This essay was originally published in the Full Stop Quarterly “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities,” edited by Michelle Chan Schmidt. Subscribe at our Patreon page to get access to this and future issues, also available for purchase here.
The first thing I did when I started reading Lublin was to open a map of Europe and check where Lublin was. I had a faint idea—or was it a memory?—of where the city might be located, and ensuring I knew its exact position before I embarked on the quest at the center of the book seemed the best thing to do. As I would later discover, knowing the city’s exact coordinates was probably irrelevant, as Lublin never manifests in the book. Still, it helped me understand the historical coordinates between which the protagonists’ adventures moved.
The second thing I did—but this was after I finished the book—was to follow an intuition I acquired from Italo Calvino’s most loved book, Invisible Cities, and get in touch with the author to find out what her connection with Lublin was. According to Calvino’s main character Marco Polo, the only way to preserve cities is to hide them, not set them down in words. Had Manya, I wondered, decided to write about her attachment to the city by hiding it behind the characters’ desire to reach it? Unfortunately, my intuition proved misleading. Manya didn’t have any connection to Lublin. What she had instead was one with Mezritsh, the shtetl where the adventure in the book starts and the village where her grandmother lived before emigrating to the US in 1910.
In admitting my instinct’s defeat, I however acknowledged a truth: Lublin is a trick, a distraction, and an optical illusion. Lublin is a mythical city, a city that becomes more and more unreal as the novel progresses, a city that disappears and in whose disappearance lies the true sense of the novel.
To understand this, rather than focusing on this city, I had to look somewhere else.
Mezritsh
Mezritsh (Międzyrzec today, as the Yiddish name for the town does not exist anymore) was a shtetl located on the eastern border of today’s Poland, in a Western area of the then-Russian Empire known at the time as the Pale of Settlement. Between 1791 and 1917, the Pale was where Jews were allowed permanent residency and where Yiddish culture and life thrived, although in a bleak and deprived economic context. The lack of freedom of movement and the constant menace of even further restrictions and deprivations by the Russian Empire made life in the shtetls hard, and it was not uncommon for people to try to move elsewhere. In 1910, a wave of emigration saw many Jewish inhabitants of the Pale move to the US in search of fortune. Among these, as she told me, was Manya Wilkinson’s grandmother. Still, despite the harsh living circumstances, some trades flourished in the area, like that of brushes and bristles in Mezritsh.
Lublin starts here in 1906, before the big wave of emigration, and follows the adventures of a trio of Jewish boys in their mid-teens who set off from the shtetl with a suitcase full of brushes and bristles that they hope to sell in Lublin.
In a strange mix of morality play and fable, the three boys, Elya, Kiva, and Ziv, epitomize three different characters—the practical adventurer, the religious unpractical intellectual, and the radical political rebel. They leave the village on foot, carrying only a map drawn by (and bought from) a local merchant as their sole guide, convinced the journey will take just a couple of days. It doesn’t take much to see that the premises aren’t great, that the journey will take longer, much longer. In fact, the boys will never reach their destination. In the impossibility of reaching it, the novel’s central narrative and its deepest meaning will play out.
Lublin is not only a road trip on foot in central Europe, nor a coming-of-age novel nor the story of a rite of passage. It is the translation into fiction of the economic migrant’s existential condition, caught and lost in the endless borderland that extends between their deprived place of origin and the metropole’s illusion of socio-economic elevation and fulfillment. The novel offers an exploration of the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, and between the local and the global, between perceived and imagined places. It describes what Gloria Anzaldúa would call nepantla.
Though the book manifests as a simple kids’s adventure at first sight, it lends itself to multiple theoretical readings. In the short space of this piece I’d like to focus on a single episode, or rather an object central to the narrative, and show how it encapsulates most of the theories I’ve just mentioned.
A map of liminal spaces
In a very early passage, towards the end of the first day of travel, Elya takes out a map and shows his traveling companions the route for the following day:
Along a snaking line, various Jewish and peasant villages have been marked and named by the worthy Mezritsher brush merchant who drew the map for Elya, while his fellow farkoyfers watched.
