Q&A with Eugene Ostashevsky about "Alphabet Soup"

Eugene Ostashevsky is a writer, poet and translator known for his ingenious play with language. His latest book Alphabet Soup: The Translingual Sayings of Emma and Eva as Recorded by Their Father (Tamizdat Project & Rab-Rab Press, 2026) is our Book of the Month for June.

Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of his daughters from toddlers to teenagers, as their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin. The girls communicate in a witty and colourful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origins. 

Eugene shared with us some fascinating insights into the book and his wider work:  about the benefits and challenges of a life across languages, and the evolution of translingualism across the generations of his family; the relationship between our identity and the way we speak; children's inspiring linguistic playfulness, and much more.

On 25th June Eugene will join us for the UK launch of Alphabet Soup, alongside Tamizdat publisher Yasha Klots and poet and translator Robert Chandler.

Pushkin House: How did Alphabet Soup come about? Why did you start this project, and at what point did it become a book?

Eugene Ostashevsky: It came about because my daughters were born and then they started speaking. This was very exciting! I began writing down some of the things they said. I wrote down whatever struck me. My daughters are native English-German bilinguals, and there are other languages around them, including Russian, so I was fascinated by how they mixed languages. But I was also interested by how the things they said showed their developing character. I did not consider my record-keeping as a “project” and certainly not as a book until I was years into it. But then I began thinking that I was compiling an ipse dixit. I sometimes teach ancient philosophy and in ancient philosophy there is a genre when students pass down and record the sayings of their master – for example, in the Analects of Confucius. This is called ipse dixit, the master said. So I thought I was writing an ipse dixit of my daughters.

PH: Can you tell us a bit more about the translingual approach in your work? How does Alphabet Soup contribute to your body of work?

EO: Chronologically, my first language is Russian. But I grew up in New York and the base language of my poetry is English, which is also my dominant language. As an adult, I’ve lived in different places in Europe and I now live mostly in Berlin. In other words, the language of my poetry is formed by my life experience of linguistic multiplicity and incomprehension – not because my poems join words from different languages, which they sometimes do, but because I am not fully one with my base language. I’m outside of it and it’s my material. I look at it from the side. But looking at things from the side bestows a certain freedom – a space to play. And so I think of poetry as play with language and with concepts. As a result, the road from my poetry to children’s language is short. Children play with words just as they play with objects or with social roles. 

PH: In Alphabet Soup, your daughters build worlds amid the collision of languages. There’s also a collision of registers (if we can call it that). The book is thought-provoking in a scholarly and artistic sense, and also childish and very funny. Speaking from your professional perspective, or your perspective as a father, how does a translingual life enrich us – or challenge us?

EO: It gives us many points of view! We are constantly flipping from one point of view to another. Having many languages also means having a place to hide, when speech in one language becomes restrained… for political reasons, for example. The self has more dimensions in which to grow and to be itself. I am a linguistic relativist, in that I think that language is never sundered from semantics, that is to say culture, and therefore translingualism is always to some extent transcultural.

Yet growing up between languages is not an unalloyed good. When you have a language that is uniquely yours because your friends don’t share it, you can feel alienated. As a teenager in New York, I lived largely in English but I read a lot of poetry in Russian and I still, after many decades, stick out from American poetry like a sore thumb as a result of that diglossia.

Still, all the scenarios having to do with translingualism are particular scenarios, depending on may factors. And so, my daughters’ linguistic situation is different. Right now, I am troubled by their relationship to the German language and to Germany, the country they grew up in and which is their country more than any other. They are reading English all the time, and they consume media in English, and they often even speak to their friends in English. And they refuse to read in German! Hopefully, this is just a form of teenage rebellion. But how do I make them read German? My German is terrible. I was retelling the Metamorphosis to the older one, and she became really interested, but then something dawned on her, and she shouted: “You are just trying to get me to read German!” As if that were some sort of crime.

PH: Do you have any favourite moments in the book, or did you learn anything particularly surprising or interesting through collecting the things your daughters say?

EO: A lot. Actually, I advertise it as a translingual book but for me, at the moment, what strikes me most is the way their characters come across. Their preoccupations, especially with obtaining dessert and refusing to clean their rooms. (When I took the older one, at age of five, to see the Ishtar Gate in Berlin, she wanted to know if it made a mess when it fell, and then she wanted to know whether the people had to clean up!)

It is especially interesting to watch their characters develop in time. What one child says on one page is just so different from what the same child says a few pages down, because in real life a whole year has elapsed. Cognitive development is also fascinating: they go from not understanding (and consequently having to memorise!) the natural number sequence to becoming obsessed, four years later, with varieties of infinity.

