Emigrant Experience Quotes

“Does anyone ever
want to leave their home?
The fresh fruit that drops from their backyard?

The neighbors who wiped their snot?
Does anyone ever
want to believe they won't come back?

To the dog that sniffs their heel,
to the bed that holds the echo of their body?
Is there relief in pretending it is temporary,

that one day it will be safe? That I will once again
wave to the kind school bus driver;
that I'll hold Carline's baby before he grows,

having never known me? They have no palm
trees in New York City, no leaves to shade me,
to brush against my cheeks like my mother's hands.

There is no one over there, alive or buried,
who held me as a child, who cradled me close,
who fed me from their table, who wiped my knees when

I fell & scraped them. Here, despite the bad & ugly,
is my home. & now I wish that I could stay. Does anyone ever
want to leave the place they love?”
― Elizabeth Acevedo, Clap When You Land

“You need only to add balalaikas, sonorous songs of the Volga, a disorderly dance and there you have it--the Russian emigration.”
― Helen Rappaport, After the Romanovs: Russian Exiles in Paris from the Belle Époque Through Revolution and War