“Home out of home”: South Africa,Central Europe,and “dark nostography”

Abstract

The essay provides a comprehensive discussion of South African nostographies which are concerned with the nostographers’ return to their Central European father/motherland. The paper not only explores the poetics of nostographic writing but also attempts to identify specific generic signposts that characterise South African nostos narratives about Central European homecoming. Having analysed – with the support of archival records – several notable examples of second-generation nostographies by South African writers of Central European descent (Gordimer, Zwi, Jacobson), the essay focuses on the first nostos narrative by a second generation South African Pole, i.e. Blood and Silver by Jan Glazewski (2022). The proposed reading of Glazewski’s book pays special attention to the way in which the Polish/Ukrainian “home” to which the author returns partakes in negotiating the “anachronoid” identity of the auto/biographical (homecoming) subject – especially in the context of the subject’s multiple dislocations; and in revealing a new, essentially transnational geography of historical and ideological connections between Central Europe and South Africa. Additionally, the essay argues that Glazewski’s book should be recognised as a specimen of “dark nostography,” i.e. a homecoming narrative in which one’s double home (South African and Central Europe) is acknowledged as a site of trauma, while the homecomer is considered the subject implicated in the past and present forms of injustice and violence.

Return to Central Europe

In the opening section of his 2017 memoir An Odyssey, Daniel Mendelsohn aptly notes that the English language has a number of nouns to describe the act of moving in space from one point to another. While “voyage”, due to its Latin provenance is “saturated in the material” (Lat. viaticum, i.e. provisions for a journey), and “journey”, which originates in the Old French word jornee (meaning day or its portion), points to the temporal dimension of moving, the word “travel” (also French in origin, travail) refers to effort and pain (2017: 20). “Travel”, Mendelsohn asserts, “suggests the emotional dimension of travelling: not its material accessories, or how long it may last, but how it feels. For in the days when [this word] took [its] shape and meaning, travel was above all difficult, painful, arduous, something strenuously avoided by most people” (20–21). What is more, when writing about the world’s most famous traveller, namely Odysseus, the memoirist pays attention to the root of the hero’s name: the Greek word odynê which means pain. “The one who travels” is then “the one who suffers”; he/she is the “[wo]man of pain”, Mendelson concludes his musing (21).

The understanding of travel as a painful activity (be it physically or emotionally, or both) and travellers as the individuals gnawed by pain appears to be particularly pertinent in the context of travelling back home. André Aciman’s extensive scholarship on exile and homecoming offers one of the most acute discernments of the narrative category of nostography ¹ (also known as “nostos narratives” [Mendelsohn, 2017: 93]) — the term whose etymological root is the Greek word nostos meaning homecoming and which originally referred both to the return of the heroes from Troy, as well as to the title of poems that narrated those journeys (201). In False Papers, which has placed Aciman alongside the other great scholar of exile, namely Edward Said, ² the Alexandria-born American writer and critic provides the most comprehensive and probing analysis of this literary phenomenon, which he defines as “writing about return” (2000: 7), and of which he himself is not only a major theoretician but also practitioner. According to Aciman, nostography is essentially built on paradox — the concept which the writer further develops in his 2011 study Alibis (89). A complicated and meandering nature of this kind of writing is, for example, illustrated by the fact that it is always spread between three contradictory activities: “nostalgia […] the ache to return, to come home; nostophobia, the fear of returning; nostomania, the obsession with going back” (2000: 7; emphasis in the original). What is more, nostography has a pseudo-therapeutic role: even if one writes (and returns) so as “to bury the whole thing, to get it out of [one’s] system, to forget, to hate even”, one also knows that home, to quote Constantine Cavafy, “will always pursue [one]” and “would eventually find newer, ever more beguiling ways to remind [one] that [it] is where [one’s] mind always turns” (21). Also, Aciman further argues, any nostography is essentially a doomed enterprise since from the very beginning of one’s journey back home (as well as writing about it) one realises that one will never be able to find it — even upon one’s successful return (5). A significant part of Aciman’s reflections is dedicated to the condition of nostographer whom he calls “a spectre”, “a ghost”, and “an anachronoid” — someone who is “chronologically displaced” and who finds oneself in an epistemologically incompatible and fragile situation. One who knows that the past/home can neither be recaptured nor put behind, but its “spell continues to lure on [the] errands in time” (8). A nostographer, much like an exile, “is not just someone who has lost his home; he is someone who can’t find another, who can’t think of another” (39); they are not only permanently “mobile scattered, nomadic, dislodged”, not only someone who “reads change […] in the key of loss” (39), but also — crucially for the poetics of nostos narratives — someone for whom spatial dislocation has resulted in “a set of intellectual, psychological, and aesthetic displacements” (2011: 197). ³

