Latest / The Starfish Storytellers / Episode 13 - International Storytelling: Historical Fiction with Elena Ulanovsky

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Episode 13 - International Storytelling: Historical Fiction with Elena Ulanovsky · The Starfish Storytellers

• 0:00
  Welcome to the Starfish Storytellers, the podcast that makes a difference one story at a time by bringing storytelling to life.
• 0:15
  How can I tell the story of who I am, who I am without the stories of the place I have lived?
• 0:22
  My name is Yelena Olanovsky and I am a writer.
• 0:25
  I write fiction novels with fictional characters, however my readers can follow my life journey through my books.
• 0:34
  I was born in Russia, grew up in Ukraine, emigrated to Israel and now I am living in America.
• 0:41
  The hardest experience of my life was the immigration experience to Israel.
• 0:47
  That's why my first novels were about that time.
• 0:51
  Don't forget that we emigrated to the country where arachytatics and terrorist attacks were a part of daily life.
• 0:59
  And it was a shock.
• 1:01
  After 20 years in Israel, my family relocated to the US in 2009 thanks to my husband's job.
• 1:08
  And we tried to fit ourselves into the new country.
• 1:13
  However, you can't avoid memories about your childhood, thoughts of your family, your friends.
• 1:21
  It is always your back.
• 1:23
  Can you imagine you are losing it?
• 1:25
  Yes, when the war in Ukraine of 2014 started in my hometown, Lugansk, I felt like even this last bastion had now fallen.
• 1:37
  From the minute those boys who wore ones my classmates and close friends went to war, I knew I would write about it.
• 1:46
  I will write about this war.
• 1:49
  But when I started to take interviews and read articles and watch videos, I understood it's not my war.
• 1:56
  I am a woman. I never saw the battlefield. I can never feel what the soldiers feel.
• 2:03
  Mark Dwen knew what he was talking about when he said those internal words, write what you know.
• 2:11
  I had to write what I know.
• 2:14
  At this point, I started thinking about women like me, my girlfriends, schoolmates, neighbors.
• 2:21
  They all became the hostages and victims of the war.
• 2:25
  They lost everything and had to run from the war and became refugees in their own country.
• 2:32
  Now we have become equal. We all lost our town where the apricots bloomed.
• 2:38
  This is the name of my book about the first war in Ukraine.
• 2:42
  It was a short but very intensive novel, a fiction novel but it was based on real characters and real events.
• 2:51
  In the end, all the heroes moved to new little towns east of Kiev.
• 2:56
  Towns like Buczha, Irpen, Gostomel, they found a new home and a new life.
• 3:02
  Last what I thought would be a continuation of this book.
• 3:07
  However, after 8 years, in February of last year 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine again big time
• 3:17
  and started the invasion from those small towns, Buczha, Irpen, Gostomel, believe it or not.
• 3:23
  All those people who were prototypes of my heroes fell again into the fire of war.
• 3:31
  And here I am writing about the same characters and their destiny in the new war.
• 3:37
  I hope it will be a last book.
• 3:56
  Hello, my name is Liana Henry and welcome to the Starfish Storytellers.
• 4:00
  I'm the CEO of the Black Dog Group, a Marcom and project management firm headquartered on the east coast of the US in Quaint Colonial Bedford, Massachusetts.
• 4:10
  I'm your host and passionate about storytelling. I'm actually on a mission to raise up the next generation of storytellers.
• 4:17
  We've named ourselves the Starfish Storytellers after the Starfish Story.
• 4:21
  The moral of the Starfish Story is based on the power of one.
• 4:25
  No matter how big the challenge, each action we take makes a difference and has an impact.
• 4:30
  One step, one starfish or one story at a time.
• 4:33
  Every episode we welcome a new storyteller who will share their story meant to inspire and connect with you.
• 4:39
  Then we'll break it down and offer tips for any listeners who are ready to tell their own stories.
• 4:43
  So thanks for tuning in. Now let's get started.
• 4:46
  Today's episode is about international historical fiction, storytelling that reaches across the world.
• 4:52
  And with me today is Elena Ulanovsky, an award-winning author, screenwriter and movie producer.
