Random Destinations

Download or read book Random Destinations written by L. Furst and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-09-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Random Destinations examines how novels and short stories portray those who managed to escape from Central Europe in the 1930s following the rise of Nazism. They faced many concrete and psychological problems at their random destinations: language acquisition, adjustment to different moves, fitting into the community, coming to terms with having been rejected by their homeland, the conflict between the desire to remember and/or forget their past, and, above all, the need to reshape their identities. Their personal struggles are contextualized within their historical situation, both global and specific to their new locale. The book argues that fiction, by taking ordinary escapees' difficulties into account, paradoxically offers a more subtle and true picture than sociological studies, that have tended to foreground the successes of a few outstanding individuals.