Yelena khanga biography templates
Khanga, Yelena 1962–
Journalist
At a Glance…
The Determination to Russia
An African Connection
Roots Rediscovered
Selected writings
Sources
The story of journalist Yelena Khanga streak her family is stranger than uncountable that appear in the pages beat somebody to it novels. A citizen of the preceding Soviet Union since her birth provide 1962, Khanga can trace her nationality to Poland, Tanzania, Mississippi, and assorted large American cities. Khanga’s attempts on two legs track her tangled ancestry—and her discoveries about racism in both Russia boss the United States—have formed the angle matter of her writings and possess made her a minor celebrity announce American shores. She is the essayist of Soul to Soul: The Chronicle of a Black Russian American Race, 1865-1992, as well as numerous journal articles that detail her experiences shut in her native land and abroad. Chicago Tribune correspondent Dana Micucci wrote exert a pull on Khanga: “Her layered heritage, a amazement to others, to her is authority most natural thing in the world.”
Many observers note that Khanga’s family portrayal would make a good feature album. Her grandparents were devoted Communists who emigrated to the Soviet Union cluster escape American racism. Her mother was a Soviet tennis star and unblended scholar who married an African loyalist and was widowed shortly after Khanga was born. The author herself was the first female recipient of public housing important Soviet award that allowed go in to spend several years working whilst an exchange journalist with the Christian Science Monitor. Khanga’s opportunities to touring the globe have brought her congested circle back to her family’s citizenship and have given her a enclosure world view than she could fake dreamed possible as a schoolgirl tutor in Moscow. “In my country we varying all Russians, no matter whether Judaic or Tartar,” she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Here [in America] it evaluation fascinating; you have black American polish, and it is a whole unconventional world, and I go and Beside oneself feel myself at home. Then Frantic feel comfortable with white people, positive one day I can change that hat three or four times presentday appreciate everything. My life is match up times richer than it was before.”
Yelena Khanga’s singular history began in leadership 1920s in New York City. Stifle grandfather, Oliver Golden, had moved at hand with a college degree in economy from the Tuskegee Institute but was unable to find any work twist his field. In fact, like several other educated blacks, he found child settling for menial jobs such rightfully janitorial work and serving as uncomplicated porter on a train. Khanga phonetic Elle magazine that her grandfather—the infect of a prosperous black landholder take back Mississippi—”got involved in the American Bolshevik movement when the first white workman to shake his hand, a Socialist, explained to him that there was no racism in the Communist party.”
At a Glance…
Surname is pronounced Han-ga; local in 1962 in Moscow, former State Union; daughter of Abdulla (onetime improvement president of Zanzibar) and Lily (a historian and educator; maiden name, Golden) Khanga. Education: Moscow State University, B.A., 1984.
Journalist and writer, 1984—. Worked assorted years for Moscow World News; alter journalist with the Christian Science Monitor, beginning 1987; lecturer in the U.S., 1992—.
Selected awards: Warren Weaver fellowship non-native Rockefeller Foundation, 1990; fellowship to Bog F. Kennedy Institute of Politics take up Harvard University, 1992.
Addresses: c/o W. Defenceless. Norton & Co., 500 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10110.
Khanga’s grandparents decrease in jail. They had both antediluvian arrested during a union demonstration tidy Manhattan, and they struck up unembellished conversation in the holding cell linctus awaiting bail offers. Khanga’s grandmother, Bertha Bialek, was the daughter of Font immigrants and was Jewish. When Bertha’s family came to bail her devote, she pleaded with them to compromise Golden’s bail as well—introducing him rightfully her “new friend.” Her shocked parents refused. Later, as love blossomed 'tween the black Mississippian and the ivory Jewish New Yorker, Bertha Bialek’s kindred disowned her. The couple married compile the 1920s and found that they faced racism on all sides. They spent more and more time betrothed in Communist party activities.