• 4:58
  Elena grew up in the Ukraine and emigrated to Israel and then later to the US.
• 5:03
  She's written a number of novels focusing on historical fiction as well as plays and runs a movie company whose productions have been performed in the US, Israel and Russia.
• 5:12
  Thank you so much for being with us today Elena. It's really, really a treat to have you here.
• 5:17
  Thank you.
• 5:18
  So we usually get started with an introduction. So I would love to hear, I know that the listeners would love to hear more about you.
• 5:26
  So if you wouldn't mind introducing yourselves in better detail than I just shared, you know, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?
• 5:33
  I'm happy to be here and I think it's great to tell stories about the people. It's very powerful.
• 5:42
  I'm a storyteller as well. I love stories not about nature, not about like something not psychological stuff, like five pages about what people, person thinks what she or he takes like morning coffee.
• 5:58
  I love stories. And my book based on stories, it's like full of stories. I know a lot of people and I try to make it shorter.
• 6:08
  But people just speak for themselves in my books.
• 6:13
  So you have here four of your books. Have you written a total of four novels or are there more than four novels?
• 6:20
  Yeah, it's actually, yeah, it's a book. They are in different languages, but I write in Russian. This is my mother tongue and it's what I can do.
• 6:31
  But they have translation. This is Palms from the asphalt. Actually, it's Palms trees from the asphalt.
• 6:40
  And this is in Hebrew now, you see it. And this is Palms actually where you go to Haifa from Tel Aviv. This is the real picture. See how nice it is.
• 6:50
  So what is that book about? This book, it's like my, the most important book for me because it's about this immigration to Israel.
• 7:02
  It's called Repatriation. Soviet Jews came back to their roots to Israel.
• 7:08
  The most important in the modern time, it was immigration in 90s when Perestroika came, like Gorbachev, you know.
• 7:20
  About million Jews came from Soviet Union. It was a huge country. It's like America, you know, a lot of states, a lot of republics.
• 7:29
  And they came to this tiny, tiny East country, but it was not just East. It was actually a modern Western country.
• 7:37
  And we came from socialistic life, communistic life, to capitalism. It was like to come to another planet.
• 7:47
  It was so hard. Not just language. It's all like order of life.
• 7:54
  A lot of people with same language, with same points of view, they came and their destinies developed in different ways.
• 8:04
  It's like about a few families. They met first in Moscow to get visas and they got visas same day.
• 8:14
  So they came same day to Israel and it was then this war started, you know, with Iraq.
• 8:25
  The Persian War, how do you say? Persis-Kizalip. I wasn't prepared to say the name of this war.
• 8:35
  It was in 1991. January 1991, it started January 15 and exactly people came to the new country.
• 8:42
  Was it Desert Storm? No. No, that Desert Storm was after it was in 1991.
• 8:48
  It started with Kuwait. What is the name?
• 8:52
  Oh, the Gulf War.
• 8:54
  Gulf War. Yes. It started January 15. So exactly the people came to January 15 and they got masks from gas.
• 9:04
  It's a story for 15 years how they developed in new country, how they built themselves for the new life.
• 9:13
  Tell us a little bit about your other books as well. I have some questions about that but I just want to hear about your other stories first.
• 9:19
  This is a trilogy that is a story about people who already live in new country.
• 9:27
  This is a woman called Alina. Actually, this book Apocalypse is a third part of this.
• 9:33
  I was printed. It was in New York magazine separately because it's like a last book but this is an actual fantasy.
• 9:41
  Two first books, it's kind of a reality. And third one, it's something that didn't happen at all.
• 9:49
  But now it happened with another war.
• 9:51
  Almost like a premonition. Yeah, it's like a prediction.
• 9:56
  It was exactly a prediction. I actually prepared a little story about this book for three minutes if you want.
• 10:04
  I can tell you. That would be good.
• 10:06
  Because it's only a book in English and it was translated by my friends.
• 10:11
  And this is a book about Ukraine. This is in Ukraine and actually I wrote it in Russian as well.
• 10:17
  And just now I sent the second part about this war. This is about 2014 in Donbass, Lugansk.
• 10:26
  I know people know about it but not exactly. It was like a local conflict.