With translingualism proper, there’s the crazy stuff they do with verbs. For quite a long stretch the roots of their verbs are German but the endings are English. And, because there is a six-year difference between my daughters, the verb hybridisation happens separately and independently and must, therefore, be a developmental stage that other bilingual kids go through. Their punning is just unbelievable – pyrotechnic – and that is also the result of being between languages. But then there are also inadvertent puns, like my mother discussing dinosaurs with them and referring to that scary predator, Tyrannosaurus Wreck.

PH: In Alphabet Soup, and in your previous poetry collection The Feeling Sonnets, you explore the role of language in shaping emotions, experiences, and identity. There is a question at the centre – does who we are determine the way we speak, or is it the other way around? Have you come any closer to answering that question?

EO: You know, Montaigne famously said that “I have no more made my book than my book has made me.” I think this is certainly the relationship between the self and all our speech acts. Nothing comes first. But then there is also the question of whose speech acts make us, where and from whom is the language coming from.

Kids growing up with modern media have all sorts of languages running through them that we can’t control and which we don’t even know. And these languages are very quickly mutating, because the kids are adopting evermore new words and new ways of speaking with their peers. There are studies to the effect that teenage girls are the drivers of language change. Now – with internet – the process is really amped up. And the development of new ways of being in the world – new habits, new attitudes, new rights, new sensualities and sexualities – is also greatly accelerated.

So… If Montaigne’s making of his self through language was a relatively controlled experiment – after all, he uses the word “innovation” as if it were derogatory – I am afraid that shall not be the case with our children.

PH: In The Feeling Sonnets, you also explore the idea of history: the stories of your ancestors and of your home city of Leningrad; your personal histories and one’s relationship with one’s history, especially as an immigrant. Does this story continue in Alphabet Soup? Do any elements of your childhood, of these histories and stories, emerge in the book?

EO: There’s a Russian Jewish theme that comes forward on a number of occasions, mostly inadvertently. Like, I am singing a Russian song to expose a child to Russian but it’s a labour camp song. It’s very hard for history not to come out when you are living in Berlin. I mean, it’s hard for twentieth-century history not to come out. For the first few years after you move there, you are thinking about it all the time. Especially our neighbourhood, which was a Jewish neighbourhood and is full of Stolpersteine, plates with names of persecuted individuals that replace paving stones. I very much have the sense of being a Jew and moving back and repopulating this neighbourhood.

The Germanness of my daughters, their speaking to each other in German – it’s an interesting irony in the book. My translingualism must have something to do with the fact that my great-grandparents switch from Yiddish to Russian, I switch from Russian to English, and my daughters switch from English to German… But there is also an immigrant history from their mother’s side, which is Turkish and Deaf. I am afraid that none of us make very good indigenous people. 

PH: In the afterword to Alphabet Soup, you talk about how children’s playfulness and their use of language was an inspiration for 20th-century experimental artists and poets. Could you tell us a bit more about this? Could we say that a child’s expression is naturally more poetic than that of an adult – even, perhaps, of an adult poet? 

EO: I mention the twentieth-century Russian critic Kornei Chukovsky, who is something of an inspiration in this context. He compared lexical and syntactic innovation in Futurist poetry with linguistic phenomena characteristic of young children. Chukovsky argued that all children were, at heart, poets, because they reinvented words and rules each time they spoke – that each word a child said was, effectively, a neologism. Chukovsky is also one of the best children’s poets in the Russian language. But do I think that a child’s expression is naturally more poetic? I don’t know. I think “naturally” is a very ideological word.

PH: What do your daughters think about the book?

EO: They are happy with it! I told them they are my co-authors, which of course is true. Eva came to the launch in Berlin and signed books along with me, and plans to do it again. She is hoping it will help her become famous. Emma, the older one, who is not at all public, will not sign anything right now, and in fact asked me to use another name for her – the real one is not Emma. But she is not against the book. She is tolerant with me.

PH: What else are you working on at the moment?

EO: I am finishing, with my sister and the artist Igor Karash, another family book – a graphic novel about my sister's and my grandfather's experience in World War II. I interviewed our grandfather at length when he was still alive. He was a soldier and a starving civilian during the siege of Leningrad, he was evacuated and redrafted, he fought in the artillery at Stalingrad, and he was logistics on the Ukrainian front. A strange experience of the war, from many points of view, in many roles – a picaresque, really.

It’s very paradoxical. He came from a Communist family and he spoke German, because his father did med school at the Charité Hospital in Berlin until 1914. So I have family history in Berlin but I only found out about this during our last interview, a century later. The novel, which is coming out next year, is going to be named Victor: A Soldier’s Story, but we use his first name ironically. His story is very different from the official, triumphalist Soviet narrative of the war – from the war myths the Kremlin is using in its attack on Ukraine. There is actually nothing triumphal about it. It’s really about not having any control over history, whether general history or your own.