ABSTRACT
Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Turks [ . . . ] found ourselves deprived of the very rootlessness that made us Other, immured inside the boundaries of a country [Romania] that would let us neither out nor in. (Vlasopolos 48-49)
My chapter inscribes itself in the emerging study of Eastern European exiles,1 the exilic identities that have emerged after leaving the former Soviet bloc, and the signifi cance such exiles’ writings have at the turn of the twenty-fi rst century. More precisely, I focus on Anca Vlasopolos’s memoir, No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement (2000), in order to discuss the forms of dislocation the Cold War produced in Eastern Europe and highlight the specifi c twists and turns that the discourse of displacement brings about when originating from the socio-historical experience of life under a totalitarian regime, namely Romania. I discuss the geographical, psychological, ideological, political dislocations the regimes under which Vlasopolos lived brought about, as well as their e ects upon her identity and narrated life experience.