• 10:31
  Nobody thought abroad that it will be start of the big war but it was.
• 10:37
  It was eight years ago.
• 10:39
  And now last year those people who came to Ukraine from this place because they didn't have any other possibility, they got to the war again.
• 10:54
  So, just very interesting when you're talking about that book that was based on the 2014 war.
• 11:01
  Yes, this one. Another one was ready.
• 11:05
  Right, but my question about that one is what was it like in between?
• 11:11
  You were already here in 2014.
• 11:13
  I was in Israel. Actually I was here.
• 11:16
  You were here by then, right? I think I read somewhere. You were here in 2009.
• 11:20
  Yes.
• 11:21
  But based on, you must have family back there.
• 11:25
  Yes, I have family, friends. I was very close to people then.
• 11:29
  What was it like between 2014 and 2022?
• 11:32
  I mean, after the issue...
• 11:35
  It was like a local conflict. It stays kind of raw but it was like stable.
• 11:40
  It's not good. Nobody wants to live in this situation.
• 11:44
  Of course.
• 11:45
  But it was like already kind of like grey zone.
• 11:50
  Okay.
• 11:51
  It was kind of...
• 11:53
  A Russian took it and they explained that they come to help people who speak Russian in Ukraine.
• 12:02
  But now they're born in the same places where people speak Russian.
• 12:05
  It's my language, Russian, because it's a border.
• 12:09
  A lot of people spoke Russian and a lot of people spoke Ukrainian more western, near Poland, Hungary.
• 12:16
  There are people who speak more Ukrainian.
• 12:19
  Now it became very close country despite the war.
• 12:25
  What happened? They make them like a union.
• 12:31
  It would happen all these eight years.
• 12:35
  Now you're saying that...
• 12:37
  And that was my question.
• 12:38
  It was like when everything happened in 2014 and now it's happened in 2022,
• 12:42
  was there peace in between 2014 and 2022?
• 12:46
  And you just answered the question. It was sort of that bubbling under the surface.
• 12:50
  It continued that whole time over those what eight years or so.
• 12:55
  It was probably destined to happen.
• 12:59
  People didn't want to think about it.
• 13:02
  They thought somehow it will finish.
• 13:04
  But Putin actually prepared the big war.
• 13:07
  He wanted whole Ukraine, maybe not just whole Ukraine.
• 13:11
  He wanted the empire, I think.
• 13:14
  It was his dream. He started to teach kids in the school.
• 13:21
  It's like the same idea like Nazis.
• 13:25
  He used the name Nazis for Ukraine because they wanted to be independent.
• 13:30
  It's like kind of trick and scam and propaganda.
• 13:36
  He put a lot of money.
• 13:40
  If you put money and you put all TV stations, all radio, all internet,
• 13:47
  you put and you tell your own stories, finally people start to believe it.
• 13:53
  The worst would happen.
• 13:56
  So you have your fourth book now that was out in 2022, New Apocalypse.
• 14:01
  Yeah, I just sent it to New Review Magazine to New York.
• 14:06
  You said that you have a little bit of an excerpt or something that you might want to share.
• 14:11
  I wouldn't share.
• 14:14
  In my story I told about my books.
• 14:19
  The critics said that my novels show chaotic world events
• 14:24
  and follow the troubles they cause to their individual human victims.
• 14:29
  It's what you can say about whole books.
• 14:32
  I know how it happened, but I became to be like the head of different big world events,
• 14:44
  like huge migrations of Soviet Union, like this first war in Lugansk,
• 14:50
  like this war now in Ukraine.
• 14:53
  Somehow Israel, don't speak about Israel, it's the country that always in the war.
• 14:59
  Somehow I don't know how it happened, but I became to be like the head of all this
• 15:03
  and I can't be in silence.
• 15:05
  It's kind of bothering me and I have to speak about it.
• 15:08
  It's the only way how I can do it.
• 15:10
  I can sing, I can draw, I can just write.
• 15:17
  And I want to, really, today I would like to emphasize this book, New Apocalypse,
• 15:24
  because it's the only book translated to English by my dear friend, the writer Isabel Quantana,
• 15:31
  and illustrated by artist and writer Pilar Quantana.
