My Hollywood and Other Poems

In My Hollywood and Other Poems, Boris Dralyuk draws on his expertise as a translator, editor, scholar, and immigrant Angeleno, originally from Odessa, in poems that document and ardently evoke the Los Angeles of twentieth century European émigrés, particularly Russophone writers, composers, and actors from the former Soviet Union. Echoing the crystal doorknobs on the book’s cover, his metrical poems and translations from Russian (of poems written by fellow émigrés in LA), open onto glimpses of lost worlds. 

In Drayluk’s Onegin sonnets, including those that comprise the titular “My Hollywood,” Pushkin’s sparkling rhyme scheme seems to liberate the form from its typical rhetorical somersault, allowing lyric flourish to mingle with micro-narratives. “The Garden of Allah,” about the destruction of a bungalow hotel once run by 1920’s film star Alla Nazimova, begins:

And now I watch another era fade,
Cyrillic letters scraped from shuttered storefronts,
tar-crusted bread, stale fish, stiff marmalade
sit sulking on the shelves […]

“Bargain Circus” peeks into a beloved, now-defunct discount emporium, the “Huge barn chock- / full of over overstock,” where a young Dralyuk once bought a dictionary:

I wore my Webster’s out, clumsily wooing 
the tongue in which I sing this dime store’s praise.
But they’re worn too, my memories of those days 

Throughout, the ache of exile reverberates against the irretrievability of the past, but there’s also a quality of lightness in the poems, stemming from a fascination of place and the delights of Dralyuk’s prosody. The poem “Babel at the Kibitz” is an imagined encounter with Lev, a character from one of Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories (which Dralyuk has translated) who, we learned, “ditched Odessa for a new Odessa,” when he left the Ukrainian seaside city for Los Angeles. The poem’s speaker suggests to “Uncle Lev”: “Let’s go and hit the Kibitz,” a bar in the heart of the Fairfax District, still home to many émigrés. The poem ends with a vibrant couplet that juxtaposes a rich description of a California sunset and the Jewish émigré experience in Los Angeles:

The LA sky’s a quinceañera by Chagall.
Schlemiels like us—we never quit the Pale.