“Parallax is not just a disturbance in vision. What we missed was dreaming Europe in Egypt-what we missed was the Egypt where we’d dreamed of Europe,” he writes. He cannot, he writes, appreciate one place unless through the projection of another. In “ Parallax ,” the epilogue to his essay collection Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, Aciman-a Jew and an exile from Egypt to Europe, who now lives in New York-writes of the dislocation that seems by now intrinsic to his personhood. Until, that is, a friend sent me an essay by André Aciman. No matter how much I tried to talk myself down, I couldn’t seem to stop conflating the cold stares of the Austrians I passed on the street with the fact that this country had wanted my relatives dead. Arriving in the city so many decades later, I still couldn’t shake the sense of terror they’d described. I’d spent the long train ride over from Paris re-reading my great-grandmother’s autobiography-as told to my grandmother-which details my Jewish family’s flight from Vienna in 1938. But last summer, on a trip to Vienna, my sense of dislocation was so acute I didn’t know if I’d last. By now, I know that by the end of my stay that initial despair will feel almost unreal. I spend the first day in any new place, particularly when I’m traveling alone, feeling massively out of sorts and wondering if I should turn right back around and come home. Jessica Gross | Longreads | November 2017 | 20 minutes (4,900 words)
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