The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

Exile: Inside and Out

Exile Inside and Out ! Bronislava Volková Going into exile happens almost unnoticeably. You may think about it for a long time before you actually “commit the crime”; however, nothing prepares you for the brutal impact of actually doing it or for the extent of its implications. Suddenly you are in exile—outcast, alone, without people who know you or want to know you, without parents or ancestors, without language, without friends, without a past, and seemingly without a future. You weep over what has been lost, over what was and what will be, and mostly over what won’t ever be. Suddenly every memory becomes as sharp as a knife and every step a fatal step that cannot be reversed. Alea iacta est—for better and for worse, this is your life now, life in the middle of nowhere. You are no longer a member of a society or a member of a family, but a long-distance runner of the universe. In the country of your origin, you have been declared undesirable, and even your scholarly , completely nonpolitical writings are forbidden and declared nonexistent. Articles in print are torn out of journals, and your books cannot be owned by anyone, much less reviewed. You find new friends—not among the people you now encounter—their 162 | Bronislava Volková life is too complete, too different, too quiet, too satisfied to feel like a place for your raw heart. You find new friends among those you were previously not allowed to know much about, like the great poet Osip Mandelstam and his remarkable wife and writer Nadezhda, who inspire you and open a road to your own poetic adventures. You read their books and your heart opens to new vast expanses. But you never stop missing your old friends, who are now divided between those who dare to reply to your letters and those who consider their careers too important to be endangered in this way or who consider a relationship with you as futile in your new circumstances. You suffer pangs of guilt about not being able to be there for your aging parents, who miss you painfully . You don’t know if you ever will be able to hug your mother; you know you will almost inevitably miss their dying; you know you will never spend a regular afternoon with them again in your lifetime. You wonder if, in fact, you will ever be allowed to see them again. The next station feels even more remote, a place where you find absolutely nothing that connects with who you are: America. You lead the strange existence of a nonperson. You have a certain image you put on every day when you go out—to work, shopping, to parties, and so on. It is an image of a person who comes from a strange land that nobody knows much about, and this person is now trying to use her skills or knowledge or feeling in a different setting. That is all. Inside, you go on crying for the friends you can no longer call up, for your aging parents whose sharp pain of loss you sense more and more each day, for your old apartment, for every little piece of furniture you were forced to abandon, for your old doll, which is now part of the irretrievable, for the view out of the window of your study, for the street you used to take to school, for the greengrocer’s shop next door. At night, you have nightmares about the distance you put between yourself and your loved ones and everything that is famil- Exile | 163 iar. Your partner is trying to fit in, so he does not want to hear your moaning and grieving and your sense of feeling lost. Your relationship with him dissolves gradually, as it is not solid enough to bear this new weight. Thus you are even more alone. You try to carve out an existence for yourself in the new environment. You find minor ways to fit in. You write in a language nobody can read, and you start publishing in the exile press and become a poet. First, you write about your acute sense of loss—a typical émigré topic, but your heart gradually moves into places where your old audiences cannot follow you so easily. Your next books take you to more universal spaces and explore new horizons, seeking sublime and...