No Return Address A Memoir of Displacement by Anca Vlasopolos

No Return Address A

Memoir of Displacement by Anca Vlasopolos is intense, captivating, intellectually honest, sincere. A life-story told with great human touch, plenty of anedocts, facts, daily life events of a family from Romania.

The story the one of the mother of the writer. Her years spent in Romania, with the terror of Nazis and what would have happened. She didn't know, she was little, that they were in danger, that it was dangerous to speak too openly. The mother of the protagonist of this book was in fact Jewish, while her husband catholic. The protagonist of this book grew up with the sensation of being in part catholic, in part Jewish. The husband tells the future religion of the children and so her dad accompanied her at church, celebrated Easter. Holidays, this ones, not appreciated by her mother although she wasn't a lady in love for religion.

But what scared to death the protagonist was to learn from a friend of her that because she was jewish, because of her mother, catholic hated them. She asked why, and his contemporary said her that he didn't know the reason, but it was like that.

She felt a sensation of profound loneliness preferring to staying in contact with all the minorities in Romania that were discriminated like Armenians.

Considering that the mother of the protagonist spent some time to Auschwitz, many are the sad memories she will report. There are terrible episodes.

"My mother often said that the weather was so harsh in Auschwitz that some prisoners maintained the Nazis controlled it" it's a phrase I would  want to remark. After the terrible experience of Auschwitz, the decision of leaving. A trip to Europe, Paris, for finding later in the New World, precisely Detroit, their new homeland. Without to feeling at home anywhere. It happens this, when maybe people are not accepted, or unwanted. It's s sentiment so brutal and horrible that, wherever they will go they won't find a home, but only a sense of hospitality.

But, although a lot of places changed, what kept the daughter of the protagonist of this book alive was being in grade of establishing, as also suggested her mother to her a web of friendships. It's remarked that "My childhood was populated by women who lived with daily choices between integrity and survival..."

In alast trip to Paris, the tale of the Americanization and globalization of the city, or maybe just as confess her: "...I have discovered myself at home at last in the world, and find the feeling uncanny?"

This book speaks of the meaning of life, home, homeland, religion, food, countries, multiculturalism, memories through objects, stories, food, recipes, storytelling, stones.

I highly suggest it to you.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori