Current Issue: May - June 2025
PN Review 283

In this issue:

Gabriel Josipovici - The Myth of the Native Language
Stav Poleg - Running towards My Childhood
Sinéad Morrissey - Arctic Cities
Doaa Kaddah - Prayer
Howard Cooper - Ur-Language
Parwana Fayyaz - In Search of My Silenced Language
Oksana Maksymchuk - Multifarious Beast
Zinovy Zinik - My Mother Tongue, My Fatherland

Current Issue: May - June 2025
PN Review 283

The Myth of the Native Language Gabriel Josipovici

I always think that one of the purest emotions is that of the banished man pining after the land of his birth. I would have liked to show him straining his memory to the utmost in a continuous effort to keep alive and bright the vision of his past, the blue remembered hills and the happy highways, the hedge with its unofficial rose and the field with its rabbits, the distant spire and the near bluebell... But because the theme has already been treated by my betters and also because I have an innate distrust of what I feel easy to express, no sentimental wanderer will ever be allowed to land on the rock of my unfriendly prose.

So writes Sebastian Knight, the eponymous hero of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, articulating the classic view......
READ MORE

Current Issue: May - June 2025
PN Review 283

Running towards My Childhood Stav Poleg There are so many ways to leave a country. Some leave after years of hesitations but keep coming back. Many are forced to flee. Others never really leave, forming their own expat communities wherever they find themselves. And then, there are those – forever outsiders in their own country – who feel an odd sense of relief by finally leaving and becoming official outsiders – foreigners – in a different land. When I left Israel, I slammed the country’s door with such force, you could hear the mountains shaking and the waves of the Mediterranean crashing on the shores in response. I didn’t want to look back or take anything with me apart from my guitar and a few favourite clothes. All I wished was to go as fast and as far as I could, and this, to an extent,......
READ MORE

Current Issue: May - June 2025
PN Review 283

Arctic Cities Sinéad Morrissey For the Cossacks, Siberia was the future – either in pelts or timber –
as the Empire stepped East leaving tracks of bloody footprints
to the Vladivostok coast. Flung outpost of eaves and weatherboards,
dripping steadily from mid-April to unfathomable June,
here exile was largely character-building – with stoves, rye loaves,
foraging, the consolations of saxifrage and plug tobacco.
......
READ MORE