Tag Archives: Anne Thompson-Akhmadova
Writing as Identity: Banine’s “Parisian Days,” Translated from French by Anne Thompson-Ahmadova
At the start of her second memoir, “Parisian Days,” Banine, a French author of Azerbaijani descent, arrives in the promised land. The year is 1921. Paris has newly entered the Roaring Twenties, a time of short respite between the two Great Wars. Banine is only nineteen, and she has just miraculously escaped her detested husband, the distant city of Istanbul where she left him behind, her homeland Azerbaijan and, perhaps most significantly, the grips of the Soviet Union.