Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss [Paperback]

Andre Aciman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2000

"Moving, deeply introspective and honest" (Publishers Weekly) reflections on exile and memory from five award-winning authors. All of the authors in Letters of Transit have written award-winning works on exile, home, and memory, using the written word as a tool for revisiting their old homes or fashioning new ones. Now in paperback are five newly commissioned essays offering moving distillations of their most important thinking on these themes. Andre Aciman traces his migrations and compares his own transience with the uprootedness of many moderns. Eva Hoffman examines the crucial role of language and what happens when your first one is lost. Edward Said defends his conflicting political and cultural allegiances. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee explores her own struggle with assimilation. Finally, Charles Simic remembers his thwarted attempts at "fitting in" in America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The five distinguished contributors to this volume agree that a homeland tends to be a nostalgic, imaginary place, not a real one, and that the home once lost can never be recovered. They also share a penchant for classifying the minute differences between refugees, exiles, immigrants and expatriates. Novelist Bharati Mukherjee adds another term: the assimilationist "mongrelizer" such as herself, who happily submerges oneself in a melting pot, while nonetheless retaining a sense of ethnic pride. Poet Charles Simic, originally from Belgrade, rejects the idea that exile or displacement means the permanent loss of any sense of home: he fell dizzyingly in love with his new country, and is amusing about his early attempts to assimilateAwearing "jeans, Hawaiian shirts, cowboy belts." Aciman beautifully captures the role that imagination plays in one's experience of "home" by exploring how a tiny park in a traffic island on the Upper West Side of Manhattan came to powerfully evoke the cities of Europe for him. Eva Hoffman's essay on the "new nomads" of the information age is the most theoretical and least satisfying piece. The real heart of the collection is Columbia professor Edward Said's memoir, inspired when "an ugly medical diagnosis suddenly revealed the mortality I should have known about before." His experience of receiving a colonial education just as the colonial system crumbled, of loving the world opened to him in his education while being stung by teachers' constant invocations of his difference, is moving, deeply introspective and honest.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

In these distinct and forthcoming original essays, five prominent writers offer their meditations on exile and memory. The authors represented in Aciman's (Out of Egypt: A Memoir, 1995) collection are a varied lota not atypical sampling of men and women who have found their way to the US from around the world: Aciman, an Alexandrian in exile via Paris; Eva Hoffman, a Pole in exile via Canada; Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali in Berkeley; Edward Said, a Palestinian exile via Egypt; and Charles Simic, a Yugoslav exile of 1945 vintage. These voices of exile are unusually eloquent ones. All five authors are non-native speakers who write professionally in English. For them, the common duality and instability of exile are heightened by the very nature of their work. Aciman puts it well: ``their words . . . are the priceless buoys with which they try to stay afloat both as professional thinkers and human beings.'' The five essays differ in tone and style. The collection begins with Aciman's lyrical and imaginative essay on a park in New York that reminds him of the places of his past, or his ``shadow cities,'' and reaches its gravest moments in the heavy seriousness of Said's reflections on his professional and personal journey in America, with frequent references to Adorno. Hoffman examines the contradictions inherent in nomadism and diasporism, referring to her own life and those of other East European literary figures such as Nabokov, Kundera, Milosz, and Brodsky. Mukherjee, coming from a different perspective, writes about the process of immigration in the US as ``the stage, and the battleground, for the most exciting dramas of our time.'' Aciman made the right choice in closing with Simic's poem ``Cameo Appearance'' and his droll essay on his youthful exile and on the speed with which exile teaches the arbitrary nature of an individual's existence. A thoughtful and diverse collection with a distinctly literary bent. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: New Press, The (May 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565846079
• ISBN-13: 978-1565846074
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #181,178 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

André Aciman was born in Alexandria, Egypt and is an American memoirist, essayist, novelist, and scholar of seventeenth-century literature. He has also written many essays and reviews on Marcel Proust. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Condé Nast Traveler as well as in many volumes of The Best American Essays.

Aciman grew up in a multilingual and multinational family and attended English-language schools, first in Alexandria and later, after his family moved to Italy in 1965, in Rome. In 1968, Aciman's family moved again, this time to New York City, where he graduated in 1973 from Lehman College. Aciman received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and, after teaching at Princeton University and Bard College, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York. He is currently chair of the Ph. D. Program in Comparative Literature and founder and director of The Writers' Institute at the Graduate Center. He has also taught creative writing at New York University and Yeshiva University. In 2009, Aciman was also Visiting Distinguished Writer at Wesleyan University.

Aciman is the author of the Whiting Award-winning memoir Out of Egypt (1995), an account of his childhood as a Jew growing up in post-colonial Egypt. His books and essays have been translated in many languages. In addition to Out of Egypt, Aciman has published two other books: False Papers: Essays in Exile and Memory (2001), and most recently a novel entitled Call Me By Your Name (2007), which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and which won the Lambda Literary Award for Men's Fiction (2008). He also edited Letters of Transit (1999) and The Proust Project (2004) and prefaced Monsieur Proust (2003) and The Light of New York (2007).

