Word: diaspora
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...were writing a memoir about beloved but salty grandfathers and great-uncles from the East Side. Certainly Moses and Cain and Abel and even Adam seem as pungently real to him as the Jews he knew as a child in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. In returning to the first Diaspora, the first murder, the first exile, Author Wiesel appears at last to have found a meaning, if not an excuse for the Holocaust he has borne witness to so brilliantly and compulsively in haunted books like One Generation After and in plays like Zalmen, or the Madness...
...most immediately striking aspect o Diaspora is the way it's put together. The dominant impression is one of spaciousness and particles (words, poems) emphasized by their well-planned isolation in white space. Poems flower out onto the pages, or waterfall down them, or squat like fertility goddesses statuesque against the white. Then too, illustrations recur at intervals never longer than four pages--illustrations mostly that caress the eye, or that sit back and wait to be scratched, or that just purr. Vicki Minnis '77 did Diaspora's cover of cavorting silhouettes, as well as two impressively simple, almost monumental...
...literary part of Diaspora, it is by no means an unqualified success. College literati generally ropewalk their readers over deep pits full of slobbering metaphors and toothless symbols--all juicily anticipating being able to gum us to death down below. The freshness of youth too often translates as poetry into tired old cliches, because students usually have a naivete about what has come before...
...Diaspora, there are some writers who are in touch with, continually reach out for, their heritage--Africa, slaveships, plantations, revolts, the crushed hopes of an oppressed people always bubbling up nonetheless through chains and cigarette smoke and broken refrigerators. These writers' best verse is narrative and pithy and stabbing, like "Miles to Go" by Marc Roberts (Diaspora's editor) which moves tightly, inexorably, raspingly, through one dismal day of a ghetto woman's life and ends...
...Diaspora is a big magazine--52 pages of expression. What this briskly trotting publication needs now, in the desert that still is the Harvard-Radcliffe literary scene, is oases--Diaspora ("a dispersion as of people of a common national culture into other countries") is crying out for reading...