A Vivid Memoir by Artist Felix Lembersky’s Offspring, a book review by Herb Randall, Jan 13, 2023, Jerusalem Report. To read
“We are merely honest people and see what is good and bad, and we cannot be confused” – Felix Lembersky, Leningrad, 1960
Book review by Valerie Sperling, Fall, 2022, Women East-West AWSS, Vol 11, Association for Women in Slavic Studies. To read
Scholars of the USSR will recognize many elements of the Lembersky family’s story. But for those well-versed in the history, the memoir also provides a fascinating insider’s view of how patronage and corruption worked within Soviet services like the beauty industry. … The text is well written with evocative language… The book would find crossover readership between the public interested in the experience of Soviet Jews in the waning years of the USSR and classroom use. Reading it, I thought about designing an undergraduate course on Soviet women’s memoirs; this team effort by mother and daughter would be a natural fit for such a course, shedding light on both everyday life and state repression, and the ways they intersect.”
— Valerie Sperling, Clark University, Women East-West AWSS Newsletter
Book review by Alexandra Grabbe, Heavy Feather Review, January 30, 2023. To read
This memoir is important at a time when Vladimir Putin is terrorizing both the people of Ukraine and the citizens of Russia, conscripting its men to fight in a war the Kremlin calls a “special operation.” The Gorbachev era brought hope for change. Over the past twenty years, that hope has been dashed.
Book review by Valentina Mitkova, Aspasia, The International Yearbook of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern European Women’s and Gender History, June 2022, pp 227-230
Another optimistic vein refers to the indestructible bond between mothers and daughters, and the spiritual resilience transmitted from generation to generation of women. … This vein does not allow such a story of women’s determination and resistance demonstrated in the context of life’s extremes, to be washed away like a drop of ink in a downpour.”
To Fairyland: An Excerpt from Yelena Lembersky and Galina Lembersky’s Memoir Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour, Punctured Lines: Post-Soviet Literature in and outside the Former Soviet Union, August 2, 2022
“Our empty kitchen shimmers, the walls pixelate and dissolve into white. Mama stays as still as an ancient sphinx, swaddled in a quivering smoke.”
Author sharing story of rescuing art from Russia at Brewster benefit for Ukraine by Rich Eldred, Cape Cod Times, Wicked Local, part of the USA Today Network, Aug 9, 2022
Relics of the USSR both maddening and sweet emerge in blockbuster Jewish memoir by JULIA MASIS, Times of Israel, July 25, 2022
Yelena Lembersky’s ‘Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour’ is a surprisingly even-handed tale of escape from the Iron Curtain with her grandfather’s famous Babyn Yar massacre paintings
Remembering the Final Years of Leningrad: A Conversation with Yelena Lembersky by Susan Blumberg-Kason WORLD LITERATURE REVIEW, May, 2022
“Fear is transient. And freedom is relative. You can be free in captivity if you are free inside yourself. We turned to poetry, art, and music. We became more spiritual, even if a bit superstitious. We had our forests, hardy winters, sleds with long metal runners that went wicked fast down the hill. You could find wild strawberries in the meadow; they were smaller than a blueberry and tasted salty. I had a full life. I am grateful for all those gifts.”
Babyn Yar and Putin’s War in Ukraine by Yelena Lembersky, The Forward, March 3, 2022
“I was inspired to speak with the young people on the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial team in Kyiv. They were in their late twenties, ethnic Ukrainians and Jews, born and raised in independent Ukraine, and working together to preserve the memory of the Holocaust. They told me that facing the Holocaust was fundamental to Ukraine and its democracy, essential for the country’s future.”
Letter to Editor, by Yelena Lembersky, The New Yorker, May 30, 2022
“Last year, I was invited by the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center to lend two paintings by the artist Felix Lembersky, my grandfather, to an exhibition in Kyiv. His series “Execution: Babyn Yar,” painted between 1944 and 1952, features the earliest known artistic representations of the massacre. Banned in the Soviet Union, the paintings were brought to the United States by my family in the nineteen-eighties; the exhibition, which was scheduled to open this spring, would have been the canvases’ first public viewing in Eastern Europe.”
JEWISH JOURNAL review by Rich Tenorio, June 23, 2022. How ‘the heroism of everyday people’ infuses a searing family memoir.
For . . . Yelena Lembersky, writing a memoir with her mother Galina Lembersky about their life as Jews in the Soviet Union was difficult but necessary. It illuminated not only the injustices they had suffered under the Soviet regime, but also the family connection to Holocaust history: Her grandfather, Felix Lembersky, is credited with the first artistic representations of the infamous 1941 Nazi massacre of Soviet Jews at Babi Yar in Ukraine. The site is also known by its Ukrainian spelling, Babyn Yar.
SHORT FUSES review by Helen Epstein on ART FUSE, May, 2022
This story about life in the Soviet Union is a valuable partly because it is not about prominent refuseniks or about the Russian gulags or about the Second World War. This is a close-up look at what ordinary postwar existence was like for Jewish citizens of the USSR. . . . Like a Drop of Ink in a Downpour provides an unusual glimpse into the world of Soviet citizens which has been more frequently described by men. I was particularly struck by the long-term consequences of casual decisions and the bravery of ordinary people — strangers as well as friends. The book raises thorny issues of family loyalty, the importance of artists and art, and the many aspects of individual agency that Americans take for granted.