DISPLACED PERSON

Search
Skip to content
  • About
    • About Me
      • Brief Bio
    • My Native Land
    • Being Displaced
    • My Adopted Land
  • Essays
    • “On Being Invisible” Series
      • On Being Invisible
      • On Being Invisible: Our Elderly
      • On Being Invisible: Our Nation’s Veterans
    • “Dear Elvira” Series
      • Dear Elvira: Regarding [Literary] Diets and Cats
      • Dear Elvira: Bad Writing and Every Beholder’s Eye
  • Stories
    • Cold and Hungry and Far From Home
      • 1. Making Soup
        • The Story of a Story
      • 2. Home Furnishings
      • 4. Winter Wonderland
      • 5. The Microclimate of Trees
  • Novels
    • Nation of Hereos
    • Anna Noon
      • Synopsis
      • Preface; Part I, Chapter 1
      • Readings
  • Poems
  • Announcements
  • Contacts

Quotes

Fiction

Imagining . . .

Quote 24 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
The Second Plane
11 September 2001, World Trade Towers, New York City, NY (Photo: Robert Clark)

“Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

—Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 15 September 2001

Share this:

  • Share
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email
  • Click to print (Opens in new window) Print
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook
  • Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn

Posts navigation

← Previous 1 2

Look and Listen . . .

  1. W. H. Auden wrote the poem “September 1, 1939”  during the first days of World War II. It deliberately echoes the stanza form of W. B. Yeats’ “Easter, 1916” and similarly moves from a description of failures and frustrations to the possibility of transformation. (See text.) Here it is, as read by Dylan Thomas:

    Note: Since I posted this, I have read Edward Mendelson’s “The Secret Auden,” which shows that Auden was a great person as well as a great poet.

    An Affirming Flame

    22 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  2. Taken literally, “Pūt vējiņi” (“Blow, winds”) could be a sentimental folk song about the defiance of a reckless rake whose beloved’s mother had broken a promise to give her daughter’s hand in marriage because he drank and raced horses. (“I drank on my own tab / And raced my own horse.  // And married my own bride / Without her parents’ knowledge.” But his longing to return home, as well as the reverend way that Latvians started to sing it made it a surrogate national anthem, sung during times of oppression, when something more provocative such as “Dievs, sveti Latviju!” (“God, Bless Latvia!”) would have elicited harsh reprisal from authorities. Here it is as sung at the closing concert of the 2008 Latvian song and dance festival (Dziesmusvētki):

    Blow, Winds

    22 November 2013 Ilse Munro 1 Comment
  3. Brett Candlish Millier: “[Elizabeth Bishop’s] ‘One Art’ is an exercise in the art of losing, a rehearsal of the things we tell ourselves in order to keep going, a speech in a brave voice that cracks once in the final version and cracked even more in the early drafts. The finished poem may be the best modern example of a villanelle and shares with its nearest competitor, Theodore Roethke‘s justly famous ‘The Waking’—’I wake to sleep and take my waking slow’—the feeling that in the course of writing or saying the poem the poet is giving herself a lesson, in waking, in losing. Bishop’s lines share her ironic tips for learning to lose and to live with loss.” (See the full text of the poem.)

    The Art of Losing

    22 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  4. From 1944 to 1945, the approaching Soviet Army forced many Latvians to find escape routes to other countries. According to one source, about 250,000 people became refugees. Many got stuck in Courland, and some 50-60,000 were murdered by Soviet troops in Poland and Germany. After the war, approximately 6000 Latvians found refuge in Sweden, 120,00 in West Germany, 3000 in Austria and 2000 in Denmark. In later years, Latvian emigration spread to the United States, Canada, Australia and other countries. Some succumbed to forced repatriation by the Soviets; most expected to voluntarily return once Latvia was free, though that rarely occurred.

    Leaving Latvia

    21 November 2013 Ilse Munro 3 Comments
  5. Although Tom Petty uses “refugee” metaphorically, his song captures the meaning of the word. “This was a reaction to the pressures of the music business,” he said. “I wound up in a huge row with the record company when ABC Records tried to sell our contract to MCA Records without us knowing about it, despite a clause in our contract that said they didn’t have the right to do that. I was so angry with the whole system that I think that had a lot to do with the tone of the Damn the Torpedoes album. I was in this defiant mood. I wasn’t so conscious of it then, but I can look back and see what was happening. I find that’s true a lot. It takes some time usually before you fully understand what’s going on in a song—or maybe what led up to it.”

    Live Like a Refugee

    21 November 2013 Ilse Munro 1 Comment
  6. For the opening lines of The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers wrote: “It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person and hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.”

    An Unjoined Person

    21 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  7. The following is an interview with 83-year-old Mirdza Balas, a librarian in the Sonoma County system. She drove the bookmobile and subsequently became manager of Sebastopol branch, from which she retired in 1989. Balas relates her memories of growing up in Latvia before and during World War II and moving through Europe as a displaced person before she came to the United States in 1957.

    An Oral History

    21 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  8. The Economist, 22 May 2008: “Being burnt in effigy on the streets of Moscow by nationalist hoodlums must count as a kind of Oscar if you are a Latvian filmmaker whose aim is to expose modern Russia’s blindness to the criminal history of the Soviet Union. The ire of Young Russia’s protest outside the Latvian embassy this week was directed at Edvins Snore, whose film Soviet Story is the most powerful antidote yet to the sanitisation of the past.”

