No Return Address

245 Pages·2000·1.78 MB·English

by  Anca Vlasopolos

NO RETURN ADDRESS
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NO RETURN ADDRESS
A Memoir of Displacement
Anca Vlasopolos
columbia university press
new york
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
Copyright © 2000Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vlasopolos, Anca, 1948–
No return address : a memoir of displacement /
Anca Vlasopolos.
p. cm.
ISBN0–231–12130–X (acid-free paper)
1. Vlasopolos, Anca, 1948– 2. Literary historians—United
States—Biography. 3. English teachers—United States—Biography.
4. Romanian Americans—Middle West—Biography. 5. Romania—
Social conditions—1945–1989. 6. Middle West—Social life and
customs. 7. Jews—Romania—Biography. 8. Jewish families—
Romania. I. Title.
PE64V57A32000
973.’049240498'092—dc21
[B] 99–098189
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed
on permanent and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c10987654321
for my daughter,
Olivia Vlasopolos Ambrogio
in memory of my parents,
Hermina Grünberg Vlasopolos and Paul Vlasopolos
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CONTENTS
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xi
Chronology xiii
one Mouthfuls 1
two Gatekeepers 9
three Out of the Mouth 21
four The Vocabulary of Faith 29
five Mud Miracles 41
six To Eat or Not to Eat 51
seven Bucharest 63
eight Contingencies 79
nine Telling Tales 87
ten Growing Boys 99
eleven Paris 113
twelve Brussels 127
thirteen Walls 137
fourteen Frankfurt Passage 143
fifteen Misplacing Detroit 153
sixteen Where All the Lights Were Bright 171
seventeen Variations on the Pastoral 179
eighteen Sub-Urban Skies 191
nineteen Endings, Continuities 195
twenty Returns 215
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PREFACE
While writing this story of exile, I characterized it as a “fictionalized”
autobiography. The quotation marks emphasize the vexed question
of the difference between fiction and autobiography, a question I
recollect Grace Paley dismissing as a concern only booksellers might
have with shelf labeling. Yet where does the truth of an individual’s
history reside in a narrative labeled autobiographical? Is Mrs. Dal-
loway more fictional than To the Lighthouse? Is A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man more autobiographical than Ulysses? Did
Dante really meet Beatrice in the streets of Florence? Did everything
that Maxine Hong Kingston related in her memoir of a girlhood
among ghosts really happen? Is Marcel Proust?
I use these literary contexts as a diversionary tactic from the
uneasy awareness that whenever we re-collect, re-member our past,
we fashion it out of threads, scraps, disparate pieces that for reasons
fathomable or not have been taken along in the mental trunks that
hold our past selves. Were these shreds ever whole? Is there a conti-
nuity of time that remains seamless, unrent by the violence of loss,
displacement, or the insidious wearing thin of daily circumstance?
Memory is fragmentary, and we like to think that imaginative re-col-
lection can assemble the pieces, whether in the crazy quilt of a post-
modern refusal to believe in the integrity of self and history or in the
deceptively organic patterns of a method that testifies to its user’s
faith in ends, and endings, and thus beginnings and middles.
In this book I have tried to be faithful to my historical experi-