“Why don’t we have a proper map?” asks Ziv.
“This is a proper map. Look here.”
Elya points to the Village of Lakes; the Village of No Lakes; Russian Town, a dangerous place for Jews; Prune Town, the home of the flakiest crescent pastry; Prayer Town, where men and women walk on separate sides of the street; the Village of Girls, full of beautiful and available young women; the Village of the Dead, so called because no one has ever sold anything there; and the Village of Fools, where a merchant can sell anything.
“Or maybe there are no such places,” Ziv makes a frowning face.
“What do you mean?”
“They just don’t sound real.”
“They’re real, don’t worry.”
“Lemme see that,” Ziv grabs Elya’s map. “A map for children,” he hoots.
Elya grabs it back. He loves maps. Best memory: his father asking to see his atlas.
This map, which will be unfolded at different points throughout the novel, acts as a prism that reflects and diffuses the different gazes shed upon it. It is a map drawn and sold by a merchant that materializes a simplified, unreliable representation of space. It doesn’t provide trustable measures and coordinates which might establish distances and traveling times, but depicts place as it is subjectively perceived in relation to commercial possibilities— “dangerous,” “no one has ever sold anything”, “can sell anything”—or types of “leisures” and services available to the traveling businessman—“pastry,” “men and women . . . on separate sides of the street,” “beautiful and available women.” That such a map might be unreliable is a doubt that Elya himself voices towards the end of the book, when almost everything is lost. “Could it be that the merchant who drew the map and sold it [to him] for one kopek was playing a trick? Sending [him] and his friends in the wrong direction to avoid competition?”
While Elya only suspects the map’s accuracy towards the novel’s end, Ziv, the most radical of the three kids, raises the doubt at the beginning. “Maybe there are no such places . . . They just don’t sound real,” he states, before concluding that, rather than lying, the map must be “for children.” Which the boys are not. They are teenagers who have embarked on a journey with a clear purpose—selling brushes, getting rich, and improving their social and economic status. They can’t be lied to, they must be treated as adults, they need a real map, not a trick.
Paradoxically, it is exactly by doubting the map’s reliability that they locate themselves in the passage between childhood and adulthood, in that liminal space between naïveté and suspicion, enchantment and disillusion. The boys understand that something isn’t quite right, but can’t fully articulate what is wrong. In their eyes, they are just following a route which becomes more treacherous and less dependable as they progress.
In this sense, the map comes to represent a journey of discovery and a rite of passage. The way that the three boys see it transform from a reliable to an unreliable object parallels the journey towards awareness and disenchantment typical of adulthood. Here, their personal journey comes with a progressive lack of confidence in the certainty of eventually reaching their destination. Still, Elya’s stubbornness and desire for social elevation counterbalances such disillusionment and keeps the band going—until their ultimate destination.
The drawn map embodies another relationship, the one between perceived space and “objective” space. According to the urban theorist Edward Soja, space can be divided into three dimensions. “Firstspace” is the “real” space—the material space that can be mapped. “Secondspace” is the “imagined” representational space—the space as it is seen through the eyes of those who interact with it. “Thirdspace” combines the first- and secondspace to create “a fully lived space, a simultaneously real-and-imagined, actual-and-virtual locus of structured individuality and collective experience and agency.”
As a subjective “translation” of a perceived space, the drawn map records the merchant’s—and by extension the local Jewish trading community’s—historical and political understanding of space. “Russian Town, a dangerous place for Jews,” states the map. And indeed a dangerous place it is. “They have almost reached the edge of the town, when they are stopped by two officials in ill-fitting uniforms, blocking the road. Are they army? Police? No. Border guards.” Here the boys must declare loyalty to the Tsar and bribe the guards to escape. Warning of danger, the map functions as a historical archive, a palimpsest that records the traces of social violence as they have been perceived and transmitted across generations by a community.
In this sense the map conflates Soja’s first- (the geographical space around Mezritsh) and secondspace (thoughts and feelings associated to a space by a community) to become itself a thirdspace, a liminal space at the same time real and imagined, geographical and emotional.
