I’m Vicki.  I didn’t have a name for a month, but then was named after a type of strawberry growing on my grandmother’s dacha in Nizhniy Novgorod.  My full name is Victoria but I hate being called that because I don’t think I’ll ever grow into it.   When I was five, my parents decided that Russia was unhealthy for Jews and other human beings and hightailed it to America.  I’ve been a denizen here ever since.

These are my parents and me.  They are holding me up because I was too rotund to sit upright.  Story of my life. My dad is not Jewish but, in a lot of ways, is more Jewish than my mom.

In high school, I wanted to be an international studies major, but my mom told me I wouldn’t make money and live out of a cardboard box and there was no way she was paying for that, so to sublimate, I read and write about international culture on my other blog, The Walrus and the Carpenter.

After I graduated from college, I moved to DC to live a fabulous life as Woman in the Big City.  The first month, I cried myself to sleep, and then I loved DC.  Fortunately having to worry about being mugged ended when my then-boyfriend proposed to me in a synagogue in Prague and we had a crazy Russian Jewish wedding in which it transpired that our DJ was also a real estate agent and our restaurant only accepted cash.

Mr. B  and I now live in DC, together, but we have tons of family in Philadelphia, so we spend our whole life commuting back and forth.  Mr. B is my support beam and the only person who really understands why I love Shalom Auslander and brings me chicken pho when I’m sick.

Currently, I’m an international trade analyst and product manager in Washington, D.C. (but my opinions here don’t represent those of my employer.)  I graduated from Penn State with a B.S. in Economics, Honors in Economics, an International Economics Concentration, a minor in Hebrew, a thesis on the USSR oil economy, and a Nerd Badge.

I’ve been writing and reading  since I was five.  I write for Jewlicious,  Swift Economics, New Eurasia, and Interfaith Family. I’m writing editing my first novel , which I wrote during NaNoWriMo. And I also review books from time to time on le blog.

You can email me: vicki.boykis@gmail.com.