• 15:37
  The New Apocalypse, when it was written in 1999, could have been classed as Fandas Magoria,
• 15:44
  but today the novel seems rooted in reality.
• 15:48
  More than that, you could call it the prediction,
• 15:51
  because this is the story of a woman protecting her children in a Fandas Magoria geopolitical setting.
• 15:58
  This fiction story begins as war breaks out in Israel.
• 16:03
  It's like a fiction, it never happened, but I hope it wouldn't happen.
• 16:08
  Biotical Islamics and a ship arrived in Haifa port to transport civilians from the war zone.
• 16:17
  They want to make terroristic acts on the ship.
• 16:23
  Alina, our heroine, learns that the ship has been targeted by Islamic terrorists and will be blown up.
• 16:30
  With the help of the Arab guard who studied in Kiev and knows Russian,
• 16:36
  she succeeded in giving her two young children, Ron and Masha,
• 16:40
  giving her children to friends to be taken out of the country.
• 16:45
  At the last minute, the explosive device on the ship was defused,
• 16:49
  and Alina, among other women, with kids, was left as hostages to the terrorists.
• 16:56
  With help from the same guard, Alina manages to escape on a special flight to find her daughter in Ukraine,
• 17:03
  where her friend took her.
• 17:05
  After that, her next destination in Greece, where the Christian mission people flew her son.
• 17:12
  By during the war, it was impossible to get to Greece, so Alina had to travel all over Europe.
• 17:21
  She, her girlfriend and her daughter flew to Romania, where they flew into the adventure with the theft of diamonds.
• 17:29
  When Alina came to Greece, she couldn't find her son, and she remained without money and without hope.
• 17:35
  By selling her wedding rings, she got the tickets to fly to Germany to her friends,
• 17:40
  and there she found herself living in the home of one of the commanders of the Arabid Majahind,
• 17:46
  who captured her in the past. It's like kind of adventure.
• 17:50
  After a lot of adventures, all the family are together, war ends and the children return to Alina.
• 17:57
  In spite of war separation, death, all of them together, all alive. Life goes on.
• 18:03
  New Apocalypse, this book won the Nikolai Gogol International Literary Prize, in 2020, in Kiev,
• 18:13
  and was translated in Ukrainian as well.
• 18:16
  And also was published in the New Review New York Magazine.
• 18:20
  Wow.
• 18:21
  Yeah. It wasn't more than, and it was like really adventures.
• 18:27
  You can imagine what can happen.
• 18:30
  It happened.
• 18:32
  In another country, but it can happen in every country.
• 18:36
  Yeah. Yeah. No, that's so powerful.
• 18:39
  And it, like I said, I mean, it seems like it was almost a premonition of what was to come.
• 18:44
  And that was why I was asking about sort of between the two conflicts, you know, what, you know, how, how was life there.
• 18:52
  Nothing stopped. It was. It was.
• 18:53
  It just stayed the same.
• 18:54
  Yeah, it's true.
• 18:55
  Yeah.
• 18:56
  So we'll take a step back from your books for a minute and, like you said, you couldn't stay quiet and you needed to express yourself and you do it through writing.
• 19:07
  Have you always been a writer? Have you, how, how, how far back can you remember?
• 19:12
  I always was a reader.
• 19:14
  Always was a reader.
• 19:15
  I read a lot of books.
• 19:16
  And actually in Soviet Union, we didn't get modern books from America and they didn't like it, but they translated a lot of classical books.
• 19:25
  We grew up on Mopasan, Balzac, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Feitzwanger, whatever you just call it.
• 19:36
  And it was a great education and I loved it.
• 19:41
  But I never even think to write.
• 19:44
  I wrote essays, you know, in the school.
• 19:46
  But when I came to Israel after this, like, huge impression of this event of too many people, somehow I just wanted to write about it and I started to write.
• 19:59
  And I found out that I can do it and I can build it like a plot and people read it and read it very quick.
• 20:08
  They like it and I have this tempo, you know, like kind of adventure.
• 20:13
  I like to be like fast.
• 20:16
  Fast-paced.
