Alla Marchenko is a sociologist, doctoral candidate at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (Graduate School for Social Research), researcher and poet.

Alla works on the topic of cultural memory and focuses on small towns of Ukraine and Poland, where Hasidic Jews make pilgrimages. Alla was born in Uman, studied and later worked at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where in 2008 she defended her first Ph.D. thesis on the concept of "social prestige" in sociology. Currently, she cooperates with several cultural institutions (namely, the Center for Urban History in Lviv and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews "Polin" in Warsaw), writes her blog in Ukrainian and short stories in Yiddish (yet unpublished). In her work, the sociologist aims to question stereotypes related to the Jewish cultural heritage (in particular, in Poland and Ukraine). 

In Alla's poetry page there are more than 200 poems that she writes under the pseudonym Alanissima.

Paris

It spread a dawning coffee on the roofs,
it fed some leaves beneath with honey colors,
while living high above the arches of Paris,
it holds the bridges -
a flirting sun.

Look, animals and angels
sleep here by the door a hundred years.
Hey, handsome city, you are not the one I trust,
you are a scarf from Lafayette Galleries,
unstable, windy-hot,
your paintings attract hundreds of eyes,
you are packed in thousands of gifts
and millions of destinies.

You are a city-tale
how three hundred metal meters
grew up a sign of neverending love, fault by default.
Just for one euro - cheap and tired price
you'll have a view of Eifel on your desk.

I want to have a view of Eifel on Montmartre,
I think about how he lived, Van Gogh,
and how de Beauvoir with Jean-Paul Sartre
were looking for redemption from this crazy world.

I drank a dawning coffee on my roof,
and this is how I became a cat
with an address in Paris ...

13.08.2018, Paris-Warsaw

FB page: https://www.facebook.com/alla.marchenko.3
Blog: alanissima.wordpress.com
Academic page: https://pan-pl.academia.edu/AllaMarchenko