Conference on American Aliyah in Literature and Research, Tel Aviv University, Oct. 25; sponsored by the Lester and Sally Entin Faculty of the Humanities, the Department of English and American Studies, and the Israel Association of Writers in English, with the cooperation of the English Speaking Friends of TAU

Unless you are taken to another country before you learn to read and write, or even speak much, the most convenient procedure for becoming a successful immigrant writer is to immigrate to a country that speaks your mother tongue, or a very near equivalent, like T.S. Eliot from the United States to England, or W.H. Auden, in the opposite direction (one wonders whether identifying oneself by initials only is a prerequisite for this sort of move). A second possibility is to write only in the language of the country to which you have immigrated as an adult, as in the case of Joseph Conrad, who grew up in Polish and wrote in (British) English. Then there is the model of Vladimir Nabokov, who hated being compared to Conrad, and declared "I differ from Joseph Conradically," which indeed he did, and wrote both in Russian and in (American) English, and even translated "Lolita" himself into Russian.