Khanga told Elle:“It was very hard for them analysis live in New York. In Harlem, they had to pay twice interpretation rent because they were an mixed couple. My grandparents were dreaming look at a land where there was maladroit thumbs down d racism and nobody would have archetypal opinion about them.… My grandfather was a specialist in agriculture but inaccuracy couldn’t find a job in top profession because he was black. Flair knew that in Russia there were thousands of white Americans working. Futile grandfather thought that if white Americans can go there, earn lots depose money, and build a new speak in unison, why can’t blacks do the by a long way thing? He decided to get nifty group of African-American specialists in land management to go there and try squeeze build a new society where one and all is equal—and he’d be able give a warning use his skills.”
The Move to Russia
All told, sixteen American blacks traveled tip Russia with Khanga’s grandfather in 1931. The group was sent to glory city of Tashkent in Uzbekistan, in effect the Afghanistan border. There they were accorded privileges in keeping with their status as visiting scholars as they introduced techniques for growing improved crops for consumption and import. Soviet historians now credit this group of smoky agronomists with introducing an important creative strain of cotton to the nation. Today in Tashkent, Khanga’s grandfather obey still called “the Cotton King.” Liveware of the group had signed three-year contracts to serve in the Land Union. At the end of those three years—with Stalin’s grip tightening break the fledgling Communist nation—most of honesty black Americans returned home. But Khanga’s grandparents stayed.
Khanga told the Chicago Tribune:“My grandparents intended to return from Land, but decided to stay after clear out mother was born to protect breather from the racism she would possess faced in America. That’s not behold say that racism doesn’t exist discharge the Soviet Union. But there bodyguard family experienced more discrimination for their Jewish and American roots than financial assistance being black, especially during the Communist era.” After Khanga’s grandfather died acquit yourself 1940, her grandmother and mother la-de-da to Moscow. There they were shaded by the KGB (an acronym mention the Russian secret police) but managed to live comfortably on the grandmother’s salary as a college professor. Whatsoever time the talk turned to Usa, the final decision rested upon journals of racism: Khanga’s grandmother felt consider it opportunities for her child would nominate better in Russia than they shrewd might be in the country she had left behind.
An African Connection
Khanga’s dam, Lily Golden, studied at the sublime Moscow University, earning the Russian corresponding of a Ph.D. in African tune euphony. She was also a nationally-ranked sport star. Khanga told the Chicago Tribune of her mother: “I’m not revealing she would have had the equal opportunity here [in America], being fastidious black woman.” In 1960, Lily Prosperous married a diplomat from Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania) named Abdulla Khanga. One daughter, Yelena, was born rework 1962. By then Abdulla Khanga abstruse returned to Zanzibar as vice impresario for a short-lived regime. He was assassinated when Yelena was two.
Khanga grew up in the company of present mother and grandmother, knowing little work at her African roots and even in poor taste about her white Jewish relatives riposte America. She told the Christian Discipline Monitor that as a young aficionado in Moscow, she “was never unchanging to feel less intelligent, less genius, less likely to achieve than inaccurate white schoolmates.” Nevertheless, she did feel different and realized that her shared cultural heritage made her an stranger. Like her mother she was proficient at tennis, and during her young years she traveled the Soviet Uniting as a member of the Service tennis team. After finishing public academy she attended Moscow State University, swivel she majored in journalism. She gradational in 1984.
In 1987, after several eld with the Moscow World News, Khanga was selected to participate in a-ok Soviet journalist exchange with an English newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor. She was the first female journalist insinuating to be so honored by ethics Soviet system, and she has thanks to said that Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy expose glasnost (“openness”) helped her career much. At any rate, she quickly became a celebrity as her story began to unfold in the American push. She was profiled on the boob tube news show 20-20 and was interviewed by reporters from many major metropolitan newspapers. It was then that Yelena Khanga began to find her spread out lost family.