• 20:17
  And yeah, and it was good.
• 20:19
  So I started and they couldn't stop because it happened something else, happened something else.
• 20:25
  Now, how long did it take you to do each of those books?
• 20:28
  Like you've got four novels here on the table.
• 20:31
  How long did each one take for you to write?
• 20:34
  This one, like, took like, it looked one year.
• 20:37
  I actually took vacation and I sat in the library like 24-7 and then I emigrated in the middle of writing this book about,
• 20:47
  poems from the asphalt about Israeli immigration.
• 20:50
  We emigrated to America and then I stopped because I needed to learn English.
• 20:56
  I didn't know English.
• 20:57
  And you can write in Russian and in English.
• 20:59
  So I stopped for five years and after five years I finished this book.
• 21:04
  Now, what year did that one publish?
• 21:07
  This, yeah.
• 21:08
  It was published in 2015, I think.
• 21:15
  Yeah, okay.
• 21:16
  And this is, this one I wrote earlier.
• 21:20
  So this apocalypse in Russian was published in New York in 2014.
• 21:26
  Just one part.
• 21:27
  And then I published whole trilogy.
• 21:29
  Yeah, okay.
• 21:31
  And, you know, I, when you think about historical fiction, I mean, there's some level of research that has to happen often.
• 21:42
  I mean, did you, as you were writing these pieces, you know, you were living a lot of what was in those books,
• 21:49
  but did you do any other research as you were writing some of these stories?
• 21:54
  There are two questions from my side.
• 21:57
  First, what does historical fiction mean?
• 22:01
  For me, historical fiction is something about like Roma or, you know, something really back to history.
• 22:09
  This is modern fiction.
• 22:11
  However, you have to know a lot of stuff.
• 22:14
  And it's, even it's happened where I lived already in Israel.
• 22:19
  I did a lot, a lot of stuff to interview people about their jobs.
• 22:25
  You know just what you know, like your job.
• 22:29
  Let's say my character works like you.
• 22:33
  What I know about it, nothing.
• 22:35
  I can't write it.
• 22:36
  I can't be in your shoes.
• 22:39
  So I have to speak with you like hours.
• 22:42
  I have a lot of musicians somehow.
• 22:45
  I'm not a musician.
• 22:46
  Somehow I got a lot of characters.
• 22:48
  And really I spoke to people who play for the piano and cello and I found out a lot of stuff that I never knew.
• 22:58
  It's about like modern times.
• 23:00
  If we speak about Ukraine, I left there like 30 years ago with my immigration to Israel.
• 23:06
  And it became to be a new world.
• 23:08
  They actually changed.
• 23:11
  In this case, I had to speak a lot of people like take interviews, not just the question answer.
• 23:18
  I just asked them to tell something what you do now.
• 23:22
  I like asked them to tell their story like whole day.
• 23:25
  Like I wake up like this morning and what happened and where went then.
• 23:30
  I mean, to be like feel how what they did.
• 23:34
  And it took a lot of time.
• 23:36
  And for sure little stuff like how called this, how called this name of this, what happened.
• 23:44
  Yeah, it's a lot of work.
• 23:46
  I mean, I think when when when I say historical fiction in relation to the stories that you're writing, I mean, there is history there.
• 23:54
  You know, there is things that happened.
• 23:57
  And whether I read it today or I read it in 10 years or I read it 10 years ago, there's still history.
• 24:03
  And I think that was sort of the thought process behind.
• 24:06
  Yes, you're saying it's modern fiction, but it's based in real life.
• 24:11
  You know, you're right.
• 24:13
  When we work on translation of this book, New Apocalypse, it was written, how I said in 1999, I found out that there are things that we both already don't use.
• 24:25
  Kind of, for example, paper tickets for flight or phone.
• 24:32
  Like you couldn't like they had a problem to get to Greece and to check out what about something about embassy.
• 24:41
  Now you go to Internet and they were in Ukraine.
• 24:45
  They didn't have any information, you know, where you go to library to read book from like last century.
• 24:52
  It's so hard.
• 24:53
  It was hard to get some information and now you can't get it when you read it.
• 24:58
  I mean, yeah, what's the problem?
