#Quaint notion meaning series

The very title of Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss, is further writing on this theme - a reflection on relocating, with attendant notions of exile, identity, language and loss.

The Exile section brings home the pain, alienation and wrenching which accompanies relocating to another country with different norms and social conventions, ideas and values.

Merely flipping through the index section of another touching book, Lost in Translation one notes just 3 sections - Paradise, Exile and The New World. These notions have been eloquently written about in many books - Edward Said - The Paradox of Identity, and Out of Place, both of which deal with the dislocation of migration and its effects. It is the sum total of who one is, from whom one has evolved, one's roots, one's country, one's friends, one's family, one's school, one's whole world as embodied by one's unitary past.

#Quaint notion meaning series

This strange-sounding series of phonemes, 'mee-ka-el', presaged my new identity and was an augury of how I would grow to experience the loss of my old identity.īut identity is not merely one's name. My name, Michael Cohn, is phonetically pronounced 'my-kil kon' in English, but the Hebrew equivalent is 'mee-ka-el core-hen', and so I became 'mee-ka-el' from then on, an imposed and strange-sounding appellation which never really assumed its essential vocative characteristics. A quaint notion, coming as we did from a country that did not require one to carry identity documents, but suddenly we were confronted by having to choose names in Hebrew, which foreshadowed our new, nascent identities. We were to receive our identity documents. I remember our family's arrival at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, the excitement and the hope, and the odd feeling while we went directly into the office of the Interior Ministry, located at the airport. Personal Journey - Reminiscence Of A Fateful 1988