Yelena Khanga
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Yelena Khanga (Russian: Еле́на Абду́лловна Ха́нга; also known as Elena Khanga) was born in 1962 and raised in Moscow, USSR, and came to the United States in 1990 to write (with Susan Jacoby) Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family: 1865 - 1992 ([1]). Khanga divides her time between New York City and Moscow.
The daughter of Abdullah Kassim (onetime vice president of Zanzibar) and Lily (a historian and educator; maiden name, Golden) Khanga (pronounced Han ga), she is of African, Russian and Polish Jewish descent, the great-granddaughter of a former Mississippi slave and a Polish rabbi. Her American maternal grandmother, of Polish Jewish descent, was a Russian-English translator for a Soviet news agency.
Yelena Khanga was the moderator of the Russian television talk show The Domino Effect ([2]). One of her interviewees was Paul Klebnikov, Russian-based editor of Fortune who was later murdered under mysterious circumstances.
She was also a performer with a comedy group in Brighton Beach called Kanotye.
[edit] Quotes
My grandmother often said, "Learn to write, Yelena, because it is a piece of bread." In the Russia of my youth, it was a prestigious thing to be a writer. Even if you had no money, people still felt your life was graced by art.
