One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile by Alicia Borinsky

Abstract

One-Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile by Alicia Borinsky Trinity University Press, 2011. 223 pages Alicia Borinsky's paternal grandmother arrived in Argentina in 1919, escaping the pogroms in Russia. Along with the family images in her grandmother's apartment, which spoke of genealogies, the young Alicia was particularly captivated by large, gleaming silver samovar on the living-room sideboard. The samovar conjured up in the young girl's imagination of heroic flights from persecution, of past wealth, of closed Jewish communities in other lands. Her father, who adapted to life in the city of Buenos Aires with amused irony, was still drawn three times week to his mother's living room: He went for the tea poured from the samovar, the homemade jellies, Russian stories (3). But for Alicia Borinsky came the awareness that these of homeland and exile were just that, stories, tales: understood the message of the samovar. It stood silently on the sideboard warning me not to trust her. Exile, I learned very early on, was about telling (3-4). How then to tell story that might make sense of these displacements? For several pages of her introductory chapter, it seems Borinsky might be opting for memoir in the style, say, of the Mexican writer Margo Glantz's The Family Tree (1981). Or, more politically, that she might be contributing to contemporary Argentine memory debates--by Hugo Vezzetti, Elizabeth Jelin, and others--that look to analyze the massacres that took place under recent Argentine in the light of studies of the Holocaust. There are references to Borinsky's maternal grandfather who arrived in Argentina in 1934 and later sent for his children. Borinsky s mother was the last family member to make it out of Poland in 1936, while others remained and were killed: learned only recently that all the Jews of their town, Slonim, perished (4). Her grandfather exhorted her to study and learn languages, as both way both to broaden her horizons and also potential passport to flee persecution. Borinsky states that his advice was prophetic when, as young adult, she left Argentina to escape its bloody dictatorships (7). But she soon rejects autobiography as her storytelling mode, even though traces of the first person remain throughout her text and reappear, most significantly, halfway through the study, when she describes her move from Buenos Aires to New York. The movement between Buenos Aires and Europe, in particular Paris, informs many Argentine travel accounts from the nineteenth century to the present. Borinsky traces different personal journey, from Buenos Aires to the East Coast of the United States, in which New York replaces Paris as the site of cultural dynamism, exile, and migration stories. Throughout her book, Borinsky inserts modest autobiographical references that speak to productive relationship with many of the writers she considers: here is someone who knows the dining table habits and literary preferences of the Argentine writers Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo; who can describe the grain of Borges's voice; who can be told by the exile Cuban writer, Reinaldo Arenas, that her early study of his work, published in 1974, helped him to break out of isolation in Cuba and find receptive international audience. Critical theory plays an even smaller part in Borinsky's account than does direct autobiography. Other authors might feel tempted to offer meta-theoretical account of the nature of exile in cultural texts. But at least two of Borkinsky's chosen writers, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Vladimir Nabokov, warn against such an approach, for they depict theories that are found to be incomplete. Singer's scholars grapple with thoughts that do not help them organize their lives (117), while the US campus of Nabokov's Pnin offers a circuit of lectures and foreign culture discussions . …