Among the narratives in which the poetics of nostography — as stipulated above — can be acutely observed, a distinct position is held by a small corpus of texts by South African writers which address the latter’s travels into Central Europe ⁴ — particularly in the last two decades of the twentieth century. With the exception of Lewis Nkosi and his auto/biographical piece entitled “Letter from Warsaw”, ⁵ as well as Harry Bloom’s and Beryl Gordon’s We Meet the Czechoslovaks (1948), ⁶ the South African writers who travelled to the European core and who, subsequently, narrativized that very experience, Nadine Gordimer, Rose Zwi, and Dan Jacobson, were the (often unwelcome) returnees to their mother/fatherlands. When visiting the “other” Europe, they were not ordinary tourists but second-generation homecomers who travelled back to the areas from which their Jewish parents emigrated decades before in an attempt to escape poverty and persecution. However, they also returned to the Central European “bloodlands” (Snyder, 2010), to the post-Holocaust traumatic landscapes where many of their relatives that had never left their homes were murdered by the Nazis and their local auxiliaries. Consequently, the travel memoirs that they wrote in the aftermath of their painful “returns” to Central Europe were not only characterised by a “contrapuntal awareness” (Said, 2012: 186), namely the paradox principle paradigmatic for nostos narratives, but also overshadowed by Holocaust post-memory. As a result, the Central European travelogues by South African writers were inevitably both: nostographies and necrographies (Panagiotopoulos and Espírito Santo, 2019). ⁷

In 2022, a modest body of South African nosto/necrographies about Central European homecoming was expanded by a new addition: Jan Glazewski’s Blood and Silver, which offers an account of its autobiographical narrator’s return to the land of his parents, pre-WWII Poland and the village of Chmielowa (Khmeleva, nowadays in Ukraine), where the author’s father buried the family “treasure” before escaping the Red Army in September 1939. Being the first memoir by a second generation South African Pole, Blood and Silver not only reconstructs Glazewski’s journey to Poland and Ukraine and his discovery of the treasure but, most importantly, chronicles his experience of homecoming, as well as of displacement and double-homeness. But if Glazewski’s book is, indeed, the first South African travelogue ⁸ which is not haunted by the lasting trauma of the Holocaust, it, nevertheless, cannot escape addressing other forms of violence to which his Polish and South African “homes” have been subjected and in which he has been implicated.

The aim of this essay is thus to analyse Glazewski’s nostography vis-à-vis other examples of South African/Central European homecoming narratives: “My Father Leaves Home” by Nadine Gordimer, Last Walk in Naryshkin Park by Rose Zwi, and Heshel’s Kingdom by Dan Jacobson. Not only will the article attempt to demonstrate how Blood and Silver responds to the thematic and formal demands posed by the poetics of nostos narratives; it will also investigate the ways in which the Polish/Ukrainian “home” partakes in both: negotiating the “anachronoid” identity of the auto/biographical (homecoming) subject — especially in the context of the subject’s multiple dislocations; and in revealing a new, essentially transnational geography of historical and ideological connections between Central Europe and South Africa. Additionally, the essay will argue that Glazewski’s book should be recognized as a specimen of “dark nostography”, namely a homecoming narrative in which one’s home is a site of trauma, while a homecomer is the subject implicated in the production and sustaining of the very trauma due to his position as a descendant of the colonisers (both in Poland/Ukraine and South Africa).

Mein shtetele: Between nostalgia, nostomania, and nostophobia

Despite the fact that the first Central Europeans arrived in South Africa already in the sixteenth century (e.g. Żukowski, 1992: 1–2), while dozens of thousands migrated from Central Europe to South Africa between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century (Klotz, 2013: 173–178) — especially Jews from the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (Shimoni, 1980: 5–6, Mendelsohn and Shain, 2008: 37–39) ⁹ — the returns to Central Europe undertaken by the South Africans of Central European origin and the accounts of those “homecoming” experiences have been scarce and rare. To paraphrase Nadine Gordimer: few, like her Berlin-born husband Reinhold, “[felt] the pull of old ties with Europe”; the vast majority, like herself, were “pull[ed] the other way, anchored to Africa” (Gordimer, 1964: n.p.).

Quite ironically in the light of her early declarations, Gordimer herself was, in fact, the first to write a work of nostography that would focus on the South African subject’s return to the Central European fatherland. Initially, she was reluctant to acknowledge her own “ties with Europe” which is particularly conspicuous in Gordimer’s abandoned first novel whose main character and Gordimer’s alter ego, Ruth Karanov, remains indifferent ¹¹ to the lamentations of her father Sam, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, upon the tragic death of his brother at the hands of the Nazis (Gordimer, n.d. [before 1946]: n.p.). Despite these early misgivings, Gordimer repeatedly “returned” to the region where her father, Isidore, was born (Suresh Roberts, 2005: 33). She did so in in her essays which are populated by thinkers and writers from the region (such as Czesław Miłosz or Milan Kundera); in her later fiction which features Central European characters (for instance, “Letter from His Father”, “The First Sense”), or in person — when she visited “second world” countries such as Hungary or Poland both before and after the collapse of communist regimes (Gordimer, 1979: n.p.; Gordimer, 1989a: n.p.). One such visit (on the occasion of the Wheatland Conference held on 18–24 June 1989 in Budapest, during which Gordimer met such advocates of the idea of Central Europe as Danilo Kiš, Claudio Magris, and Czesław Miłosz [Gordimer, 1989b: n.p.]), resulted in what should be seen as the first South African nostography about Central European homecoming: an auto/biographical short story entitled “My Father Leaves Home”, first published in The New Yorker in May 1990. The story fuses two narratives. The first one is about Isidore’s departure from his hometown Žagarė (located only a hundred and fifty kilometres from Szetejnie/Šeteniai, another Polish-Lithuanian-Jewish village where Miłosz, Gordimer’s favourite writer, was born) and his subsequent arrival in South Africa. The second is concerned with his daughter’s return to Central Europe — more specifically, to a small Hungarian village which stands for her father’s home village (still inaccessible to the writer herself due to the on-going political changes in the USSR). ¹²