The map also records a linguistic relationship to space. Although its language is unclear, the names that the merchant scribbled on the map don’t match the boys’s experience:
But the Village of Lakes, as it turns out, is actually the Village of Sticks. According to Elya’s unmistaken map, the Village of Sticks ought to have been found elsewhere, beyond the Village of Girls, but before the Village of Prayers, none of which have they encountered, in this order or any order. Eh? What gives? And where are all the ordinary towns between Mezritsh and Lublin? Radzyn? Stavaitchi? Vlodva? Lubartov? Skrobow? Serniki? Niemce? Tarow?
Are they in the wrong place? Or has the merchant given the towns the wrong names? Did he draw the map from memory, or while being in the actual physical space? The book’s constant interplay between English and Yiddish easily reveals the ambivalent relationship between language, experience and space. The constant switch between languages doesn’t simply contain political and cultural meaning, but also shows how language shapes experience and, by association, how knowledge acquired in a language can determine the limits of one’s experience. For instance, “Kiva only knows the names of those trees that appear in the Jewish Bible: olive trees, fig trees, palm trees, caper bush trees and sorb trees, which do not grow in Poland.”
Being in the liminal space
By embodying all these relationships between conflicting experiences—subjective and objective, real and unreal, childhood and adulthood, experience and language, place and translation—the map not only represents but becomes a liminal space of transformation, as the queer Chicana theorist Gloria Anzaldúa writes below:
Bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds, spaces I call nepantla, a Nahuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement–an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling.
The three boys are trapped in a borderland between Mezritsh and Lublin, and in an endless journey of personal transformation which mirrors the postcolonial subject’s journey towards emancipation, which is often a journey towards an illusion, towards a city or a future that constantly recedes, and eventually disappears in the horizon. It is not casual the use of “postcolonial” in this context since scholars today increasingly read the history of the former-USSR from a postcolonial perspective.
Going back to Anzaldúa, I didn’t quote her by chance. As a Chicana, her interest lies in the border between Mexico and the US, a border that is not only political and economic but also linguistic. Living in the “borderland” that separates the two countries means embodying a disassociation between two cultures, mindsets, languages, and experiences. This separation is irreducible and unsolvable, and can only be processed by accepting the coexistence of different identities. The nepantla is the space inhabited during this process.
Curiously, Valeria Luiselli’s much appreciated novel Lost Children Archive (2019) presents an episode that echoes Lublin’s. Luiselli’s book is an autofictional travelogue that recounts a family’s road trip from New York to the Mexican Border, to document the Mexican migrant crisis and retrace the steps of the last Native Americans conquered by European settlers. Throughout the novel, Luiselli scatters different types of material, from archival traces—photographs, books, bibliographies, police records—to chapters of a fictional kids’s book, inspired by the historical Children’s Crusade of the thirteenth century. Towards the end, when they’ve reached Echo Desert, the two siblings leave the temporary accommodation rented by their parents to set off in search of Mexican children that they believe are lost in the desert, trying to reach the US. They leave in the early morning before the sun rises. To avoid raising suspicion the boy swiftly sketches a map of the area, using as a source the one his mother has been using during their trip. The boy’s map, like the map in Lublin, is a loose representation of the borderland space that he and his sister are trying to cross. It is an unreliable guide full of scribbles and words that only make partial sense, and that ultimately serves the sole purpose of getting the kids lost. The parallel between the kids’s experiences in both Lublin and Lost Children Archive is particularly interesting: They all set off for their respective journeys believing in the map’s absolute objectivity, but as the journey extends to the point of almost taking their lives, the kids realize that their desire to reach a destination can become an almost deadly illusion. They all get caught in the nepantla.
Both Luiselli and Wilkinson’s novels are based on extensive research on two borderlands, Mexico/USA in the early twenty-first century and the Pale of Settlement in the early twentieth century. Both novels portray characters whose identities are split between different cultures, and both borrow conventions and narrative forms from different genres or traditions: elegies and children’s books in Luiselli’s case, and Yiddish humor and jokes in Wilkinson’s. In doing so they reflect on the experience of the post-colonial economic migrant, caught between and ultimately squeezed by different socio-economic realities.
