Dionne Brand, a Canadian poet of Caribbean ancestry, has pre-empted the title we should have used for this paper: A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging. 1 All migrants know about belonging and, indeed, not belonging, about the double consciousness of claiming more than one community and identifying one in terms of the other. Bina Toledo Freiwald opens the ‘‘Auto/biography’’issue of Canadian Literature with an essay on ‘‘Nation and Self-Narration,’’in which she, an immigrant from Israel, identifies the exclusionary practices of nationhood in Québec. 2 Who, she asks, placing official documents in dialogue with auto/biographical writings, may determine the character of that community, in what languages, and for whose benefit? We ourselves, as immigrants to western Canada, have experienced the isolation of not belonging and the need to create such maps as Brand describes. As readers of auto/biography, 3 we are drawn to texts that imagine (and therefore create) communities of the past, the present, and the future, asking with Freiwald what role the subjective approach, combining memory and desire, may play in the grander scheme of national identities. For the mosaic of Canada as for the melting pot of the United States, the first two generations of new immigrants are necessarily hyphenated by the disenfranchisements of language, class, and proximity to cultural heritage. What does this position on the hyphen entail for auto/biographical identity? And how does the auto/biographer negotiate between two (or more) communities when writing about one (her ancestors, the people who shared their lives, people with similar stories to tell) for another (the wider audiences who will read the auto/biography)?

Return is not always possible but retracing that journey, or temporary reverse migration, can be important because it claims a version of the past which contributes to present-tense belonging. Now, at the turn of the new millennium, auto/biographers are increasingly exploring the possibilities of present-tense belonging by recounting their family’s participation in the massive migrations from Europe during the Depression and after World War II. The children and grandchildren of migrants are often the ones who