The rise of fascism in Europe created a body of works by authors for whom the choice of exile became the defining event in their lives, autobiographers who recounted terrifying stories of incarceration, flight, survival, and integration into a new culture. In The Face of Exile, Judith Melton offers a powerful and empathetic analysis of the autobiographies written by these unwilling participants in the social upheaval created by Hitler's war on Europe.

In The Face of Exile, Judith Melton first focuses on the disrupted lives revealed in early memoirs by such self-defined witnesses of history as Lion Feuchtwanger, Georg Grosz, and Yehuda Nir, emphasizing that their personal stories provide the modern reader with insight into the subjective responses to the crisis of going into exile. Given the traumatic nature of the experiences involved, Melton preserves an admirable balance between critical objectivity and sympathy in analyzing the lives of these suffering writers.

In the second and longer part, Melton situates exile autobiography within the appropriate critical theories before concentrating on the consistent themes of exile autobiography: loss, disruption, and reintegration; she examines psychological expressions of exile—often written years later—that seek to reconstitute a self fractured by the psychic and physical shocks of exile. Drawing on an amazingly diverse body of works, she shows how nostalgia for childhood (Vladimir Nabokov and Eva Hoffman), intellectual responses (Czeslaw Milosz and Thomas Mann), and spiritual meditations (Mircea Eliade) become major influences on exile autobiography.

The Face of Exile is a significant and validating examination of the cultural, psychological, and historical dimensions of exile autobiography. Clearly and compellingly, Judith Melton reveals the voices and concepts behind this important twentieth-century literature that has become a metaphor for alienation in our time.

As a child growing up in Cambodia, Ronnie Yimsut played among the ruins of the Angkor Wat temples, surrounded by a close-knit community. As the Khmer Rouge gained power and began its genocidal reign of terror, his life became a nightmare. In this stunning memoir, Yimsut describes how, in the wake of death and destruction, he decides to live.

Escaping the turmoil of Cambodia, he makes a perilous journey through the jungle into Thailand, only to be sent to a notorious Thai prison. Fortunately, he is able to reach a refugee camp and ultimately migrate to the United States, where he attended the University of Oregon and became an influential leader in the community of Cambodian immigrants. Facing the Khmer Rouge shows Ronnie Yimsut’s personal quest to rehabilitate himself, make a new life in America, and then return to Cambodia to help rebuild the land of his birth.

Winner of the Florida Historical Society's 2015 Stetson Kennedy Award

The 1980 Mariel Boatlift was a profound episode in twentieth-century American history, impacting not just Florida, but the entire country. During the first twenty days of the boatlift, with little support from the federal government, the state of Florida coordinated and responded to the sudden arrival in Key West of more than thirty thousand Cuban refugees, the first wave of immigrants who became known as “Marielitos.”
 
Kathleen Dupes Hawk, Ron Villella, Adolfo Leyva de Varona, and Kristen Cifers combine the insights of expert observers with the experiences of actual participants. The authors organize and present a wealth of primary sources, first-hand accounts, archival research, government records, and interviews with policy-makers, volunteers, and refugees that bring into focus the many far-reaching human, political, and cultural outcomes of the Mariel Boatlift that continue to influence Florida, the United States, and Cuba today.
 
Emerging from these key records and accounts is a grand narrative of high human drama. Castro’s haphazard and temporary opening of Cuba spurred many thousands of Cubans to depart in calamitously rushed, unprepared, and dangerous conditions. The book tells the stories of these Cuban citizens, most legitimately seeking political asylum but also including subversive agents, convicted criminals, and the mentally ill, who began arriving in the US beginning in April 1980. It also recounts how local and state agencies and private volunteers with few directives or resources were left to improvise ways to provide the Marielitos food, shelter, and security as well as transportation away from Key West.
 
The book provides a definitive account of the political, legal, and administrative twists on the local, state, and federal levels in response to the crisis as well as of the often-dysfunctional attempts at collaboration between governmental and private institutions. Vivid and readable, Florida and the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 presents the significant details that illuminate and humanize this complex humanitarian, political, and logistical crisis. 

In 1790, Pierre-Charles de Lassus de Luzières gathered his wife and children and fled Revolutionary France. His trek to America was prompted by his “purchase” of two thousand acres situated on the bank of the Ohio River from the Scioto Land Company—the institution that infamously swindled French buyers and sold them worthless titles to property. When de Luzières arrived and realized he had been defrauded, he chose, in a momentous decision, not to return home to France. Instead, he committed to a life in North America and began planning a move to the Mississippi River valley.