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TALES OF MIGRATION FROM CENTRAL AMERICA AND CENTRAL EUROPE j Helen Fehervary In the midst of a war or an insurgency the dependent condition of children leaves them vulnerable to every peril that threatens their family and community, as well as to one more that may lie implicit in their rescue. If the adults succeed in fleeing to a new country, they bring their past with them. Their identities are already established, their knowledge of a tradition and a language secured, and if they are fortunate enough to arrive in a hospitable land, they will have the power to preserve some portion of that heritage if they find the determination to do so. Some traditions have survived for centuries in diasporas, but there is no diaspora of children. Their individual survival comes at the cost of their old identity and the annihilation of the future that might have lain in store for them as members of the community that could no longer sustain them. They receive the priceless gift of life, but that gift has a double meaning. A new future opens up where only bleakness or extinction may have threatened before, but only by means of a substitution they did not choose. If they had stayed in the war zone, that future would have been swallowed up by their physical extinction. Now it is lost to an exchange. They live on in the identity accepted from a new family and new culture, aware that something will always persist in them of a destiny broken off by fate, always irreparably lost though never completely overcome. And if much is gained by learned research into these phenomena through disciplined knowledge, in the end every child presents the irreducible reality of a unique life. —Marcus Bullock Though we academics always hope and believe that what we study and write about under the large heading of “history” will have its place, and perhaps 16 HELEN FEHERVARY even its effect, in the world—that is, in the world of our most human everyday relationships and actions—the mediation from one realm to the other is elusive and resistant. What we discover when we reflect on our own personal decisions and actions in the world reveals to us that the autonomy on which our profession depends for its intellectual integrity also requires us to think and speak with a degree of distance from our everyday selves. For most of us most of the time, this divide does not cut so sharply or so deeply that we come up against it in any kind of shock. Our subjectivity elaborates itself as a complicated set of connections between different kinds of language in which we express different forms of attachments and identities to the people with whom we have that speech in common. With our parents and their world, we feel the force of memory that ties us to an origin which might supply the very substance that we critique in our intellectual endeavors, but it lies in the nature of time that we should look for distance there. We do not expect to remain unchanged in the cultural identity of a history and perhaps of a community or nation that lies in our past. Among our contemporaries, we submit to the pragmatics imposed by shared interests and shared projects that may bring us together in particular settings and for limited times. Those restrictions dictate specific terms for our discourse. But as parents, we owe everything to a generation that may be completely dependent on our complete presence. With children, we cannot adopt a set of conventional terms designed to contain a body of thought within a controllable framework. In a child we adopt a whole being, a person unfolding constantly in time, growing in all aspects, and ravenous for our complete acknowledgment. As I was to find one day in the midst of a learned presentation on Christa Wolf at Princeton University, it is not always possible to negotiate the simultaneous commitment to a professional and personal expectation. The language of one realm of connections overwhelmed the other, and I found myself lost, unable to speak, silenced between the terms in which we communicate in those two domains. It was ultimately in a passage from Anna Seghers’s novel Transit that I came to see the place of an intersection between the various languages of human experience and resolved the contradiction that had brought me to that moment of silence. In...

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