the funny side of even the most tragic situations. With cool irony, her debut novel tells the story of a headstrong young woman for whom the issue of origin and nationality is immaterial—her Jewish background has taught her she can survive anywhere. Yet Masha isn’t equipped to deal with grief, and this all-too-normal shortcoming gives a particularly bittersweet quality to her adventures.

Olga Grjasnow was born in 1984 in Baku, Azerbaijan, grew up in the Caucasus, and has spent extended periods in Poland, Russia, and Israel. She moved to Germany at the age of twelve and is a graduate of the German Institute for Literature/Creative Writing in Leipzig. Eva Bacon studied German and English Literature in Munich and has worked as an international literary scout. All Russians Love Birch Trees is her first translation of a novel. She lives in Brooklyn and works for Google.

This year's European Voices events are organized in collaboration with the literary journal AGNI and the Goethe-Institut Boston and are taking place as part of EU Futures, a series of conversations exploring the emerging future in Europe. The EU Futures project is supported by a Getting to Know Europe Grant from the European Commission Delegation in Washington, DC to the Center for the Study of Europe at Boston University.