    The Soviet Story

    20 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  9. The musical Eslingena premiered in Toronto, Canada in 2004 at the 12th Latvian Song Festival. At the end, as Andris Straumanis reports, “the audience joined hands and, led by the actors and crew, sang again the closing song: ‘Vai tu vari mani tagad pateikt, Kas mums dzīvē notiks?‘ Can you tell me now what will become of us? It is a question that is as relevant now as it was in the Esslingen DP camp, and as it has been in much of Latvian history. We don’t know the answer. That’s why I cried.” Here is a parody of a Soviet attempt to convince Latvians in the DP camp to repatriate:

    Forced Repatriation

    19 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  10. Latvian-American artist Markus Rotkovičs (Mark Rothko): “I’m not an abstractionist. I’m not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

    Tragedy, Ecstacy, Doom

    19 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
More videos →

Consider . . .

  1. Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students.
    Salman Rushdie having a discussion with Emory University students.

    “So my subject changed, was no longer a search for lost time, had become the way in which we remake the past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool.”

    Salman Rushdie, “Errata: or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children,“ 1983

    Errata

    17 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  2. Barrack in Dolinka
    A barrack in Dolinka, a village at the center of the gulag system in Kazakhstan. (Source: Reuters)

    “Dad always said a person must have a magnificent reason for writing out his or her Life Story and expecting anyone to read it.”

    Marisha Pessl, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, 2006

    Magnificent Reason

    16 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  3. Thomas Edison's factory
    Storage Battery Assembling Department, Thomas Edison’s factory (Source: National Park Service.)

    “There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.”

    —Joshua Reynolds, often misattributed to Thomas Edison, who liked it so much that he posted it around his factory.

    An Apt Misattribution

    3 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  4. Dinaw Mengestu
    Dinaw Mengestu in Washington, DC in 2012 (Source: Getty Images)

    “What was it my father used to say? A bird stuck between two branches gets bitten on both wings. I would like to add my own saying to the list now, Father: a man stuck between two worlds lives and dies alone. I have dangled and been suspended long enough.”

    Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 2007

    Between Two Branches

    2 December 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
  5. The Second Plane
    11 September 2001, World Trade Towers, New York City, NY (Photo: Robert Clark)

    “Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

    —Ian McEwan, The Guardian, 15 September 2001

    Imagining . . .

    24 November 2013 Ilse Munro Leave a comment
More quotes →

ILSE MUNRO

Welcome!

One month after I was born, my family and I were forced to leave our native land. In this way, I became what is officially called a "displaced person." When I arrived in the United States as a five-year-old, I learned that the term, shortened to "DP," could be used pejoratively. These days, I simply see it as an apt descriptor and even take perverse pride in having been identified as such. In doing so, I acknowledge that it continues to apply today.

I have lived in Latvia, Austria, Germany and, in the United States, many places in Michigan, Massachusetts, Alabama and Maryland. But being a DP is as much a state of mind as it is of residency. Often a solitary one, so I would be delighted if you shared my wanderings, as presented in the posts and pages of this site. And added your own unique voice, as well.

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Posts By Category

Recent Posts

  • Deprived of Decades 17 July 2022
  • What Was, What Will Be 29 March 2022
  • Starting from Scratch 13 December 2021
  • Private Parts 13 July 2021
  • Ethel Street 13 April 2021
  • The Face of Extremism 2 March 2020
  • Steering Clear of Camps 24 November 2019
  • Are We Better Than This? 4 July 2019
  • My Many Names 29 January 2019
  • Season’s Greetings 17 December 2018
  • Welcome to America 24 June 2018
  • To Leave Or To Stay 8 June 2018
  • A Book About Sentient Beings, Great and Small 11 April 2018
  • It Wasn’t Always Like This 21 February 2018
  • Reading DH Lawrence in Grand Rapids, MI 26 September 2017
  • Monuments and Museums 22 August 2017
  • Bread, Salt and Water 3 January 2017
  • Before The Storms Begin 29 September 2016
  • Me, As Mammal 22 May 2016
  • The Nativists and Me 19 April 2016
  • No Big Deal 9 February 2016
  • So Long, Laima 19 January 2016
  • So You Know About Guns? 6 January 2016
  • Lost Lost Lost 23 November 2015
  • The Last Time I Saw Paris 19 November 2015
  • A Good Day 3 November 2015
  • Migrants and Thugs 15 September 2015
  • Debt of Honor 8 September 2015
  • Were You Ever a Refugee? 25 August 2015
  • Body Language 21 August 2015
  • Satirize Something 12 January 2015
  • My Cousin in England 23 December 2014
  • Reconsidering Sentiment 17 December 2014
  • From Playing with Food to Playing with Words 9 October 2014
  • What to Do When Stranded 2 October 2014
  • Bremerhaven Today 11 September 2014
  • A Formal Feeling Comes 18 January 2014
  • What Causes Us to Cringe 18 January 2014
  • Four Generations of Women 18 January 2014
  • Aspects of My Father 17 January 2014
  • Errata 17 December 2013
  • Magnificent Reason 16 December 2013
  • An Apt Misattribution 3 December 2013
  • Between Two Branches 2 December 2013
  • Imagining . . . 24 November 2013
  • An Affirming Flame 22 November 2013
  • Blow, Winds 22 November 2013
  • The Art of Losing 22 November 2013
  • Why I Write 21 November 2013
  • Leaving Latvia 21 November 2013
© 2013-2015 Ilse Munro. All rights reserved.
Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Subscribe Subscribed
    • DISPLACED PERSON
    • Join 79 other subscribers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • DISPLACED PERSON
    • Subscribe Subscribed
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...