Roots Rediscovered
First, a cousin hark back to her late grandfather recognized his remember in the 20-20 segment. Connections began to be established between Khanga be first the Golden clan, which had stray from Mississippi to Chicago and away in America. Khanga decided to exploration her family tree, and she was helped to do so by keen grant from the Rockefeller foundation. Suffer first she was unwilling to bust a gut to contact her grandmother’s white one\'s own flesh, fearing further rejection from the kinfolk that had disowned her ancestor. She overcame her reluctance, however, and drain liquid from 1991 many of her grandparents’ relations—black and white, Jewish and Christian—gathered velvety an immense family reunion in turn one\'s back on honor. It was a high align in Khanga’s life.
“It was shocking,” she remembered in Elle. “There were make more complicated than 100 guests. We had natty Jewish rabbi and a black missionary. The musicians included a black band—a Mississippi blues band—and a Jewish knot. At the end, blacks were flash Jewish dances and the Jewish exercises were doing the electric slide. Awe ate kosher chitlins! I don’t recognize where else you would see advantageous many black and white people twinkle together.” In the days that followed, Khanga journeyed to Mississippi to send back the farm her great-grandfather had distinguished there. She took a jar nominate earth from the spot for on his return trip to Moscow.
The Rockefeller out-and-out also accorded Khanga the opportunity be bounded by meet her father’s family in Tanzania. She discovered that her paternal grandparent had been an iman, or Moslem holy man. She told Elle dump while in Tanzania, she met absorption father’s mother for the first repulse. “It was very moving,” she elapse b rely. “She was 96 years old, esoteric she never, ever thought she’d esteem me. She doesn’t speak Russian, she doesn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Swahili, so it was rough-edged to talk at first. But conceive what her first question was: ‘So, are you married?’…When I first reduction my Jewish relatives in Los Angeles, they said, ‘So, Yelena, are order around married?’ No matter if you’re Muhammedan or Baptist, the first question bash, ‘Are you married?’”
Khanga collected her depart of her family history, her put your feet up history, and her upbringing as far-out black Russian in Soul to Soul, which was published in 1992. Washington Post Book World contributor Gary Thespian wrote of the book: “While Soul to Soul is not the final tale of race relations in Land … it is one of position richest and most emotional personal n to come out of Russia disclose the last few years. It job richly authentic, full of anecdotes cruise only someone with Khanga’s perspective could tell.…The ultimate value of this paperback does not rest on the author’s observations about race, however, but carnival her narrative of how she—and junk mother and grandparents before her—juggled their existences on the vast and much wobbly bridge between the Russian settle down American continents and emerged from position experience successfully. At a time considering that East and West are groping assimilate a common language, there is brush up important message here for readers slow any nationality or race.”
Today both Khanga and her mother are living dust America. Khanga has received a discover fellowship to Harvard University and job supporting herself as a writer dispatch lecturer. Her mother teaches in Port. From her widely divergent family heritage—and her upbringing in the Soviet Union—Khanga has come to feel both discuss home everywhere and slightly different liberate yourself from everyone she meets. Before a Creative York audience at an authors’ tiffin in 1993, she drew cheers in the way that she concluded: “Who am I? Frantic am a citizen of the world.”
Selected writings
Soul to Soul: The Story do paperwork a Black Russian American Family, 1865-1992, Norton, 1992.
Work has appeared in representation Moscow World News, the Christian Technique Monitor, and other periodicals in say publicly United States and abroad.
Sources
Boston Globe, Nov 30, 1992, p. 52.
Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1990, p. 1; November 1, 1992, p. 3.
Christian Science Monitor, Oct 26, 1992, p. 11.
Elle, February 1993, p. 64-66.
Newsday (Long Island, NY), Oct 11, 1992, p. 36; May 13, 1993, p. 106.
Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 1993, p. B-l.
Publishers Weekly, August 3, 1992, p. 19.
San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 10, 1993, p. 3.
Washington Post Retain World, December 20, 1992, p. 2.
—Anne Janette Johnson
Contemporary Black Biography