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Jewish Book Fair
A Memoir
For Our Times
MONTH CD
Local professor's
book is a tribute
to her mother's
moral courage.
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nca's mother, Mimi
Vlasopolos, graced
her daughter's par-
ties with a charm
and intelligence that guided
conversations from philoso-
phy and politics to the the-
ater. She was the first person
I knew who talked about
her Holocaust experiences. I
now regret my youthful pri-
orities, the missed opportunities to
meet her more often especially after
reading her story.
In a compelling and beautifully
written memoir No Return Address, A
Memoir of Displacement (Columbia
University Press, $24.95), Anca
Vlasopolos, a literature professor at
Wayne State University, writes about
her parents, Hermina "Mimi" (nee
Grunberg) and Paul Vlasopolos, who
both had the moral courage to main-
tain their humanity during a most
inhumane time.
In this coming-of-age story, Anca
learns from her parents that
humankind is divided not by religion
or citizenship alone, but by a willing-
ness to be moral. This is sometimes as
simple as not doing harm to others,
sometimes as difficult as standing by
those threatened because of their reli-
gion or ethnic background.
A decade ago, three years after her
mother's death, Anca began to write
her parents' story. Many nights she
lay awake in her Grosse Pointe home,
writing passages of the book in her
head.
"It came out so quickly," she says,
"it was like writing poetry."
Anca tells how her mother, a beau-
tiful Romanian Jew descended from
an Orthodox family of kobanim (high
priests), spends her 26th year in
A
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Anca
Vlasopolos
German labor and concentration
camps, including Auschwitz in
Poland. By the time the young
woman returns home, family mem-
bers, her fiance and former students
all have been killed.
After the war, Mimi becomes a
respected film editor and translator in
Bucharest, Romania. She meets and
marries Paul Vlasopolos, an econom-
ics professor. When Anca is 7, her
father has the misfortune of being
selected Romania's ambassador to
Greece the day his sponsor is arrested
by the communist government. A few
months later, he is imprisoned for a
year. The weakened Vlasopolos suc-
cumbs to the flu and dies three years
later.
When Mimi applies to leave the
Romania with Anca, she is blacklisted
from all legitimate employment by
the government of dictator Nicolae
Ceausescu. The waiting takes two
years.
Darkness And Love
Like many episodes in this book,
alongside periods of darkness are deli-