No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement / Edition 1

by Anca Vlasopolos

Overview

No Return Address is a vivid memoir of a life in exile and a poignant meditation on pleasure and loss, repression and transgression, and the complexities of love under harsh human conditions. In recounting her life's journey from Romania to Paris and Brussels, then on to the United States, Anca Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world—the hyphenated, ambiguous identities; the purgatory in which immigrants await transfer to another country; the mysterious nostalgia for places and events dimly recalled. Throughout, she describes the constant search for a place to truly call home.

Vlasopolos renders a clear and loving portrait of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor courageously raising a young girl by herself after the death of her husband, a political dissident. She details their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and of settlement in Detroit, Michigan, as well as her ultimate decision to identify the United States as home, inspired by the strong multicultural quality that allows so many others to do the same.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231121309
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/07/2000
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)
Lexile:	1400L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Anca Vlasopolos is a poet and novelist. She is professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and director of the university's comparative literature program. She has published a critical study of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats, a mystery novel, and two chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Chronology
1. Mouthfuls
2. Gatekeepers
3. Out of the Mouth
4. The Vocabulary of Faith
5. Mud Miracles
6. To Eat or Not to Eat
7. Bucharest
8. Contingencies
9. Telling Tales
10. Growing Boys
11. Paris
12. Brussels
13. Walls
14. Frankfurt Passage
15. Misplacing Detroit
16. Where All the Lights Were Bright
17. Variations on the Pastoral
18. Sub-Urban Skies
19. Endings, Continuities
20. Returns

What People are Saying About This

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

A beautifully written memoir, its stories and analyses woven seamlessly in prose that is both passionately and intellectually compelling.

— Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces: An Asian American Memoir of Homelands

Kathe Koja

Full of sensuous detail, comic and sad, No Return Address limns a life of change and contradiction, with a survivor's brio and a poet's grace.

— Kathe Koja, author of The Cipher, Kink, and Extremities

Editorial Reviews

Neither Anca nor her mother has a return address, and this absence, like her mother's stories of Auschwitz, sensitively retold, haunts the book.

Times Literary Supplement - Robert Eaglestone

Neither Anca nor her mother has a return address, and this absence, like her mother's stories of Auschwitz, sensitively retold, haunts the book.

— Robert Eaglestone

Times Literary Supplement

Vlasopolos opens this pensive memoir by proclaiming that she is not Philip Roth and that she detests therapy. Indeed, she is no "self-hater," as Roth is often labeled, and she does not equivocate regarding her Jewish origins in order to establish a new sense of self. Her insightful autobiography easily reads like fiction and is actually more of a love letter to her family--especially her mother--than to her Romanian heritage and its place in her adult life in America. While this is not an inappropriate focus, the early chapters, which depict the political pressure that Vlasopolos could sense while growing up in Romania, are far more riveting than the later chapters, which center on her psychological quest of the West at the age of 13. The word "displacement" here apparently entails a form of indescribable longing rather than location or identity. Alas, it remains unclear whether the teenage girl eventually freed herself of the mental burdens of communism or is still unwittingly adapting to a culture in which the "I" overrules the "we." An English professor and a writer, Vlasopolos is clearly as talented as she is erudite, and despite the blurred ending, her memoir conveys well-above-average writing and a unique perspicacity worthy of accolades.--Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal" Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A poet and novelist relates her journey from childhood in communist Romania to her coming of age in the US. She writes movingly about ambiguous identities assumed by displaced people, and describes the constant search for a place to call home. The true heroine of the story of the author's mother, an Auschwitz survivor who raised her daughter herself after her husband's death. Includes b&w personal photos. The author teaches English at Wayne State University. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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