• 25:00
  No, it's different world.
• 25:02
  For kind of 10, 20 years, it became to be, you're right, it became to be historical novel somehow.
• 25:10
  Well, you know, and I understand what you're saying.
• 25:13
  I mean, you know, you think historical fiction, you're thinking colonial times, but this is a moment in time and a very important moment in time.
• 25:21
  And you are, in essence, giving people information that they would not otherwise have.
• 25:28
  You're giving them a glimpse inside of a life that they would not ever have any other information, especially people from the United States.
• 25:37
  You're absolutely right.
• 25:38
  And you know what?
• 25:39
  Not just people who were born here and grew up here.
• 25:43
  I have people who immigrated, who immigrated from like me, from Ukraine, for example, in the, live here in America for 30 years.
• 25:50
  When they read this book about Lugansk 2014, they say, yes, we read about it, we spoke to our people, we know about it, but we never thought it was this way because it's, you know, it's too deep.
• 26:05
  I mean, it's true how it was, how you know, you don't know.
• 26:09
  I would imagine for the people that read that, it probably, I would imagine that it drummed up even a closer sense of patriotism for them, for their own country.
• 26:21
  Like you said, if they, you know, they were living in sort of their corner of Ukraine or the world.
• 26:27
  And then they read that book and it sort of opened their eyes to what was happening around them that maybe, because maybe they couldn't, like you said, they couldn't get information, you know,
• 26:38
  the same way that maybe we can get information now, you know, we have information overload now instead.
• 26:45
  But not at all.
• 26:47
  Yeah, yeah.
• 26:49
  So another question I had for you.
• 26:53
  So we talked about your novels.
• 26:55
  You have also been a screenwriter.
• 26:58
  Yes, I'm a screenwriter, you see, scriptwriter, screenwriter.
• 27:03
  And I'm a playwright.
• 27:05
  And a playwright.
• 27:07
  So is there a difference?
• 27:09
  Yes.
• 27:10
  What's the difference?
• 27:12
  Difference, when you do play, you think about people on the stage.
• 27:16
  When you do screenplay, you think about people in the movie and it's different.
• 27:23
  How is it different?
• 27:25
  I mean, you think about how they're moving.
• 27:27
  He came from this place, he stayed here.
• 27:30
  And if it's play, you know, it can happen.
• 27:32
  You can put 20 people to the play and in screenplay, you can easily put like some kind of, you know, a lot of people.
• 27:42
  The entire city.
• 27:44
  The entire city, exactly.
• 27:46
  Maximum you can do some kind of glimpse from the different, even moving.
• 27:52
  And I think the last thing I really wanted to cover with you today and talk about was you also have like a movie production company.
• 28:01
  Like you said, you were doing documentaries for folks.
• 28:04
  Yes, this is my production company.
• 28:07
  It's not that like active.
• 28:09
  It exists for us to work with our scripts if we need.
• 28:15
  We did with my director from Israel, we did a few co-documentaries.
• 28:22
  Actually one, it's called From Russia with Mass, about Russian school of mathematics.
• 28:27
  We did a few documentaries in Israel, one about my family.
• 28:32
  It's called Russian is hard language about why people want to, why kids have to know their mother tongue language.
• 28:42
  Well, that is all the time that we have for today.
• 28:46
  But I want to thank you, Elena, for coming and just sharing yourself with us this way and just such an amazing, deep way.
• 28:53
  I mean, I feel like we've learned so much from just hearing you today and, you know, we produce videos too and can appreciate how much time goes into that.
• 29:02
  And as writers, I mean, I'm not a book author, but I'm married to a book author and I can appreciate like it takes a long time to be able to story map everything and put it together.
• 29:13
  So thank you for sharing all of that with us.
• 29:16
  Thank you for inviting me.
• 29:18
  It's like a big honor for me.
• 29:20
  And to our listeners, whether you hear us locally from the BTV studios in Bedford, Massachusetts or across the globe on such podcast channels as Spotify, Apple Podcasts or Amazon Prime, thank you for listening.
• 29:32
  We hope you enjoyed this episode and we'll see you next time.
• 29:36
  Happy story telling.