A Certain Kind of Orphanhood

There is a double meaning to “Report of a Journey,” the subtitle of Eleonora Lev’s first book. It describes not one but two different journeys: an actual 13-day trip to a fascinating and often-misunderstood country during a crucial time in its modern history; and a simultaneous exploration of long-buried yearnings and terrors of the heart. The story is a blend of autobiography, conjecture and fiction. While recording external events, people and places, Lev also examines the workings of memory, cutting through its many disguises and falsifications to marvel, ultimately, at the riches that it yields once we dare to confront it. Although necessarily dealing, among other themes, with the Holocaust and its ramifications for the “second generation,” this is essentially a bittersweet, contemporary adventure story. It recaptures the sometime comical, often heartbreaking adventure of being “history’s refugee,” the by now almost-universal tale of being uprooted and losing one’s home, family and country, the very context and meaning of one’s existence, to forces beyond one’s control or understanding.