By Anca Vlasopolos
No go back Address is a shiny memoir of a lifestyles in exile and a poignant meditation on excitement and loss, repression and transgression, and the complexities of affection below harsh human stipulations. In recounting her life's trip from Romania to Paris and Brussels, then directly to the USA, Anca Vlasopolos writes movingly of the extraordinary attributes of displacement within the modern world--the hyphenated, ambiguous identities; the purgatory during which immigrants watch for move to a different kingdom; the mysterious nostalgia for locations and occasions dimly recalled. all through, she describes the consistent look for a spot to really name home.
Vlasopolos renders a transparent and loving portrait of her mom, an Auschwitz survivor courageously elevating a tender lady via herself after the dying of her husband, a political dissident. She information their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and of cost in Detroit, Michigan, in addition to her final determination to spot the USA as domestic, encouraged by means of the powerful multicultural caliber that enables such a lot of others to do the same.
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Example text
The hateful mornings when my sitter would tie me up because I would not get dressed fast enough, the one month spent in a government day-care center that loomed like years in my childhood memory, all faded in my father’s presence, which I look upon as recompense, though paltry, for my then losing him so soon again. What would I have remembered of him if he had not come back or if he had resumed insane hours of work? My mother later told me that I had seen little of him since I’d been a baby, when he used to snatch me from the cradle and hide with me in an armchair behind the door, where he’d talk and sing to me.
The strange thing is that I don’t remember her explanation, except for her confirming my Jewishness, so I knew Benny to have been right about that anyway. But I think I began to hear the Auschwitz stories shortly thereafter. In vain I try to reconstruct what I thought and felt when I first heard the concentration-camp stories. The context was sometimes so pleasant that I listened to them as to adventure tales, with a sense of excitement as the plot rose and with sorrow or relief at the denouement, but I believe on the whole with emotions not unlike those elicited by my reading of The Three Musketeers or The Count of 25 26 Out of the Mouth Monte Cristo.
The word lake may be redundant for all I know, as in Grasmere Lake; the name is Turkish. The lake itself is a prehistoric leftover from a retreating sea, separated from the shoreline by a mere couple of miles and with so few freshwater tributaries that its salinity almost rivals the Dead Sea’s. Except that in Techir-Ghiol there is life, tiny microorganisms that survive in the rich black sediment on the bottom. The mud is considered a miracle cure for practically every disease. Since it smells awful, we children made horrible faces when pressed by the adults to smear it on ourselves, as if we had suddenly grown fastidious about dirt and smells.