I was born in Romania, a closed society during the Cold War, and I never expected to live anywhere else, especially not in the West. When communism ended, I rushed out of Eastern Europe for the first time, eager to find places and people I could only read about before. I also discovered the power longing and homesickness can have on defining our identities. I moved to the United States, where I now live and work, cherishing my nostalgia for the world I left behind, imperfect as it was. The books I read and write are always, in one way or another, about traveling across cultures and languages.
I wrote
Intimate Strangers: Arendt, Marcuse, Solzhenitsyn, and Said in American Political Discourse
Exquisite writing Nabokov-style would be enough of a reason to put this book, seen by some as one of the most influential books of all times, at the top of my list.
Speak, Memory was assembled from short stories that were published first separately, without any indication that they were autobiographical. This memoir was born literary, even as it contains fascinating historical details about Russia before the Russian Revolution. Nabokov does not betray his longing for this lost world even as he reconstructs it in meticulous and vivid details.
The political aspect, although so important for a writer whose family had to go into political exile, is subtle and often implied rather than visible and militant. This is a politics to discover emotionally, by re-living with Nabokov the everyday joys and pleasures that are cruelly taken away by the revolution, and thus feeling the pain, the betrayal, and the outrage.
It is not the content of the reminiscence that gives this book its power—although the scenes are unforgettable—but the act of remembering itself, brilliantly captured as it unfolds. Nabokov in conversation with the effigies of his past—this is a character we encounter in several of his novels and short stories, but nowhere as clear-headed, unsentimental yet deeply moving as in this memoir.
An autobiographical volume which recounts the story of Nabokov's first forty years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War Two. It tells of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, and his passions for butterflies and his lost homeland. Written in this writer's characteristically brilliant, mordant style, this book is also a tender record of lost childhood and youth in pre-Revolutionary Russia.
This is a Cold War chronicle of homesickness and identity change, written by a Polish woman who came to Canada as a child with her family.
Hoffman had to learn not only how to live in a radically new culture, or how to speak a new language, but also how to get used to a new name and to a new lifestyle. This book showed me how to make a potentially cheap sentiment, nostalgia, into a tool of lucid introspection.
As an immigrant myself, I learned from Hoffman to not feel like I must choose between loyalties—to my previous self, before I left my country, and to who I am now, in a new culture. In key moments, Hoffman likes to imagine who she would have been if she had stayed in Poland, not to compare to who she is in North America but to find a third, middle point from which to see her both Polish and American selves, accept both and abandon neither.
"A marvelously thoughtful book . . . It is not just about emigrants and refugees. It is about us all." -The New York Times
When her parents brought her from the war-ravaged, faded elegance of her native Cracow in 1959 to settle in well-manicured, suburban Vancouver, Eva Hoffman was thirteen years old. Entering into adolescence, she endured the painful pull of nostalgia and struggled to express herself in a strange unyielding new language.
Her spiritual and intellectual odyssey continued in college and led her ultimately to New York's literary world yet still she felt caught between two languages, two cultures.…
Brother. Do. You. Love. Me. is a true story of brotherly love overcoming all. Reuben, who has Down's syndrome, was trapped in a care home during the pandemic, spiralling deeper into a non-verbal depression. From isolation and in desperation, he sent his older brother Manni a text, "brother. do. you.…
Walter Benjamin was a Jewish German philosopher who escaped Nazi Germany only to commit suicide upon arrival in Spain.
This book captures an earlier time in his life, when he was still hopeful, an idealist in search of intellectual adventures and political transformation. He went to Moscow to define his political vision and found a city both seductive and elusive. The intense winter scenes in the deep Muscovite cold are unforgettable, even though he mentions them almost in passing.
Benjamin had another reason to go to Moscow: he was in love. But the woman he wished to pursue was also elusive, unavailable both in practical and emotional terms. The book speaks to the fascination Western leftist intellectuals have had with Russian culture and politics, turning to Russia as an alternative to a corrupt West.
Benjamin’s reflections about philosophy, history, and the Moscow of the 1920s makes me fantasize about our history, if only Russia could have been more like how he saw it then, instead of what it became and what it continues to be.
The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin's intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco-Spanish border, pursued by the Nazis, but long before he had traveled to the Soviet Union. His stunning account of that journey is unique among Benjamin's writings for the frank, merciless way he struggles with his motives and conscience.
Perhaps the primary reason for his trip was his affection for Asja Lacis, a Latvian Bolshevik whom he had first met in Capri in 1924…
At the height of her success as an American writer, Lahiri moved to Italy to pursue her dream of mastering the Italian language.
She got more than what she had hoped for—a new voice, not just a new language. But this discovery comes after many trials and tribulations that show her that a language is a whole universe that demands we completely re-invent, not merely translate ourselves.
This is the memoir of a writer who is keenly aware of language as a key part of our human condition, bilingual already before leaving Italy (in Bengali and English) and never fully at home in any language.
Italian teaches her the humbleness of sounding simple and modest; the courage of making mistakes; the patience to build a vocabulary, storing new words like a collector obsessed with having more and more items; the confidence to speak with natives, including judgmental ones who always see her as an outsider because of her physical appearance.
The most precious lesson is the language itself, not the virtues associated with learning it. A language is a gift, and Lahiri’s gift for Italian comes back renewed to us through this amazing bilingual edition.
On a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and write solely in her adopted tongue. A startling act of self-reflection, In Other Words is Lahiri’s meditation on the process of learning to express herself in another language—and the stunning journey of a writer seeking a new voice.
Me and The Times offers a fresh perspective on those pre-internet days when the Sunday sections of The New York Times shaped the country’s political and cultural conversation. Starting in 1967, Robert Stock edited seven of those sections over 30 years, innovating and troublemaking all the way.
Written in elegant prose and with vivid visual detail, this book uncovers an exotic lost world—lost both to the author, with the death of her parents, and to all of us, with the march of history.
This is the world of a British bookshop owner and his Italian-born wife, in Cairo after World War II, in the years leading up to the 1952 revolution that marked the awakening of independent feeling in Egypt. The city Warner uncovers, on the brink of the revolution and after a devastating war, is her childhood paradise, and she is not afraid to portray it as exotic even as she understands the risk of betraying a colonial gaze.
To recreate this world, she uses not only old photographs and her own memories, but also artefacts, from furniture to clothing, shoes, most of all books (not just their content, but as objects), which she researches meticulously, just as she researches her family’s history, with curiosity and love, non-judgmentally even when it would be all too easy to be critical and dismissive.
This story of self-discovery through traveling far away, both in time and in space, is exceptionally tender and lucid at the same time.
By one of the finest English writers of our time, a luminous memoir that travels from southern Italy to the banks of the Nile, capturing a lost past both personal and historical.
Marina Warner’s father, Esmond, met her mother, Ilia, while serving as an officer in the British Army during the Second World War. As Allied forces fought their way north through Italy, Esmond found himself in the southern town of Bari, where Ilia had grown up, one of four girls of a widowed mother. The Englishman approaching middle age and the twenty-one-year-old Italian were soon married. Before the war…
My book examines the reception of four immigrant intellectuals in America, particularly the negative reception of their political opinions. All four were outspoken critics of what was considered at the time mainstream thinking and political discourse in the United States. The protagonists of my study were aware of their outsider status, used it to their advantage, but also paid a price for it. I discovered that each of them fashioned a unique political ethos that I called the “stranger persona,” which allowed them to be both detached and distant, and deeply involved in American politics. I wanted to explain why these four intellectuals saw American society so differently from American-born intellectuals, and why it was both uncomfortable and enlightening to listen to what they had to say.
