The emigrants by wg sebald6/24/2023 ![]() Exhausted they lay in their berths, their eyes glassy or half closed. Most of my fellow travellers were sea-sick. And now, nothing but black water all around, day in, day out, and the ship always seeming to be in the selfsame place. And there is a whole gamut of negative moments in the psychological climate of exile…Įven as a child I used to be horrified when the frog pond was frozen over, and we played curling on the ice, and I would suddenly think of the darkness under my feet. Nostalgia is just one aspect of emigration. When I asked where it was that he felt drawn back to, he told me that at the age of seven he had left a village near Grodno in Lithuania with his family. Selwyn, after a pause for thought, confessed (no other word will do) that in recent years he had been beset with homesickness more and more. ![]() I could not think of any adequate reply, but Dr. Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick. Sebald, himself an emigrant for many years, knows how it does feel to live far away from a homeland.ĭr. The Emigrants: four human lives, four broken fates… W.G. ![]()
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