MediaListen to Lee Kofman read aloud her short story 'At the Russian restaurant', a vivid tale of love, belonging and alternative lives. This story appears in Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange (you can read the story here). Griffith Review ·...

FictionListen to Lee Kofman reading ‘At the Russian restaurant’. AT MY REQUEST, Slavik is taking me to a Russian restaurant in the heart of Melbourne. This is him: narrow water-­blue eyes; lips long and slippery like snakes; chopped hair with a balding patch at...

GR OnlineI WOKE UP at about midday. My head was still heavy from the drinking and some vaguely remembered sexual activity of the previous night (with whom I was also unclear about; my memory seemed to have dissolved in the...

MemoirEARLY IN MY life in Australia, during the year I spent on a bridging visa that included no work permit, and with the little savings I had running out, I rejoiced when a new job offer finally came my...

EssayIN MY TEENS I revered writers. I hung onto their words the way my classmates hung onto marijuana. I believed writers had the gift of clairvoyance, that they knew things about this world non-writers didn't. I thought people wrote...

MemoirIf you ever forget you're a Jew, a Gentile will remind you.– Bernard MalamudBROOKLYN LAUNDRY, 2002: Sometimes I am asked how it feels to be a Jew in Australia. For years I had not considered myself a Jew. I...

MemoirI GREW UP in a Jewish Orthodox family and my first memories of Kabbalah flow from my childhood in the early 1980s. Kabbalah seemed like Salome – an alluring silhouette blurred by seven mysterious scarves. It was so available,...

Fiction‘EVERY WOMAN ADORES a fascist.'– Sylvia Plath 1. The puppyWITH PAUL, SEX has become vicious altruism: Come on, I'll give you what you want... This is what he teaches her: the availability of humiliation; the intolerable easiness of pleasure.He also teaches...

Fiction‘When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and everyone who touches her will be unclean until evening.’Leviticus 15:19 A MONTH BEFORE they left for Australia, just after Gorbachev was...

MemoirPHILOSOPHERS SAY INNER contradictions are a natural thing; they lie within the core of the human condition. I'd add that from the imbroglio of everyday paradoxes, there will always emerge one overriding paradox – one that defines the course...

Memoir'I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets. My overcoat too was becoming ideal. I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! And I was your vassal. Oh dear me! What marvellous loves I dreamed of!'– RimbaudEVENTUALLY IT...