Alphabet Soup

by Eugene Ostashevsky, Elina Alster (Editor), Yasha Klots (Editor)

"Alphabet Soup" collects the sayings of two multilingual girls as written down by their poet father. 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.

With an essay and poems by the author.

A co-publication with Rab-Rab Press (Helsinki).

270 pages, Paperback

Published April 15, 2026

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a Russian-American writer, poet, translator and professor at New York University. Ostashevsky was born in Leningrad and then immigrated with his parents to the United States when he was 11 years old where they settled in New York City.

Ostashevsky has a PhD from Stanford University.

His poetry collections, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi and Feeling Sonnets, are published in the NYRB Poets series.

He selected and translated the poems in Alexander Vvedensky's An Invitation for Me to Think, also in the NYRB Poets series, and translated The Fire Horse: Children's Poems by Mayakovsky, Mandelstam, and Kharms, published in the NYRB Kids series.

Reviews

[jaden eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

read this for a class as my professor was one of the editors! the author also came in to speak to my class about it. such an interesting little book to see how linguistics work for bilingual children. but also to see the development of their personalities and how creative yet rational young children can be. the author was a genius for thinking to write these little sayings down!

[Airam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious and heart-warming.