One-Way Tickets

In One-Way Tickets, Borinsky offers up a splendid tour across 20th-century literatures, providing a literary travelogue to writers and artists in exile. She describes their challenges in adjusting to new homelands, issues of identity and language, and the brilliant works produced under the discomforts and stresses of belonging nowhere.

Speaking with the authority of first-hand experience, Borinsky relates the story of her own family--Eastern European Jews, with one-way tickets to Buenos Aires, refugees from the countries that "spat them out and massacred those who stayed on." Borinksy herself becomes an exile, fleeing Argentina after the take-over of a bloody military dictatorship. She understood, then, her grandfather's lessons: "There's nothing like languages to save your life, open your mind, speed you away from persecution." As a writer of poetry, fiction, and essays, the author also knows intimately the struggles of writing from between worlds, between languages.

In these pages, we encounter Russian Vladimir Nabokov, writing in English in the United States; Argentine writer Julio Cortázar in Paris; Polish writer, Witold Gombrowicz in Buenos Aires; Alejandra Pizarnik, Argentine writer for whom exile is a state of mind; Jorge Luis Borges, labyrinthine traveler in time and space; Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish writer in New York driven from Poland by the Nazis; Latino writers Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina Garcia, and Junot Diaz; and Clarice Lispector, transplanted from Ukraine, to Brazil, to Europe, and the United States.

Not surprisingly, these charismatic and artistic people, as well as many others in Borinsky's nearly encyclopedic associations, inhabit equally intriguing circles. She introduces us to a wide range of friends and lovers, mentors and detractors, compatriots and hosts. We come away with a terrific breadth of knowledge of 20th-century literature and culture in exile--its uneasy obsessions, its difficult peace, its hard-won success.
About the Author: Alicia Borinsky is a professor of Spanish, a member of the Boston University-Chelsea Management Team, and director of the Writing in the Americas Program at Boston University. She has published extensively in Spanish and in English in the United States, Latin America, and Europe. Among her books are Theoretical Fables: The Pedagogical Dream in Contemporary Latin American Fiction; the novels Mean Woman, All Night Movie, and Dreams of the Abandoned Seducer; and the poetry collections La pareja desmontable, Madres alquiladas, La ventrílocua, Mujeres tímidas, Las ciudades perdidas van al paraíso, and Golpes bajos. Her work has been translated, anthologized, and published in the Massachusetts Review, Confluencia, American Voice, Under the Pomegranate Tree, New American Writing, Tameme, and Beacons. She has held visiting professorships at Harvard University and Washington University, St. Louis and is the recipient of the Latino Literature Prize for Fiction and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.