His forthcoming novel Eight White Nights (FSG) will be published on February 14, 2010

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deeply Insightful Readings of Exile, Language and Loss, July 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (Paperback)

"Letters of Transit" is a collection of five essays originally presented, in somewhat different form, as lectures sponsored by the New York Public Library from November, 1997, through February, 1998. Andre Aciman, the editor and author of both the Foreward ("Permanent Transients") and the first of the essays ("Shadow City"), focuses on the theme of being an "exile" (as opposed to being an "expatriate" or a "refugee" or an "emigre"). Aciman suggests, in his Foreward, that "[w]hat makes exile the pernicious thing it is is not really the state of being away, as much as the impossibility of ever not being away." He goes on to elaborate, in his ensuing essay, that the exile is not just someone "who has lost his home; it is someone who can't find another, who can't think of another." Aciman, impressionistically explores the way in which living in a new city (New York) can vividly reincarnate the memories of cities in which the exile has lived previously (the "shadow cities" of his title). Aciman's essay is fascinating, perceptive and insightful; it is a wonderful short piece which illustrates why his much-praised memoir, "Out of Egypt", has become a minor classic of the genre.

Similarly, Bharati Mukherjee's essay, "Imagining Homelands", provides thoughtful elaborations on the nuances and connotations of the words "expatriate", "exile" and "immigrant"; she draws fine and interesting distinctions among these words and carefully entwines these distinctions with an elaboration of her own life experiences.

The strongest essays in this collection, however, are those of Eva Hoffman, Edward Said and Charles Simic. All three of these writers provide classic insights into the experience of "exile, identity, language, and loss" which are worth careful thought and consideration. All three suggest (as does Mukherjee when she describes herself as an "integrationist" and a "mongrelizer") that the exile can only ultimately be redeemed by rejecting irrational devotion to the narrow and myopic tribalism of nation, ethnicity, religion, and ideology which so often encumbers the exile community; that redemption comes only through freedom, reason and syncretism. Thus, Simic writes, in concluding his essay, "Refugees", that the poet "is a member of that minority that refuses to be part of any official minority, because a poet knows what it is to belong among those walking in broad daylight, as well as among those hiding behind closed doors."

Hoffman's essay, "The New Nomads", is clearly the best of this collection. She carefully delineates the universality of the exilic experience, an experience which can be found in the Ur-text of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. She then discusses the way in which exile can magnify the impulse to "memorialize" the past. The result, she suggests, is that exile distorts the vision of the past, tending to make it an idealized "mythic, static realm" which forever impedes the ability to deal with the present (what Hoffman perceptively characterizes as the "rigidity of the exilic posture"). She then provides an interesting discussion of A.B. Yehoshua's provocative essay, "Exile as Neurotic Solution", wherein he postulated that there were many opportunities for the Jews (prior to the creation of the modern State of Israel) to settle in Palestine more easily than in countries where they had chosen to live, but it was the one location they avoided. In Hoffman's words, "[i]t was as if they were afraid precisely of reaching their promised land and the responsibilities and conflicts involved in turning the mythical Israel into an actual, ordinary home." The ultimate result of the "memorialization" of the past and the "rigidity of the exilic posture" is that exile communities often cannot function in the locus of the larger society; rather, they conceive of themselves as perpetually "Other".

Edward Said's essay, "No Reconciliation Allowed", describes the dislocation of the exile in vivid terms: "a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity at all." Thus, he finds himself in a secondary school where only English is permitted to be spoken, even though none of the students is a native speaker of English. While his entire educational experience is Anglocentric in the extreme, he is also trained to understand he is a "Non-European Other", someone who can never aspire to being British in any true sense of the word. While Said has been criticized recently for allegedly misrepresenting his past, he is quite forthcoming in this essay in acknowledging his admiration for "self-invention". In some sense, Said's essay and the narrative of his life reflects his theory, specifically the notion that we can (and do) use language instrumentally to construct social realities (in this case the reality of his life).

While somewhat uneven, as all collections are, "Letters of Transit" ultimately provides a rich, varied and deeply insightful range of readings on what it means to be an exile.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, haunting, personal prose by 5 masters., November 16, 1999

By 

Suzi Winson (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile and Memory (Hardcover)

This is a very important book from 5 writers who have suffered the unease that comes from being "neither fish nor fowl", something I've always felt as a Jew, but never related to other immigrants, expatriates, or those in exile. This book also draws in writers and their craft, the work that comes out of "homesickness", the instinct to "memorialize in prose". I read this book in a light trance, feeling if but for a moment as if I lived somewhere. Anyone looking for where they come from or even where they got to should read this book.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Perspectives, January 31, 2002

By 

Bahar Jaberi "kaspienne" (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (Paperback)

This is a great book for those who want to be able to place Exile, Identity, Language and Loss in some kind of coherent context. It allows the reader to be able to understand his/her own behavior and the behaviors of those around them. It can also be applied to novels written in the various genres that deal with immigration and exile--to understand the motivation of the authors regarding plot and character development.

There is not, however, based on just one perspective. We read five different authors' point of view and their personal experiences, which allows for a range of inquiries.

I highly recommend this book.