The Distance From Odessa, by Carol Seitchik

With precise language, and evocative images, Carol Seitchik’s poems invite the reader on a journey both familiar and intensely personal. The Distance from Odessa recounts one generation’s insistence on telling stories that move only forward, to the next generation’s insistence on free love and rebellion, to subsequent generations’ migration to a land of pomegranates and olives, a land where “so much strife wants to be ordinary.” Seitchik’s first collection is memoir, journal, history, one family’s story—and every family’s story—of finding their place in the world.

Carla Panciera, Author of Bewildered, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Grace Paley Prize in Fiction.

The voice of four generations is filled with emotional reflection that captures the human struggle from childhood through adolescence into adulthood. The Distance From Odessa explores the intersection of life and faith and our inescapable inheritance woven through the labyrinth of the family saga through immigration and emigration. Longing for home and the question of home is palpable, as the poet follows the path her daughter takes, moving to a new land, living a new language and the everyday life of crossing cultural boundaries.

Seitchik writes, “the pages of the living are wide open with history, alive with so much to ripen.”