ABSTRACT
There are certainly many writers and poets who entered my heart with their work—as did real people. Thanks to them, I am who I am not only as a physical and social survivor of systems, regimes, persecutions, and immigration, but, more importantly, as a human being in my relationship to others and self. Literature has made me feel at home—no matter what my reality was. French literature, with its intellectual and democratizing power, was especially meaningful in a totalitarian country, and I was eager to identify with it. It also created one of the most significant and effective inputs in my learning of French, in becoming fully functional in French, in acquiring a French identity. My initiation into the French culture via the free spirit of the medieval poetry of the scandalous François Villon, romantic Ronsard, stoicist Alfred de Vigny, the symbolists Baudelaire and Verlaine, modern surrealists, existentialists, and nouveau roman writers—this list is by no means inclusive—was the journey in space and time to my beloved France.
