Back in the Old Country: Homecoming and Belonging in Leonard Kniffel’s A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home and Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace

Małgorzata Rutkowska

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.14.04

Authors

Małgorzata Rutkowska Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7962-3320

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.14.04

Keywords:

homecoming, homeland, travel books, non-fiction, travels, Poland, Macedonia

Abstract

Homecoming travel narratives are typically written by first-wave immigrants, their children, or grandchildren. Usually, homecoming books are accounts of emotionally charged travels that oscillate between nostalgia and idealization of the ancestral land on the one hand and a sense of grief, loss and unbelonging on the other. The present paper examines two homecoming travel narratives that sidestep such pitfalls: Leonard Kniffel’s A Polish Son in the Motherland: An American’s Journey Home (2005) and Kapka Kassabova’s To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace (2020). For both authors, a starting point of the journey is a deep bond with their late maternal grandmothers, whose stories of “the old country” have shaped their sense of identity. Neither Kniffel, a Polish-American author, nor Kassabova, a Bulgarian-born writer writing in English, has ever lived in the countries their grandmothers left as young women—Poland and Macedonia. Return travels not only allow them to better understand the interplay of past and present in their immigrant family history but also to accept their homeland as a complex historical, cultural, and personal legacy. Thus, in both books, returning to the ancestral homeland, undertaken at mid-life, is represented as an essential stage in one’s life journey, which results in a symbolic sense of closure and restoration.

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Author Biography

Małgorzata Rutkowska, Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin

Małgorzata Rutkowska works as Assistant Professor in the Department of British and American Studies, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin, Poland. Her research focuses on generic conventions of American and British travel writing in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, women’s travels, representations of Poland and Eastern Europe in Anglophone travel books as well as Animal Studies. She is the author of two books: In Search of America. The Image of the United States in Travel Writing of the 1980’s and 1990’s (2006) and Psy, koty i ludzie. Zwierzęta domowe w literaturze amerykańskiej (2016).

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