Despite being the first of its kind, Gordimer’s nostography already shares a number of characteristics with future South African works about Central European homecoming, including an investigation of the returning subject’s complex relationship with one’s (un)familiar “home”, the representation of Central Europe as an undeveloped rural hinterland, or the narrative’s attentiveness to the region’s ongoing and pervasive legacy of trauma and oppression (symbolized by a war memorial erected by one of the ”empires” that have occupied it over the centuries). Perhaps the most noticeable feature of Gordimer’s short story — one that could be identified as uniquely paradigmatic for the poetics of nostos narratives about Central Europe by South African writers — is its deliberate fusion of distant temporalities, topographies, and identities. The very feature is first to be observed in the opening paragraphs of the short story where an old Hungarian woman shelling peas morphs into Gordimer’s grandmother “sew[ing] up rents and darn[ing] socks” for Isidore before he left Lithuania as a thirteen-year-old (Gordimer, 1990b: 40). Soon, it becomes the overriding principle of the entire narrative and its diegesis: a shtetel-like town in Hungary with its Roma minority, slatted wooden roofs, scarf-wearing women, and horse carts, overlaps with a real shtetel left by Gordimer’s father in the last decade of the nineteenth century; the narrator’s travel to the Hungarian-USSR borderlands is mirrored by her father’s journey from Lithuania to South Africa; Isidore’s sense of victimization, alienation, and unbelonging in the country of his birth is matched by the status of the South African Black miners who, despite being in their own country, are, like him, “migrants from their homes” (41). The story’s annulment of the binary division into now and then/here and there/self and other is especially discernible in Gordimer’s constant shift between the past and present tense which The New Yorker editor Linda Asher found particularly confusing and which Gordimer insisted on keeping. “That’s my intention!” states the irritated note on the margin of the second page of Gordimer’s typed first version of “My Father Leaves Home” — the very page on which Asher mercilessly underscored all (erroneous, in her opinion) tense forms (Gordimer, 1990a: n.p.). But Gordimer’s nostography deserves to be singled out for yet another reason, namely its acknowledgement of the ambiguous position occupied by the South African homecoming subject — one that mirrors the ambiguous position occupied by Gordimer’s father in South Africa, a white immigrant who soon appropriates the “vocabulary of command” towards the Black South Africans and builds financial prosperity by exploiting the latter (Gordimer, 1990b: 41). The actual reason behind the narrator’s trip to rural Hungary is not to experience a transhistorical and transnational communion with her father and his homeland. Its real aim is to take advantage of what a newly capitalist post-Iron Curtain Hungary is now able to offer to its wealthy and privileged visitors from the West: to take part in the shooting of game birds. When, in the concluding paragraphs of the short story, the by-standing narrator compares the dying birds to Jews and her hunting companions to Cossacks whose “bayonet[s] lift the man by the heart like a piece of meat on a fork” (43), Gordimer not only comments on the history of violence and the plight of Central European Jews but also recognizes her own implication in present-day forms of injustice. A descendant of the victims, Gordimer returns to her father’s homeland not only to learn and understand her own father but, most importantly, to admit her own connections to the suffering and exploitation of others, including non-human others.

