This is The Writer's Voice, new fiction from The New Yorker.

I'm Deborah Trisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker.

On this episode of The Writer's Voice, we'll hear Joan Silber read her story, Safety, from the December 8th, 2025 issue of the magazine.

Silber, a winner of the National Book Critic Circle Award in Fiction,

and the Penn Malamut Award for Excellence in the Short Story,

is the author of nine books of fiction, including the novel's improvement and secrets of happiness.

Now here's Joan Silber.

Safety.

Dictators like to move people around.

Stalin, for instance.

From the summer of 1941 through the fall of 1942, with the Russian front facing massive bombardment and Nazi troops on the ground, he decided to relocate civilians and entire

industries to safer regions in the Eastern Soviet Union.

The Urals, Siberia, the Middle Volga, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan,

eventually received 16 million evacuees, perhaps the most ever moved across land by a single

directive.

I have always liked weird historical facts, but I never would have known this one had my

best friend in middle school, Yasmina, not been from Uzbekistan.

Her family moved to Brooklyn in the early 90s after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

Yosemina was just a little kid, so she didn't remember much, but she had absorbed a number

of stray facts. During the Second World War, her mother had been one of the thousands of Russian

children sent to the Uzbek city of Tashkent.

Yasminu spent much of our time enunciating Uzbekistan for people, spelling it out.

...