Karine Arutyunova’s prose has no beginning and no end: we are always in the center of events that simultaneously occur in several dimensions. From Kyiv Podol in the 70s we find ourselves in Tel Aviv in the 90s and meet the same familiar characters there - Jews and Armenians, Russians and Ukrainians. All of them are forever imprinted in the immediate memory of the storyteller, who weaves her stories with the dexterity of Scheherazade. This book can be opened anywhere and read, admiring the details and unraveling the meanings, just like looking at miniatures. Eastern ornamentation serves as a technique for the author to recreate someone’s long-played – or unplayed – games. The deep, true essence of things and people grows from torn memories and is built into a bizarre chain of pictures, like dreams. Karine Arutyunova is a voice from the new Russian literature, not post-Soviet and not Russian. Jewish on her mother's side and Armenian on her father's side, raised in Kyiv and living for many years in Israel, she has a vision that penetrates ethnic, political and geographical barriers. Mikhail Krutikov, Professor of Slavic and Jewish Studies, USA