Published seven years later, Rose Zwi’s Last Walk in Naryshkin Park (1997) is a more conventional specimen of Central Europe-cum-South Africa nostography. From the very beginning, it is clear that the story of Zwi’s journey to post-Soviet Lithuania ¹⁰ — which took her almost five years to write, required two separate travels to Lithuania, as well as considerable research in archives and libraries and interviews with the Holocaust survivors from all over the world (Zwi, 1997a: n.p.; Zwi, 1993: n.p.) — is more than just an attempt to search for her family’s past and the surviving relatives. Moreover, its ambitions go far beyond learning about the region’s fading Jewish heritage — as many Jewish writers’ works did in the years following the fall of the Iron Curtain (for instance, Hoffman 1997; Mendelsohn 2006). Zwi’s text is, first and above all, an account of the writer’s return to what she repeatedly refers to as “der heim”, the home, a Yiddish expression that she learnt from her parents. Early in the book, she ponders over the meaning of the term “home” and her inexplicably nostalgic longing for Lithuania — the place which she never visited but which, in her parents’ recollections, existed as an idyllic rural dwelling place: “Is [home] the place where you were born, where you grew up, where the landscape is familiar? Is it the light, the air, the sunsets? Or is it the place you yearn for when you’re away from it?“ (1997b: 65). Zwi’s travelogue, which might be seen as the product of her own inherited yearning for the lost homeland, contains several formal and thematic characteristics that have already been recognized as typical for the poetics of nostos narratives about Central Europe by South African writers. For example, it deliberately establishes a number of parallels (historical, geographical, political) between Africa and Central Europe, Zwi’s two father/motherlands — be it when she juxtaposes an excerpt from The Destruction of the European Jews by Raul Hillberg (1961) with a fragment of the conversation between a Tutsi survivor and a Hutu neighbour who is accused of murdering the former’s family; when she deliberately mixes the Central European vald (“forest” in Yiddish) with South African veld (65, 72, 216), or when she pairs Napoleon admiring Vilnius’ Great Synagogue with Paul Kruger officiating the opening of Johannesburg’s main synagogue (144). Also, the memoir is determined to present Central Europe as, first and foremost, a site of trauma: a place of empty shtetls and mass graves. While in Central Europe, Zwi is primarily a practitioner of “dark tourism” (Lennon and Foley, 2000) — as testified to by the first page of Zwi’s notebook that she kept while researching and writing her book. It opens with the list of four works that are to prepare Zwi for her journey and its subsequent account: apart from Hillberg’s study, the notebook lists the Einsatzgruppen documents (the reports by the Nazi death squads), “The Shawl” by Cynthia Ozick, a short story about a march to a Nazi concentration camp, as well as a picture book of the ghettoes (Zwi, 1993: n.p.). When, having read those documents, Zwi finally arrives in Žagarė, the birthplace of her parents, she concludes: “As I walk along the muddy streets of this depressed little town, it is impossible to evoke my parents’ heimen shtetala, their home town. Nothing fits. Not their stories, nor their songs. I feel disoriented” (1997b: 224). The new Lithuania generates a sense of “menace” (198). The most telling description of her parents’ “home” for which they yearned throughout their life is to be found in the chapter which narrates her travel from Vilnius to Žagarė through the heart of Lithuania: “The further north we travel, the darker the skies become. The mist, the sleet, the empty road; the sodden fields, the copses of birch and pine, combine to form the landscape of nightmares” (189; emphasis added). Lithuania becomes a space where titular Naryshkin Park hides the grave of several thousand Jews, where only one Holocaust survivor still continues to live, and where the Lithuanian Nazi “auxiliaries” and by-standers thrive. In the last chapter of the book, she concludes: “I had been to Zagare but had not found Zhager” (235; spelling original) — thus re-affirming the failure of her homecoming endeavour.

Unlike Last Walk in Naryshkin Park, Dan Jacobson’s Heshel’s Kingdom (1998) — undoubtedly, the best-known example of Central European nostography by a South African writer (cf. Roberts 1998; Daymond 1999; Davis 2009) — is not a (post-)Holocaust memoir par excellence. Although the annihilation of the European Jews clearly remains the book’s principal focus (as noted by the likes of Amy Simon [2015], Kaisa Kaakinen [2020], and — in fictional form — W.G. Sebald [2001]), it does not reduce Central Europe, the birthplace of Jacobson’s parents and the source of his widely acknowledged “middle-European” patrimony (Jacobson, 1985: 26), to a site of genocide only. Contrary to Gordimer and Zwi, Jacobson returns to Central Europe equipped not only with the books about the Holocaust or traumatic post-memory of the pogroms, but also with the glasses that belonged to his grandfather — the titular Heshel Melmed, who died in Lithuania in 1919, in “the best of all countries for a pious Jew” (Jacobson, 1998: 38). It is the very glasses that metaphorically allow Jacobson to interrogate various pre-conceptions about the place from which his ancestors emigrated to South Africa. One notable example of this strategy is Jacobson’s attempt to dismantle the view which prevailed among the South African Jews of his parents’ generation that “in leaving Lithuania they had exchanged night for the promise of day, superstition for the promise of reason, limitations and frustrations for a hitherto unimaginable degree of personal autonomy” (68). To do so, he brings together two antithetical categories: “Nowhere” and “Somewhere” — the former conventionally used with regard to “old Europe” (176), the latter to South Africa. Jacobson insists on the possibility of reversing this paradigm and acknowledging that the opposite might have also been true: “Somewhere” — namely, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth with its cities, libraries, monuments, synagogues, history, and so forth — could have been exchanged for African “Nowhere” (76).

