Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange

Peter Sterling has edited a wonderful collection of essays, stories and poems all spun out of the observations of a number of American Fulbright scholars living far from the familiarity of the Golden Arches and supermarkets and Jiffy Lubes. Experiencing the world out of sync with the cognitive prompts one can only believe have always been this way and always will be this way only to find that, well, no, they don't have to be that way and, in fact, aren't that way at all. Some of the scholars had ephinanies that you know you'll never have or understand. Others got bonked on the road to Damascus like St.Paul and nothing was ever going to be the same for them ever. I think about that guy who woke up holding a Ladino headstone in his hands from the old Jewish cemetary in Salonika destroyed by the Nazis in WWII. Or the poems of the woman who's so carefully chosen words which were meant to distance herself out of a sense of self-protection, are the same words that bind her to her lover. People laugh, people cry and people are pretty much the same in Siberia as there are in northern Maine, but the differences can profound. But we humans seemed cursed by "them or us" attitudes until us includes them. Thank God for Senator William Fulbright.