If the “Socratic equation of reason, virtue, and happiness” is, as Nietzsche asserts, the “most bizarre of all equations,” the equation of self, city, and cosmos may be the most frequently applied. Think of all the philosophical visions it informs: Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s City of God, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and so on. And think how it plays out in popular culture: “We won!” the beer-bleary fan exults, as if the football team were the city and the city were himself. A self is like a city, one says; the self just is the city, says the other.
As one form of fractality, self-similarity at all scales, the equation is comprehensive, giving warrant to my sophomore British Lit professor’s formula that there are in narrative only three conflicts, protagonist vs. self (think Hamlet’s indecision), protagonist vs. society (rotten Denmark), and protagonist vs. Nature (or God or Fate or whatever capitalized term one prefers for the more-than-human). There they are: self, city, cosmos. The equation is plenty useful: grant me the equation and I can infer from what I should do to what we should do, and vice versa. But it also puts pressure on the city, so that, for example, division between cities creates division of self. It’s what makes exile a punishment and forced migration an ordeal: forced away from my city, I am divided from myself. And it’s why you can’t go home again: by the time you do, the old city has become a new self, and you have become a different city. Eppie can help aging Silas Marner travel back to Lantern Yard, but he won’t find it where it was or as it was, and he won’t find himself there.
That division between cities and of self, with the attendant problematic that you can’t go home again, gives the subject of Ilya Kaminsky and Piotr Florczyk’s Within, Without, which consists of two essays, one by each author. The authors both immigrated to the U.S., Kaminsky from Odesa, Ukraine, and Florczyk from Kraków, Poland, and the essays both narrate return visits to the city of origin. Both pieces extend the tradition of you-can’t-go-home-again memoirs, in particular Eastern European ones, so their conversation with one another takes place within a larger conversation that includes, for example, works in other media, such as Jonas Mekas’s film Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania, and works in other genres, such as Katerina Stoykova’s poetry collection Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House.
Kaminsky is divided from his birthplace of Odesa, Ukraine. That the division from the city is also a division of self gets made explicit in the writing by movement between first and third person: Kaminsky in the essay is both an I and a he. “I am a man who comes back after years and finds everyone dead. I am an aging man who” — now the turn from first person to third — “takes off his jacket on the bench, sees dogs’ teeth bared, a click of tongue, a hiss. He does not know why he is here—why he is happy, free. He doesn’t know why he bought his ticket to Odesa.” He does not know his own motivations, and if he doesn’t know his then I don’t know mine. There are real and knowable reasons, though, for this interruption of self-knowledge, for this relationship between division from city and division from self. Later in his essay, Kaminsky asks, “If my parents are dead, what is here for me in this now-empty city? When I say the word nothing, I name something that is there.” If his parents are there and not there in the city, so is he himself there and not there: he is there when he is not there, and not there when he is there.
Florczyk is divided from his birthplace, Kraków, Poland. As it does for Kaminsky, also for Florczyk that division from birthplace entails a division from self, manifest as not knowing his own motivations. Florczyk has a hypothesis, though. He cites with approval J. M. Coetzee’s observation that “people can only be in love with one landscape in their lifetime,” with the consequence that even though one “can appreciate and enjoy many geographies,” there is “only one that one feels in one’s bones.” For Florczyk, Coetzee’s “insight that trying to uproot oneself from one’s native surroundings is a fool’s game” leads him to pose himself a question: “Is this why I turn every visit to Kraków into a scavenger hunt, truly leaving no stone unturned, in the hope that I might finally let it go?” Without finally answering that question, Florczyk does arrive by the end of his essay at an observation, this one from Claudio Magris, to counterpose against Coetzee’s: that “journey is above all a return, even if the return, almost always, lasts very little and it’s soon time to leave.”
Each essay finds one sense primary in the author’s experience of self and city. For Kaminsky, who, as noted in the essay itself, has been deaf since the age of four, that sense is hearing. Hearing and not hearing inform the essay from its opening anecdote:
What I remember most of all is washing Leo Tolstoy’s ears. The year is 1989, the mornings of Revolution, the year when my birth-country began to fall apart. His ears are larger than my head, and I am standing on the shoulders of a boy who is standing on the shoulders of another boy. I am scrubbing the enormous bearded head on a pedestal—in the center of Tolstoy Square, one block from our first apartment. This is childhood: once a year, my classmates and I are sent to the center of the square to wash the head of a dead writer. We climb on top of each other’s bodies and scrub Tolstoy’s nostrils, ears.
In the distance, my parents laugh, watching. Their deaf boy climbs and scrubs the enormous ears. Behind them, a band of sailors marches on—Odesa is a seaport, with a large navy school. The young captain shouts, though I can’t hear him: left, right, left, right. The sailors’ legs go up and down, up and down. Aware I see her from my Tolstoy post, my middle-aged, slightly heavy mother begins to march at the end of their column, her legs high, mimicking their legs, her skirt flying up, as my father salutes.
Kaminsky’s return to Odesa is informed by that memory. “I come here because my parents will never come back. I make it to this city so Mother can again march behind the column of sailors, as my father salutes.” But it (Kaminsky’s coming to Odesa and his parents’ coming back) is also conditioned by hearing and not hearing, in a way that leads him to leave his hearing aids off when he visits, the better to approximate his unaided childhood self: “When I turn the hearing aids on in these streets, my parents are dead again. So, I turn them off.”
If Kaminsky’s essay makes hearing its primary sense, Florczyk’s essay does the same with sight. The very first word of the essay is “Staring,” and the first paragraph has him looking at himself and looking out a window onto the world below him; it mentions what can’t be seen, and what must be brought into focus.
Staring at my swollen feet, I keep telling myself that it does not matter how much time has passed since my last trip to Poland. Catching a red-eye flight from Los Angeles, I didn’t get to see the Atlantic down below. Later, after connecting in Munich, when I looked through the plane’s window, I couldn’t tell if we had already crossed into Poland or were still somewhere over Czechia. Like the speaker of that famous Elizabeth Bishop poem, “The Map,” I thought of the meadows, woods, and mountains below as blotches of color—green, brown, red—coming into sharper focus with each minute.
Looking out the plane’s window has its twin later in the essay, in looking out “the smudged window” of a cab, “the way we look for something we know is present and about to appear on the horizon.”
The essays are about a particular form of division, but the book has a particular form of unity. It is co-authored, but co-authorship can take place in various ways: the two (or more) authors might work simultaneously and in proximity, for example, or they might work sequentially and at a distance through correspondence, or in any number of other ways. Co-authorship also can result in various kinds of writing: an exchange in dialogical form, say, or a single unified work in which the individual contributions are not identified, or some other kind. The two personal essays, one by each author, that compose Within, Without present as having been written independently of one another. Each is complete in itself and could stand on its own. (Indeed, each is preceded by an acknowledgment of its prior individual journal publication.) So the co-authorship of Within, Without occurs not as a collaboration but as a conjunction, not as a composition but as a comparison. Which is not to say that the two essays only abut. They are not merely set side by side; they “talk to one another.” Their commonalities make it seem not a stretch to read both essays as developing a sense that Florczyk’s explicitly states, namely that its author is less concerned with the experience of being “torn between” two cities than with the “wish to have a say in how each makes me feel.”