No Return Address

In recounting her life's journey from Romania to the United States, Vlasopolos writes movingly of the peculiar attributes of displacement in the contemporary world. Vlasopolos renders a loving portrait of her mother, an Auschwitz survivor courageously raising a young girl alone after the death of her husband, a political dissident, and finally, details their years of limbo in Brussels and Paris and settlement in Detroit, Michigan.

Library Journal

Vlasopolos opens this pensive memoir by proclaiming that she is not Philip Roth and that she detests therapy. Indeed, she is no self-hater, as Roth is often labeled, and she does not equivocate regarding her Jewish origins in order to establish a new sense of self. Her insightful autobiography easily reads like fiction and is actually more of a love letter to her family--especially her mother--than to her Romanian heritage and its place in her adult life in America. While this is not an inappropriate focus, the early chapters, which depict the political pressure that Vlasopolos could sense while growing up in Romania, are far more riveting than the later chapters, which center on her psychological quest of the West at the age of 13. The word displacement here apparently entails a form of indescribable longing rather than location or identity. Alas, it remains unclear whether the teenage girl eventually freed herself of the mental burdens of communism or is still unwittingly adapting to a culture in which the I overrules the we. An English professor and a writer, Vlasopolos is clearly as talented as she is erudite, and despite the blurred ending, her memoir conveys well-above-average writing and a unique perspicacity worthy of accolades.--Mirela Roncevic, Library Journal Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.