Yelena Khanga was born and raised in the USSR, in Moscow, and went to the United States in 1990 to write (with Susan Jacoby) Soul to Soul: The Story of a Black Russian American Family: 1865-1992. Khanga now divides her time between New York City and Moscow. The daughter of Abdullah Kassim (one time vice-president of Zanzibar) and Lily (a historian and educator; maiden name, Golden) Khanga, is of African, Russian and Polish Jewish descent, the great-granddaughter of a former Mississippi slave and a Polish rabbi. Her American maternal grandmother, of Polish Jewish descent, was a Russian-English translator for a Soviet news agency. Yelena Khanga was the moderator of the Russian television talk show The Domino Effect. She was also a performer with a comedy group in Brighton Beach called Kanotye.

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