Wygnania i powroty. O André Acimanie
Exiles and Returns. On André Aciman

Summary/Abstract: Is it possible to recreate memory that reached us solely via the language? Is it feasible to recreate a place upon the basis of recollections and suppositions, and to what degree can the ensuing result bring us closer to some sort of reality? Finally, to what degree is our misleading memory capable of confronting a different memory about a given place, produced within the range of exactly the same space as the one that has vanished? In his essay: Barcelona, published in the collection: Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere, André Acimen traversed various parts of a town that once contained a Jewish quarter (El Call) and sought traces of his lineage - the presence of Sephardic Jews exiled from fifteenth-century Spain. But what was he really looking for? A confrontation with reality opens up quite a different dimension of a place. Everything is imaginary - imagined by the author and implicit in the case of the town (or rather the city authorities who recreated this place artificially for the tourists). These memory-literary trails in an essay in which the border between fiction and biography is infinitesimal seem to ask us whether fiction (dealing with trails) shapes our memory about ourselves and places and becomes a more authentic image despite the fact that it is illusory.

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