Dina Kalinovskaya (1934–2008)

Dina Kalinovskaya was born Dora Beron to a Jewish family in Odessa, Soviet Union (present-day Ukraine). Her parents were Maria and Meshulim Beron, a pharmacist. During World War and the Nazi occupation of the city, her father was publicly hanged during reprisals against the Jews for an explosion caused by the underground resistance movement. Dora, her mother, and brother were sent to Tashkent. After the war, they returned to Odessa. At age 14, after graduating from primary school, she enrolled in a course for draftsmen, then went to work in a shipbuilding design company. She began to contribute short stories to local publications. After 1966, she lived in Moscow, where she got a job as a designer in a metallurgy design bureau. In 1969, she married illustrator Gennady Kalinovsky; they divorced in 1981 but she kept his surname. What proved to be Dina Kalinovskaya's most famous work, the story "Oh Saturday!" was first published in Yiddish translation as "Oh, dieser Samstag!" in two issues of the journal Geymland. Her first major recognition came from the story "Paramon and Apollinaria," which appeared in Novy Mir in 1976. In 1980, "Oh Saturday!" was re-published in Russian in the journal Friendship of Peoples and translated into Estonian, Czech, Romanian, German, and Japanese. Kalinovskaya continued to publish short stories and essays in periodicals, though she was unable to publish any collections of works. In the literary yearbook of translations from the magazine Year by Year for 1985, her story "Drawing at the Bottom" was published in Russian. The story "Love in the Tangerine Garden" was published in the magazine Friendship of Peoples in 1983, and stories about the Vologda village in the magazine New World in 1984. In 2007, "Oh Saturday!" was published as a separate book. In 2012, after her death, a collection entitled Paramon and Apollinaria, compiled by Lyudmila Abramova, was published, containing seven stories and the play "The Ballad of Recklessness." Other works remained unpublished.