From a comedy about a childhood in wartime to a memoir smuggled from Manus Island on a phone, Dina Nayeri selects the best books about asylumThe refugee story doesnīt end at asylum and safety, the moment when many readers look away. It is an endless battle with pride, shame, identity and especially language. I canīt imagine a worse way to begin it than as a teenage girl.No memoir captures my own post-asylum years like Eva Hoffmanīs 1989 account of adolescence as a clever but foreign girl (a child of Holocaust survivors relocating to Canada) with no money and a heap of desires. Lost in Translation was published the year I arrived in the US from Iran (via Dubai and Italy), in a way similar to Hoffman: a child with no choice, old enough to struggle with English, habits, shame. I could have used the book then. I didnīt discover it until I was at college, but its truth stung me again and again until I was numb, and delirious with the joy of being understood - not by just any immigrant girl, but by a Harvard graduate, and a former editor of the New York Times Book Review. Continue reading...
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