The daughter of Abdullah Kassim (onetime vice president of Zanzibar) and Lily (a historian and educator; maiden name, Golden) Khanga (pronounced Han-ga), her American maternal grandmother, of Polish Jewish descent, was a Russian-English translator for a Soviet news agency. She also claimed to be distant relative to well-known violinist Arnold Steinhardt; her grandmother was the cousin of his father. Her African-American grandfather, Oliver Golden, had moved there with a college degree in agronomy from the Tuskegee Institute but was unable to find any work in his field, and moved to Uzbekistan to develop the cotton industry there.

Yelena Khanga was the moderator of the Russian television talk show The Domino Effect ([2]). She also moderated Russia's first talk show about sex titled About That (, Pro Eto (1997-2000)), which tackled such matters as H.I.V./AIDS, homosexuality and workplace sexual harassment; she later commented that the effect of the show “was like a bomb went off.”

She was also a performer with a comedy group in Brighton Beach called Kanotye.

"My grandmother often said, "Learn to write, Yelena, because it is a piece of bread." In the Russia of my youth, it was a prestigious thing to be a writer. Even if you had no money, people still felt your life was graced by art."

"Part of her insistence that I apply myself to my language studies was attributable to the fact that English truly had been a “Piece OF Bread” for her when she lost her job. The unspoken message was that if trouble cameI had a skill to keep me from starving".