Running for Your Life: Sebald -- Content and Structure

There is so much to love about W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants.”

The roots: It celebrates two places, the home and the new home. If you predominantly identify yourself as an emigrant then you’ve not let go of your homeland.

The term emigrant implies that you close your eyes and feel the spirit of your native place.

The trunk: Immigrant, on the other hand, empowers the new home. While some practices are obviously primarily class-related, the phenomenon of an immigrant as more of a stranger in the land they entered and are in (“im”) than the one they exited (“em”), and more likely to be standing in line at a Western Union, sending money home to a family in need, seems true to me.

Emigration is a deep well that we’re sinking our rope-line bucket into, replete with treasures of memory. It traffics in emotions.

Immigration, an economic particle, what is subject to legislative policy.

What is the difference between science and art.

The crown: As an emigrant myself, I’m thinking of sitting down with my father, who has never left home.

What are the stories he would tell me, the reporter-writer returning home, what would culminate in being there with him, composing a Sebald-like Ambros Adelwarth-like story?

What he sees and feels about his life as he’s lived it, let the story unfold slowly and without judgment.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paper Mate