From San Francisco’s Richmond District to the World: Why We Started Slavic Voice

By Leah Mordehai and Nellie Fouksman 

We are of American, Russian, and Ukrainian provenance. Our families immigrated to San Francisco without “an acre of land, a troop to command, a dollop of fame, all they had was their honor, a tolerance for pain, a couple of college credits and their top-notch brains” (Hamilton). 

Life for our families at first was hard. Our grandparents swept floors and painted fences to make money. They worked “immigrant-hard” to achieve a good life and give us a good education. In the Richmond District, we grew up surrounded by pieces of the Slavic world. Our parents took us into Europa Plus on Geary to buy traditional Russian foods for holidays. We bought sweets at Moscow Tbilisi Bakery, and our favorite spot for a snack was and still is Cinderella Bakery. As kids we were “forced” to attend math classes at the Russian School of Math, and our parents insisted we take after-school language classes. It was in those everyday places that we realized how much of our Slavic community’s history was right here in San Francisco. 

The history of Slavic people in California and San Francisco is woven into the story of San Francisco itself. The first Russian settlers arrived in Northern California in the early 1800s, establishing Fort Ross on the California Coast. This was one of the state’s earliest multicultural communities, where Russians, Alaskan Natives and Californians traded and lived together. By the early 20th century, waves of immigrants from Ukraine, Russia, Poland and the Balkans had made their way to San Francisco. The Richmond neighborhood became a hub for post-World War II refugees, Cold War dissidents, and, more recently, Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking families fleeing conflict. Today, the Richmond remains one of the most viable centers of Slavic life on the West Coast, a place where languages, traditions and histories continue to intertwine across generations.

As first-generation Russian Ukrainian immigrants growing up in the Bay Area, we felt how distance and politics in Slavic countries were pulling our generation apart. For many of our Slavic peers, traveling “back home” was no longer simple. The war in Ukraine, repression in Belarus, instability in Russia, and visa restrictions made visits rare. Plane tickets became too expensive, direct flights disappeared, and young people who wanted to connect with cousins or classmates across the Pacific Ocean had to rely on scattered social media posts and short text messages on Telegram (the apparently favorite communication app in Eastern Europe). We were losing the sense of shared identity that our parents took for granted. 

Slavic Voice was born from this sense of disconnection from our culture. Slavic Voice began as a bilingual newspaper as a way to let young Slavs tell their own stories in English and in their native languages. We wanted to make something borderless – a publication that could be read by a student in Lviv, a refugee family in Sacramento, or a second-generation teenager in San Francisco trying to understand where their family came from. From the beginning, our focus was on youth voices. We wanted to let the youth write about identity, war, art, humor and belonging to make sure that even when borders close, dialogue and connection continue. 

As Slavic Voice grew, so did our understanding of what it means to preserve culture. It isn’t just about publishing stories. It’s about making sure those stories are recognized, supported and represented in civic life. That’s why we’ve begun expanding our work beyond media into policy and public advocacy. We hope to establish a statewide Slavic Heritage Day in California, improve language services for Slavic communities and raise money to support Ukraine and refugees. For us, civic engagement is just another form of storytelling. It’s how we ensure our community’s narrative isn’t left out of California’s broader story.

As we focused our efforts on California, youth across the nation heard about us and began chapters under Slavic Voice in New York, Minnesota, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Delaware. And more recently, international chapters have started developing in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. 

In a world where distance, politics and disinformation threaten to divide, Slavic Voice exists to rebuild connection through journalism, dialogue, and civic action. We believe that Slavic youth, no matter where they live or where they come from, deserve to feel seen, heard and part of a shared future. From the Richmond District to the farthest corners of the Slavic world, we’re proving that culture is not something you inherit. It’s something we keep alive, together.

Leah Mordehai and Nellie Fouksman can be reached at voiceslavic@gmail.com.

Learn more at https://voiceslavic.wixsite.com/the-slavic-voice.

Membership form: https://docs.google.com/forms/u/4/d/1sf8RWsQqVux1j9r9ZrfO8Lnz3KhvKM_CM8nJTynJ7GI/edit.