Alphabet Soup collects the sayings of two multilingual girls as written down by their poet father Eugene Ostashevsky. As their Turkish-German-Russian-American family moves from New York to Berlin, the girls communicate in a witty and colorful language of their own, effortlessly mixing words of different origin. Does who we are determine the way we speak — or is it the other way around? Alphabet Soup shows us the girls’ language as it changes, letting us witness their metamorphoses from toddlers to teenagers. 

Eugene Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad, grew up in New York, and now commutes between New York and Berlin. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet and NYRB Poets, 2022), explores the affects of living in a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), examines the challenges of communication between pirates and parrots.

Eugene runs sdvig series on translingual avant-garde writing for Rab-Rab Press.

Alphabet Soup is published in collaboration with Tamizdat Project from New York City, and is designed by ELAS.

“A marvelous book! Language is itself a poet: this is something that children know (as do some poets).” 

‍ ‍ Yoko Tawada, author of Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue.

“A delightful collection of mixed-language creations that will resonate with parents raising bilingual kids.”

‍ ‍ Aneta Pavlenko, author of The Bilingual Mind: And What it Tells Us about Language and Thought.