Jacobson’s account of his travel to Lithuania ostensibly prioritizes his personal “connection […] to the distant part of the world [the writer’s] parents had come from” (73). However, in the process, he also becomes highly attuned to a variety of transnational parallels between South Africa and Central Europe that he begins to see upon his visit to Lithuania. While some of them are topographical or architectural (the peripherality of his home-town Kimberley and the Lithuanian town of Varniai, both buried deep in the Northern Cape and the Baltic region countryside, respectively; the wooden verandas in Lithuanian country houses and the South African stoeps), others reveal remarkable historical, political, and social analogies (“surprising likeness”, as Jacobson notes [117]) between the two regions: both witness major political revolutions almost concurrently (the coming down of the Iron Curtain; the demise of apartheid); both are multiethnic and experience similar tensions between various groups (the Poles in Lithuania remind him of the English-speaking South Africans, while ethnic Lithuanians are perceived as Central Europe’s Afrikaners); both have a long history of oppression and violence, such as the implementation and execution of genocidal policies during WWII and the extermination of the San peoples by Cape colonists in the nineteenth century.

The mutual and essentially transnational entanglement of the two regions and their pasts, which leads to various forms of temporal, spatial, and ontological overlapping of the memoir’s elements, and which serves as the foundation of the book’s nostographic poetics, is best exemplified by the concluding scene of Heshel’s Kingdom. In it, Jacobson falls asleep and finds himself in a place that is a commixture of South Africa and Lithuania. Though the place Jacobson dreams about is supposed to be Varniai, its soil is “sandy”, “pale”, and “dry” (234); the landscape may feature a wooden cottage like the one encountered in Lithuania, but in its gardens Jacobson discovers the wrong kind of tree, gum trees; the cottage has a wooden porch but its main door is covered with a fly screen made of gauze “in the South African fashion” (234). The children that Jacobson sees are simultaneously his own children and his grandfather’s children. He enters the world where South African and Central Europe “suddenly begin to melt” (233) and become one. Jacobson’s Central European return is thus not primarily about acquiescing to or resolving the affective triangle of álgos–phóbos–maníā which governs one’s relationship with one’s lost home, but about discovering the writer’s double-homeness.

Published towards the end of the twentieth century, Heshel’s Kingdom could appear as the last specimen of what this paper has described as Central Europe-cum-South Africa nostography. The passing of the second-generation émigrés from Central Europe, whose “knowledge” (often traumatic) about “old Europe” and longing for it were inherited from their immigrant parents, as well as a plethora of new thematic challenges and demands that post-apartheid South African literature had to respond to suggested the inevitable demise of such narratives. However, quite unexpectedly, in 2022, the corpus of South African nostographies about Central European homecoming was enlarged by a new piece: Blood and Silver by the second-generation South African Pole Jan Glazewski.

Dark nostography

True to the poetics of memoir, Blood and Silver is a “cross” (Miller, 1996: 2), a hybrid narrative which recounts, in equal measure, the story of Glazewski’s family, of the Polish diaspora in South Africa, of Glazewski’s life-long health problems (haemophilia, HIV), of his double identity as a South African Pole, and, finally, of his travels to Poland and Ukraine, including a mission to unearth the family “treasure” buried in his grandfather’s former estate on the banks of the Dniester. Being the first memoir by a second-generation South African of Polish descent, ¹³ it is also a unique work of memory: a specimen of diasporic writing which inhabits a “third geography” (Seyhan, 2011: 15) and thus actively partakes in the project of restoring cultural memory to the diasporic Polish community in South Africa. ¹⁴ In short, it is an amalgamation of filial narrative (Smith and Watson, 2010: 270), patriography (Couser, 202: 154; the book is tellingly subtitled “a son’s search”), a collective history (Eribon, 2018: 18), auto-socio-biography (Hugueny-Léger, 2018: 263), autothanatography (Miller, 1994: 12), travelogue, and, ultimately, nostography.

It seems justified to claim that the underlying theme that binds together different micro-genres whose “laws” or “markers” can be identified in Glazewski’s nostography is inheritance. Throughout the whole narrative, the concept of heritage, which, after Sharon Macdonald, I shall understand as one’s “meaningful pasts” (2009: 2), manifests itself in a variety of ways: as tangible/material assets (most notably a hand-drawn map given to the narrator by his father which shows how to locate the site where the treasure is buried, as well as the treasure itself), cultural heritage (for instance, the narrator’s enthusiasm for Polish Christmas carols or the poetry of Adam Zagajewski, another exile from the Polish territories which after 1945 were annexed by the Soviets), and even biological inheritance (Glazewski’s hereditary disorder which the narrator jokingly traces to a distant noble forebear who served at the court of a Russian tsar). The significant position occupied by the category of patrimony is emphasized by the “Prologue” to the book in which Glazewski is given a “treasure map” (11) by his father, alongside detailed instructions of how to reach the family estate, ¹⁴ and an implicit command that one day he shall return to Chmielowa ¹⁵ to recover the family heirloom and ultimately re-claim his Polishness. The Latin root of the word patrimony, namely pater (“father”) and‎ mōnium (“obligation”) implies that patrimony is not simply a paternal estate or other material asset that one inherits from one’s father, as most dictionaries would have it. The word can also be read as a son’s obligation to his father and, by extension, one’s male ancestors. Consequently, Glazewski’s return to Poland and Chmielowa is not a simple act of reclaiming the belongings of his forbears but a moral and ontological imperative which he cannot disregard (just like he cannot deny his biological inheritance). When fighting the frustration after not having been able to locate the treasure during his first expedition to Khmeleva, the narrator will state: “I am carrying out my duty to my beloved father” (2022: 156). Once the recovery of the treasure has been successfully completed with the assistance of two Ukrainian men, Glazewski will reaffirm his position: “I have fulfilled my father’s directive and a lifelong dream” (172).

