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Requiem for a Great Slavic Poet, the Polish emigre writer who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980, in part for a powerful pre-mortem dissection of communism, in part for observing that the defection from the homeland would not be easy, but that it would be worth it! Czeslaw Milosz will be burried in Krakov; about odd 77 km from the village of my birth, Vrbov.
Bernard Lane's oddly timed World according to Milosz
Like Czech exile Milan Kundera and Polish exile Hlasko (meaning voice), Czeslaw believed that reading and storytelling have historically functioned as the most dependable form of nourishing our moral compass.
Ach, before we cast the first stone at Khouri, we should examine what kind of pressure the reality of the publishing industry places on migrants in order to see their bloody stories in ink. I am not sure whether Norma is a good or a bad woman, but one thing I know is that everyone has her/his Amerikan/Jordanian/Bohemian story (real or imagined) of the way he became to live a life of a surreal stranger. For what is a stranger, if she is not a wondering creator of post cards who dreams of being a gypsy? Everything inside the world of a gypsy is preordained by mysterious and implacable forces. It is a world without history or geography. In such a world even raw and powerful human-interest stories of rootless migrants are helpless. Rarely someone can help invented or true stories to see the light of the day. Back in 1999 on the 1st Floor of 20 Alfred St Milsons Point I was advised by Jane Palfreyman of Random House fame that my story was evocative enough, but too risky even for the esteemed power house of the publishing industry. When a great publisher admits such a reality, it is a blow that shatters our whole image of the world.
Shakespeare suggests to speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. Images that to others seem simple or even banal become a raging and screaming truth. Without any doubt, the act of writing stories of survival threatens the storyteller with dual curses: that the stories will be overdone, that the tragedies will be understated ...

Literature & Art Across Frontiers: Publisher pulls Khouri book
The Australian publisher of Norma Khouri's book Forbidden Love has withdrawn it from sale permanently after she could not prove her life story was true.
Earlier this week Ms Khouri submitted documents to Random House to demonstrate the book was a factual account of her life in Jordan.
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