Etya Krichmar

Etya Vasserman Krichmar was born in 1954 in Kazakhstan, one of the republics of the former Soviet Union. In 1977, claiming religious discrimination, her spouse and a two-year-old daughter applied for immigration to the U.S. and were accepted. Now a mother to two children and grandmother of three, Etya is retired and lives in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, with her husband and two miniature dachshunds. As a Jewish immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Etya frequently write about survival, spiritual inheritance, and the enduring impact of memory on the body. Her work has appeared in SpillWords Press, The Orlando Sentinel, MasticadoresUSA, The White Rose, The Write Launch, and other literary journals. She is currently pitching her memoir, Living in Fear: Triumph in the Shadow of Soviet Oppression, and has been recognized with an Honorable Mention from Writing Away Refuge and a Best of the Net 2025 nomination.    

The Language of My Hands

Before I understood the weight of memory and the grace of healing, I had hands that reached, held, and learned. Now, when I look at my hands, I don’t recognize them. Not because they’ve changed, but because they’ve held so many lives—mine, my children’s, my grandchildren’s, my ailing Papa’s and Mama’s before they died, my brother’s, dear friend June’s, and adapted Daddy’s Sam’s before they too succumbed to illness. Through it all, my hands never once asked for rest.

Baba Sasha

A long time ago in Kotovsk, a small town in Ukraine, right before dusk, a little crowd of the neighborhood children gathered around the handmade, rough picnic table. The usually unruly kids sat quietly on the four wooden planks hastily attached to the table’s perimeter and waited for Baba Sasha’s arrival.

Papa’s Mysterious Rex

It happened a long time ago in a small town of Kotovsk, located in Eastern Ukraine, which belonged to the Soviet Union. Mama, Papa, and I sat in the back of the menacing-looking, Khrushchev-Era four-story building in front of our ground floor apartment’s window. The three of us enjoyed the last few days of the good weather. It was pleasantly warm for an October evening.
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