From Sofia to Chicago

Boxy Moskvitch and Lada cars, pastel-green concrete tiles, derelict playgrounds, intermittent hot water: these were the markers of Izidora Angel’s childhood in 1980s Sofia. “Banana Yellow Trabants,” her essay for our Autumn 2025 issue, takes its name from the Duroplast car that her grandfather, and then her father, Solomon, drove in the 1980s. But bananas show up elsewhere, too: in the myths that young girls would tell each other about the diets of Bulgaria’s famed rhythmic gymnastics team and once, miraculously, on her family’s holiday table. The Angel family's antics suffuse the essay with warmth and humor, but churning beneath the surface is Solomon’s ambition. “He would be the boss, the creative vision and force behind all his future endeavors,” Angel writes, “opening the hottest nightclub in the capital, running five restaurants, renovating city landmarks, building the first manufacturing plant in the country after communism, developing plans to build a whole city.” That city was never built, and Angel lives in Chicago today, sent here alone on a plane more than 20 years ago. She joins us to talk about how her life has been an act of translation.

Go beyond the episode:

• Read Izidora Angel’s “Banana Yellow Trabants” in our Autumn 2025 issue, and an essay on translation and her father, “The Alphabet of Supposition”
• For more on Angel’s translation, read this interview from Reading in Translation about her forthcoming translation of She Who Remains by Rene Karabash
• In 2023, the Bulgarian novel Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated by Angela Rodel, won the International Booker Prize—here are more Bulgarian books in translation

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