Such is life
Everything that ends must have a beginning
"For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live."
Theodor W. Adorno
When I was a young teen, one of my favorite books was a biography of Alexander Alekhine. To this day I can't explain why I was so drawn to the tragic story of a brilliant mind. My interest at the time had very little in common was either chess or biographies or history of Soviet regime or anything related. Yet there was something in the way the story portraed a man without a homeland, his longing and nostalgia, his ultimate demise away from home… If my life has a narrator, Emma Thompson would be nonchalantly saying “little did he know…1”
Unless you count random and often assinine posts on Facebook, I haven't written anything outside of professional capacity in over a decade. I don't think I even realized it until I saw this quotes few weeks ago and then my spouse reminded me of the same this weekend. For someone who at some point yearned to write, a decade long silence might as well be a death sentence. In many ways I have felt it without realizing or acknowledging it.
Adorno’s quote, beyond a wake call for me as a writer, felt deeply dishonest. I don't want to take anything away from Adorno's years in exile, but he had a homeland that he did return to later in his life. That was not the case for Alekhine whose homeland rejected him2 nor for me.
The Berlin Wall fell before I was old enough to form any sort of a national self identity and before my teen years turned into twenties, I've moved half way across the world, both literally and figuratively. Perhaps it was the remnants of the Soviet legacy but growing up in St.Petersburg I never felt or thought of myself as either Jewish or Russian and as soon as I was old enough to understand I never wanted to feel “soviet.” My twenties were in retrospect a desperate search for a national identity, for a homeland.
I've tried to assimilate as much as possible, engulfing myself into as much Americana as possible. In a sense I was a perfect child of the Soviet regime in my vain strive to be accepted as a perfectly average corn fed all american. You can easily guess how well that worked: the failure did come with a myriad of amazing and irreplaceable experiences and for that I'll always be grateful.
The pendulum swang and for a time I've grotesquely attempted to discover my Russian “roots”. Similarly, I've been blessed with a slew of brilliant people and experiences I've encountered, alas, the result was quite the same as in the previous paragraph.
The mundane realities of adulthood, for a time put the search for the homeland on hold, but the ability to travel and see and experience the world brought back the void I've felt ever since reading the grandmaster's biography: the first time I took a deep breath stepping off of the plane in Shannon I said: “It feels like home.” I meant it then and I am sure I'll mean it now just the same.
Yet, no matter how much at home or like home I've felt in many places across the years and continents, none of them are home nor will they ever be home. I can see us perfectly happy in a small village in Provence or in an apartment in Paris or Lisbon; I can picture a paradise in a cottage in Connemara or a small villa in Palma. We can build a home anywhere but none of those places will be homeland, we will always be different, accepted and perhaps fully adopted but never equals, always the other.
And thus the only home is to continue write… for better or for worse.
If you haven't, you really should watch Stranger Than Fiction.
I've never properly researched the actual facts of Alekhine’s exile so I don't know how much the book has been romanticized. Don't think it really matters to the point.