Poland — the birthplace of Glazewski’s mother and father who, having learnt that in the aftermath of WWII-induced territorial changes their estate became part of the USSR, emigrated to South Africa — remains Glazewski’s major patrimony. Or, as a matter of fact, his matrimoine as it is women, his mother and multiple “ciocie” (“aunties”) in particular, that are the custodians of Polish language, culture, and history, and are largely responsible for “an inexplicable longing for Poland” which Glazewski develops in his childhood (35). It is Poland, the “country of [his] forebears” and not South Africa, the “country of [his] birth” (12) that he will actively seek for most of his life. Even when studying at the London School of Economics, he will search for the companionship of fellow Poles (or Polish South Africans) and spend most of his time in the heart of the Polish community in Ealing. Midway through the book, Glazewski will describe his sense of a (double) national identity as “half Polish and half South African” (73). Crucially for my understanding of Blood and Silver as a specimen of nostography, the book unquestionably acknowledges Poland to be Glazewski’s home — as testified to by an account of his first trip to the to the country of his ancestors in December 1973. ¹⁶ Already when on a train from East Berlin to Warsaw, Glazewski will discover a sense of comradeship and affinity between himself and the Polish passengers. Quite paradoxically, after weeks of travelling across Europe and spending time with his fellow South African countrymen, he will suddenly announce: “at last I was among my people” (68; emphasis added). Upon reaching his relatives in Warsaw and Gdynia, he will unambiguously and repeatedly identify Poland as his “home” (“I [feel] at home” [72]). Many years later, when he finally manages to cross the Polish-Ukrainian border and travel to Eastern Galicia (a historical and geographical region in present-day Western Ukraine), he voices, once again, his sense of belonging to the core of Europe: “To this day, the mention of faraway Lwów stirs up all kinds of feelings in me. It is the mysterious places where my forefathers came from; it is in my genes” (126–127; emphasis added). When arriving in Chmielowa, he declares: “I feel that I have come home” (194). In order to understand his affective relationship with Poland, Glazewski — an environmental lawyer by profession — turns to the concept of “solastalgia” which is typically defined as the state of “distress that is produced by environmental change impacting […] [one’s] home environment” (Albrecht et al., 2007: 95–96). However, for the purpose of self-diagnosis, he turns to a simplified definition of the term: one that sees solastalgia as “homesickness when [one is] still at ‘home’” (Glazewski, 2022: 127; Albrecht, 2005: 48). For Glazewski, however, the object of his longing is not South Africa threatened by “environmental injustice” and “physical desolation” (Albrecht, 2005: 48) — as one would expect given the fact that solastagia is essentially a future-oriented type of anxiety — but Poland: the home for which he longs when he is in his ersatz home, South Africa.

The narrator’s acknowledgement of his double-homeness, which is characteristics for the poetics of nostos narratives, is an encouragement to identify other explicit “marqueurs” of nostography that are to be found in Glazewski’s account of his return to Poland. If, as Aciman would argue, the condition of the nostographic self is governed by impermanence and rootlessness (as a result of displacement), then the narrator of Blood and Silver should be recognized as a bona fide nostographer. The book repeatedly emphasizes Glazewski’s life-long sense of alienation and un-belonging. Its sources and manifestations are, in fact, manifold: the former include the premature death of his mother, being an invalid due to his blood disorder, contracting HIV as an adult man, while the latter are to be traced in the narrator’s alienation at school, difficulties in forming a stable relationship, or a nomadic lifestyle. Nevertheless, the book’s major thematic preoccupation, namely homecoming, implies that his “damaged” self is largely the product of his displacement and his Polish inheritance, which, just like his Polish home, haunts him throughout his life. Glazewski himself suggests that at the heart of both: his autobiographical reading of his own experiences and history in the key of “terminal loss” (Said, 2012: 173), as well as his status of a “scattered” and “dislodged” self (Aciman, 2022: 39) lies his condition of an “anachronoid” who “occup[ies] a national no-man’s land” (Aciman, 2000: 39; Glazewski, 2022: 73). His return to Poland — particularly his travel to Khmeleva — performs the therapeutic function of helping Glazewski “regain [his] identity” (Glazewski, 2022: 129).

