Immigrant life and the value of memory.
Stories of Emigration
Those who have managed to stand the continuous violences and new deprivations, the survivors, disoriented in the middle of society that despise and humiliate them, lost in languages they could not understand, they were gradually able to build, with almost heroic renunciation and sacrifice, coin on coin, penny on penny, the future of their descendants.
Some of these men, some of these women have not lost nor want to lose the memory of the period in which they had to endure all the oppressions of the low-paying job and all the bitterness of social isolation. Praised them for being able to preserve the respect they owed to their past.
Many others, most of them, have cut all ties that bound them to those dark hours, they are ashamed of being ignorant, poor, miserable sometimes, now they behave, as if a decent life, for them, is really just begun on the happy day when they were able to buy their first car. These are the ones that will always be ready to treat the emigrants with the same cruelty and the same disgust.
Who before had been judged and who has lost ... [continues »]

José Saramago

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