Officials guarding the frontier between Russia and the German zone took malicious delight in harassing those wishing to pass. Since Marie and her husband were without documents and without shelter in a town completely strange to them where they knew no one, they could not stay. Nor could they return.

In those days, I straddled more than a handful of worlds, which is also to say I belonged wholly to none.

Era il primo di cinque fratelli, il suo mondo erano i boschi, il lavoro e la povertà. Poi lo reclutarono e lo fecero prigioniero in una pianura, dove l’orizzonte nascondeva solo l’orizzonte. Tutto era strano ed incomprensibile per lui. Lui, che non si era mai mosso dal suo paese. Lui, che avrebbe scoperto luoghi nuovi da dietro un fucile e conosciuto persone solo attraverso un mirino. Lui, che non sapeva che sarebbe morto in eterno.

How is it possible for people and places to change so entirely that they lose any connection with what they used to be? Can a man adapt to new things and new places without losing a part of himself?

But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving. If the Lenape were forced from their ancestral home on the island of Mannahatta, the eviction of Little Syria's impoverished immigrants is no surprise, and it's hard for me to imagine that things will ever be any different.

mingling with the remains of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.

I tried to imagine what it would have been like to study at such a place, to walk across marble floors each morning and, day after day, come to associate learning with beauty. But my imagination failed me. I could only imagine the school as I was experiencing it now, as a kind of museum, a relic from someone else’s life

To be the child of a place that never gave you birth …

Quite a way back down the line my self-pity had got the better of me. I really did blame it all -- the terrible food, the nightmarish walks, the cramped, uncomfortable tents, the revolting, fly-plagued holes we were supposed to crap into, and, worst of all, the two empty seats in the West Stand -- on the fact that I was the child of estranged parents, the product of a broken home;

... despite the Turks' friendliness, most of the exiles soon left Istanbul. No opportunities existed there for them, and Turkey seemed an alien land. Private individuals proceeded to western Europe, French visas being most sought after. Russians still regarded Paris as the center of civilization, especially in contrast to the ferocious Stone Age into which Russia had fallen, or to the sleepy lands of the former Ottoman Empire.