A “contrapuntal awareness” — to use Said’s fitting term which describes a nostographer’s recognition of “simultaneous [and opposite] dimensions” (Said, 2012: 186) — is also to be identified in Glazewski’s homecoming narrative. It becomes particularly conspicuous in the book’s attempt to provide an account of the narrator’s complex emotional state which — similarly to other South African nostographies discussed herein — welcomes an amalgamation of nostomania, nostophobia, and nostalgia. A co-existence or interplay of the three affects is to be observed, for example, in the section of the book which narrates Glazewski’s 2019 travel to Eastern Galicia during which he finally recovers the family treasure. In this part of Blood and Silver, the obvious ache to return home meets the obsession about going back (particularly evident when after a failed attempt to locate the treasure Glazewski refuses to give up and makes another, this time successful try), as well as fear of returning — especially since the whole enterprise is a clandestine activity that violates Ukrainian law.

One formal signpost of nostography which, both qualitatively and quantitatively, surpasses other thematic or formal markers of the genre is the presence of the “mnemonic correlative” syndrome in Glazewski’s book, the kind that Aciman defines as one’s proclivity to perceive other places in such a way that they appear to mirror one’s home (be it real or imagined) (Aciman, 2000: 46). Monica Popescu has aptly observed that “South African travelers to eastern Europe frequently perceived the host countries within a comparative frame that invited retrospective reflection on the realities in their homeland” (Popescu, 2012: 178). Blood and Silver also employs the comparative paradigm — however, it reconfigures the pattern by positioning not only Poland as the “stand-in” for South Africa but South Africa as the “ersatz” of Poland (Aciman, 2000: 46). Thus, in Glazewski’s book, the rise of Solidarity and the downfall of communism in Poland precedes the unbanning of the ANC and the collapse of apartheid (13, 80); the tortures inflicted upon detainees during the apartheid regime mirror the horrors experienced by political prisoners during the Stalinist era (73); the Soweto student uprising of 1976 against the use of Afrikaans in education is compared to the Poles’ widespread resistance to the compulsory teaching of Russian as a foreign language throughout the communist era (123); the Ukrainian countryside is a reminder of rural Africa (129). In Blood and Silver, the “mnemonic correlative” syndrome is so pervasive that even the destruction of manor houses by the Soviets during and after WWII will be seen as a foreshadowing of what will happen to the houses of white farmers in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe (134), while George Hotel in Lviv will become an equivalent of Cape Town’s Mount Nelson Hotel. True to the poetics of nostography, Cape Town and Lwów/Lviv, as well as Chmielowa/Khmeleva and McGregor (a Western Cape village where Glazewski lives and where he owns a plot of land) become “analogue/shadow cities” (Aciman, 2000: 46).

Without a doubt, the most pronounced manifestation of Glazewski’s nostographic self is his ultimate failure to return home. Not only are the remnants of the manor house foundations the only sign of the Glazewski estate; it does not even feature on any map, as pre-WWII Polish Chmielowa and Lwów were replaced by post-1991 Ukrainian Khmeleva and Lviv. His mission to recover the family silver also turns out to be a major defeat. Having violated the Ukrainian treasure-trove law by unlawfully removing the items from their location and smuggling them abroad, Glazewski is forced to leave some of his family treasure behind, blackmailed by two Ukrainian “archaeologists” who have assisted him in carrying out his duty to his father. What is more, the fate of the valuables that he manages to ship to Poland necessarily needs to remain undisclosed to the reader since, legally speaking, they might be considered the stolen goods. In this way, Glazewski’s memoir with its an anti-climactic trajectory reaffirms the genre’s principle that every homecoming is necessarily a doomed enterprise.

But Glazewski’s memoir is not a formulaic piece of nostography. On the contrary, it is, as I should like to claim, a work of “dark nostography”. Throughout the book, Glazewski is painfully aware of the fact that as a white man born under the apartheid regime he is a “privileged South African” who has led a “privileged existence” (28, 29) — much like his noble ancestors did in Eastern Galicia. If he has “benefitted from being born and growing up in a country and at a time when whites enjoyed all the trappings of power, and the attendant benefits of wealth and opportunity” (29), his ancestors benefitted from being born as landowning Poles in the area where the majority of the population were Ukrainian serfs. The narrator’s double implication in colonialism — both in South Africa and in Central Europe — and his position as an “implicated subject” (Rothberg, 2019) becomes apparent when he takes a picture of Ukrainian peasants met on the road and recalls the annoyance of rural Africans when he tried to do the same in South Africa — the camera being one of the main weapons of ethnographic colonialism. Later, when trying to smuggle the silver to Poland, he will use the connections which are to be traced to the old pre-WWII regime: “Once again I note that the strong pre-war networks are still in existence”, he observes (197). The privileged status of his family is further confirmed when he learns that the Ukrainian villagers refer to the site where the family house used to stand as the “Polish hill” and to his grandfather as “the Polish landlord on the hill” (157, 159). The fear of the villagers which accompanies Glazewski during his search for the treasure might be interpreted as a fear of potential retribution since most of the wealth accumulated by the landowning Poles in the area was the result of the centuries-long exploitation of the local serfs.