From specific to universal, and back
When Manya Wilkinson told me she had no relationship with Lublin, she added something I found particularly interesting. She said that she was interested in “lost places,” and that she had attempted to animate the lost world of Jewish Poland as she had absorbed it through her grandma’s stories. She didn’t travel to Mezritsh while researching and writing the book because she “wanted to write an emotional truth rather than [a] primarily or only factual truth.” “Although the facts are largely true, I tried not to be overwhelmed by research,” she told me. It seems to me that the emotional truth she’s tried to inscribe in the novel feels “true” exactly because it echoes and reverberates other experiences. While writing a very specific and localized adventure, Wilkinson has in fact told a universal story. It is for this reason that we can find it, though flavored differently, in other books and experiences, like Luiselli’s children’s adventure in the desert or other postcolonial novels. But most importantly it is for this reason that Lublin reads like a fable: one where the protagonists are archetypes, where the characters they encounter—Russian border guards, sex workers, Cossacks—can be conflated into a single Other, and where all the places they go through are equally localized and abstract. Elya, Kiva, and Ziv could be walking through the US/Mexico borderlands as well as in Poland.
The story’s specificity can instead be found in references to Yiddish culture—in particular in the constant Jewish jokes—and in various temporal coordinates scattered throughout the book by the omniscient narrator: the invention of the ballpoint pen by László Biró in 1938; suffragettes protests in London; the arrest of a woman smoking a cigarette in a motor car on Fifth Avenue in New York City. Interestingly, this omniscient narrator tells the story in the present and constantly fractures time, bringing the the past of the shtetl and the future into the present of the children’s adventure. Its voice is like Adoshem’s, the knower of all. Yet, even knowing everything and seeing everything, they never reference what is looming ahead for the Jewish community, leaving it to the reader to understand. As I didn’t want to make assumptions or advance my personal interpretation for this choice, I couldn’t avoid asking Wilkinson her reasoning.
“My feeling is that you don’t (I couldn’t) write about the Holocaust today by writing about the Holocaust,” she told me. And then she added, “bringing the past into the present and the future into the past I tried to do this.”
The book as a map
The more I tried to unpick the different layers of interpretation and meaning embedded in Lublin, the more I realized I was stepping away from the adventures of the three boys. Instead, I was heading towards a more encompassing analysis that moved beyond the novel’s plot and tried to take into consideration a larger picture: the historical and cultural references contained in the novel, the writer’s experience, the collective historical traumas associated with the history of the Pale of Settlement, the experience of migration, and so on. In this process, in stepping out of the frame, I realized that the book itself was becoming a version of the map it contains.
You, I, or anyone could look at it and see something different according to our experiences and knowledge. This is not simply a reader-oriented response form of criticism, but rather an acknowledgement that the book’s meaning takes shape only in the accretion of our different readings. Like the map it contains, Lublin itself is a map of a world located in time and space, drawn by Wilkinson from memory, imagination, feelings, and experiences. She has marked the city of Lublin on it, aware that it is just a signpost, a name that means different things according to who’s reading the map. We can use a shared legend to read it, but we’ll end up handling the map differently.
While I was getting to the end of this piece, I realized something else. Following Calvino’s intuition wasn’t as incorrect as I had thought at first. Rather than borrowing his idea that “speaking” about a city risks causing its “loss,” I should have followed his idea that cities are to be treated like dreams:
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
Lublin is indeed like a dream. It is a city that never appears in the story, but that is constantly made “visible” by the desires of the boys trying to reach it. It is a city that disappears from the physical space inhabited by the boys to reappear in the reader’s hands as a map. It is a destination that dissolves into the desire for a destination and that in this process loses its local specificity to become the universal symbol of any desired city.
Although its rules can be absurd and deceitful, here lies one of the magic powers of writing: the ability of concealing desires and fears in its texture and making disappearing cities reappear on a page.
Giorgia Tolfo holds a PhD in postcolonial and comparative literature at the University of Bologna. She is an independent researcher, writer, and translator. She has published widely in Italian literary magazines, her forthcoming novel will be out in January 2025.
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