My Diary & Dray-Khmara as a Poet

Recently, a trunk of items from Ms. Asher's voyage to America (1943)
was recovered from her house of many years in Brooklyn, NY. Together with
snippents of poems and diary entries, Ms. Asher has begun to bring together a
treasure chest of long lost ephemera as well as enduring reminiscences.

A surviving witness of these difficult years (Dray-Khmara was eventually executed
in a GULAG in Kolyma, Russia, in 1939) Oxana Dray-Khmara Asher dedicated
spirited efforts to preserving the heritage and memory of her father, which became the
subject of her M.A. thesis at Columbia University, and was then expanded, in French, as her
Ph.D. dissertation at the Sorbonne. The current volume contains a concise but informative
English-language overview of her father’s work which she has written, accompanied by an
introduction penned by Padraic Colum, a major Irish poet with whom she studied with at Columbia.
The book also introduces Oxana Asher as a creative spirit in her own right, presenting a
selection from her own poetic output that had begun in her happy childhood home and
has continued through the many twists and turns of her remarkable, rich life.
Vitaly Chernetsky

Oxana Asher

“I was born in the Ukraine. My father, Michael Dray-Khmara, was a famous poet and scholar.
He encouraged me as a child to write my poems. His tragic death made a deep impression on me.
I studied at the Slavic Department of Columbia University where I received my M.A. for work on my father’s poetry.
I also received a Doctorate Degree in Slavic Literature from the Sorbonne in Paris.
The music and color of poetry help me to express the idea of love for all living things.”