Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky
Author and Physician in Chicago, IL
About Mikhail
His plays, novels and poetry feature colorfully adapted accounts of life in the Soviet Union and assimilation in the United States. He began writing after his emigration in response to his newly earned freedom from the repressive society of his former country. Characters from his life, like his coworkers, family and acquaintances around the globe, join his fictional and semi-autobiographical protagonists in settings from the Ukrainian countryside to immigrant communities in Chicago.
New Books
Titles published in 2018
Reviews
Viennese Kaddish
Review from 1999 Performance
Holocaust is memorably evoked in the poem “Hitler and Mozart” by Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky that inspired Timur Kogan to compose oratory “Viennese Kaddish”. The words “Hitler and Mozart” connect irreconcilable ideas of good and evil that every generation tries and never can resolve. Kaddish is an ancient Jewish prayer for the dead and for universal peace. Mikhail has family members perished in Holocaust.
House by the Lake
Review from 2002
I always approach the hurriedly published books that appear one after the other in our immigrant milieu with distrust. But a friend of mine spoke so persuasively about Mikhail Berman-Tsikinovsky’s A House by the Lake that I decided to read it. And I wasn’t sorry for doing so. The author of this book is a doctor who has already lived in Chicago for a quarter of a century, and the book was published in his birthplace, Kharkov.
