No Return Address

In recounting her life's journey from Romania to the United States, Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world. Vlasopolos renders a loving portrait of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor courageously raising a young girl alone after the death of her husband, a political dissident, and finally, details their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and settlement in Detroit, Michigan.

No Return Address is a vivid memoir of a life in exile and a poignant meditation on pleasure and loss, repression and transgression, and the complexities of love under harsh human conditions. In recounting her life's journey from Romania to Paris and Brussels, then on to the United States, Anca Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world—the hyphenated, ambiguous identities; the purgatory in which immigrants await transfer to another country; the mysterious nostalgia for places and events dimly recalled. Throughout, she describes the constant search for a place to truly call home.

Vlasopolos renders a clear and loving portrait of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor courageously raising a young girl by herself after the death of her husband, a political dissident. She details their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and of settlement in Detroit, Michigan, as well as her ultimate decision to identify the United States as home, inspired by the strong multicultural quality that allows so many others to do the same.

Anca Vlasopolos is a poet and novelist. She is professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and director of the university's comparative literature program. She has published a critical study of Coleridge, Baudelaire, and Yeats, a mystery novel, and two chapbooks of poetry. She lives in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.

[Vlasopolos's] insightful autobiography easily reads like fiction.... Vlasopolos is clearly as talented as she is erudite.... her memoir conveys.... a unique perspicacity worthy of accolades.

Robert Eaglestone:
Neither Anca nor her mother has a return address, and this absence, like her mother's stories of Auschwitz, sensitively retold, haunts the book.