Glazewski — whose response to his homeland is best described by the term “parallax”, which Aciman defines as a distortion or a disturbance in vision (Aciman, 2011: 187) and which the critic finds paradigmatic in the experience of the nostographer — returns to Chmielowa as a descendant of the colonisers. His inheritance is not only unattainable but also “difficult” or “troublesome” as it “break[s] through into the present in disruptive ways, opening up social divisions” (Macdonald, 2009: 1); Glazewski’s patrimony is “dissonant heritage”, revealing the conflicted and disharmonious relationship between the past and the present (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996: 21). By engaging in what Taras, one of the Ukrainian diggers and later blackmailers, defines as “black archaeology”, the illegal excavations of artefacts, he also becomes profoundly implicated in the Polish-Ukrainian history of oppression, exploitation, and mutual violence. If “dark tourism” refers to the act of travelling to places that are associated with traumatic histories, then “dark nostography” might refer to the homecoming narratives in which one’s home is a site of trauma, while a homecomer is the subject implicated in the sustaining of the very trauma, as well as in the production of new forms of oppression. Such a homecomer is one who occupies an “ambiguous space […] between and beyond the victim/perpetrator binary” ¹⁷ (Rothberg, 2019: 33), while remaining entangled in both historical and present-day mechanisms of injustice and violence.

Glazewski’s dark homecoming — the kind that he shares with the narrator of “My Father Leaves Home” — reveals the implicated status of the South African subject who returns to their Central European fatherland. However, much like in Gordimer’s piece of nostography, it also demonstrates the vulnerable status of a postcolonial and post-Soviet Central European state which lacks agency and remains susceptible to abuse and various forms of exploitation. Though motivated by filial duty, Glazewski’s highly problematic act of unearthing his family heirloom and transferring it abroad foreshadows the incomparably greater suffering and atrocities that Ukraine will face in the future. More specifically, its invasion by Russia less than three years after the treasure was dug up — another traumatic event in the history of the region which an “outraged and profoundly concerned” Glazewski (206) addresses in the final pages of his memoir.

Conclusion: “Out of home”

In her 2009 “old age memoir”, Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill makes the following pronouncement: “One doesn’t necessarily have to end a book about being old with a whimper, but it is impossible to end it with a bang. There are no lessons to be learnt, no discoveries to be made, no solutions to offer. I find myself left with nothing but a few random thoughts” (Athill, 2009: 177). Similarly to Athill’s memoir, Blood and Silver does not “end with a bang” but follows a similar anticlimactic trajectory. Just like other South African nostographers before him, Glazewski, the “man of pain”, has failed to successfully return home — the home that he yearned for. His bucolic dream about “rebuilding the house, sitting in the veranda after a long day in the fields, sipping steaming hot broth while watching the waters of the Dniester glide slowly by, and listening to the workers chattering in the sunset on their way home” (135) — an image taken directly from the classics of nineteenth-century Polish borderlands literature — does not materialize. The treasure is partly lost, while the smuggled items remain a liability (especially in the light of Glazewski’s confessional narrative). The estate does not exist any more. Khmeleva and Ukraine become inaccessible and on the verge of a new historical catastrophe.

In his reflections on exile and homecoming, Aciman acutely observes, by referring to the Hebraic tradition, that “home” is always “out of home” (Aciman, 2011: 197). ¹⁸ It is only a place from which “[one] can begin to be elsewhere” (Aciman, 2000: 46). If this is indeed the case, then nostography is not, in fact, writing about homecoming but writing about arriving somewhere very much elsewhere. For Glazewski, this “somewhere else” is a piece of land that he buys in the village of McGregor, Western Cape, and which he transforms into his own version of Chmielowa: a “farm” of his own where he can grow vegetables and raise chickens. The last few pages of the book show Glazewski finding comfort in this entirely new home which remains — just like Aciman would have it — “out of home.” But they also reveal the following: although Glazewski has not been able to successfully return to his ancestors’ homeland, his travel to Central Europe has become the source of knowledge — not only about his own heritage but also about a transnational history of oppression and its present-day legacies. It is this very knowledge that allows Glazewski to observe that his new home is not “idyllic”. “In many ways it is a microcosm of South Africa, where the gap between rich and poor is all too evident and discomforting”, he notes (205). In this sense, Blood and Silver is not a new Odyssey but a new Telemakheia, namely “a song about Telemachus. […] the story of how an absent father’s child starts to learn about his parent, and about the world” (Mendelsohn, An Odyssey 57; emphasis added). Like in the case of his fellow South African travellers to Central Europe, Glazewski’s nostography is not about the return. It is about gaining knowledge, even if it turns out to be a difficult or “dark” knowledge.