Exile and uprooting

Whoever leaves takes along a language that will no longer quite serve, and arrives in a country where everything must be learned again. The motif produces two families of narratives: that of departure, with workers crossing the desert or the Atlantic, and that of arrival, with Nabokov's Russian professor who takes the wrong train and the wrong words in an American university. Cinema films mostly the second: a family from southern Italy in Milan, a German widow who marries a Moroccan worker, a man found by a Texas roadside.

works 11

• CinemaThe ImmigrantCharlie Chaplin · 1917A short film from the series made for Mutual, it follows emigrants from the steerage of an ocean liner to the streets of New York.Cinema
• NovelThe Radetzky MarchRadetzkymarschJoseph Roth · 1932Three generations of a family ennobled after Solferino, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire wearing away around them.LiteraturePublic domain
• NovelPninVladimir Nabokov · 1957A 1957 novel, written in English, about a Russian professor exiled in an American college.Literature
• NovelThe Magician of LublinDer Kuntsnmakher fun LublinIsaac Bashevis Singer · 1959The novel departs from the familiar literature of Eastern European Jews: its hero, without faith, tries every possible life to see which one will hold him.Literature
• CinemaRocco and His BrothersRocco e i suoi fratelliLuchino Visconti · 1960Five brothers from the South look for their place in Milan, and do not find it together.Cinema
• NovelMen in the Sunرجال في الشمسGhassan Kanafani · 1963Fifteen years after 1948, Palestinian refugees look for work in the oil countries, at the mercy of smugglers.Literature
• CinemaAmerica AmericaElia Kazan · 1963The story follows a young Greek of the Ottoman Empire, from his village in Anatolia to the port of Constantinople, at the end of the nineteenth century.Cinema
• CinemaAli: Fear Eats the SoulAngst essen Seele aufRainer Werner Fassbinder · 1974Munich in the early 1970s, where the union of a German widow and an immigrant worker turns those around them against them.Cinema
• NarrativeA Dakar ChildhoodDe Tilène au Plateau, une enfance dakaroiseNafissatou Niang Diallo · 1975A Dakar childhood of the forties and fifties, told by the woman who lived it, between the working-class district where she was born and the streets of the colonial centre.Literature
• CinemaParis, TexasWim Wenders · 1984The roads of the American Southwest, where a man who has come back from nowhere tries to find his family again.Cinema
• PoetryFewer Rosesورد أقلMahmoud Darwish · 1986When the PLO leaves Lebanon in 1982, Palestinian exile begins again, and the poet writes from Tunis, Nicosia and Paris.Literature