Love and death may drive most of the important stories we tell each other, but exile isn’t far behind as an engine of significant human narrative. In the Bible, for one important example, exile makes its dramatic entrance in Genesis 3, just behind Adam, Eve, and the serpent: “Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man.”

A few chapters later, it’s Cain’s turn to be rendered rootless, then Noah’s to be sundered from the world he knows and floated off with his menagerie and fractious sons to Mount Ararat. Then comes Abraham’s eviction: “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee,” says God. Then Hagar, Ishmael, Jacob (fleeing to avoid Esau’s anger at Jacob’s rendering him a displaced older son) are made refugees in rapid succession. And a few chapters later, all of Israel’s fate pivots when Joseph is sold into Egypt, eventually to be followed into that exile by his large family, its members cast from their tents by famine, not to return until Moses arrives on the scene to finally take the tribes home and, in one of the more terrible expressions of exile in the Bible, to die while gazing at the promised land from a mountain top.

Meanwhile (so to speak), 750 miles to the northwest of Mount Nebo, the Greeks—the other half of the querulous but enduring mixed marriage that we refer to as Western civilization—were themselves awash in heart-wrenching stories of exile: Helen dragged off to Troy, and bringing down those towers; prideful Odysseus forced to spend a decade tacking his yearning way home to Ithaka; the exiled Oedipus simmering in Corinth until he can return home to kill his father and marry his mother; the exiled Orestes simmering in Phocis until he can return home to kill his murderous mother and her lover.

As exile is most often induced by privation, political chaos, and cruelty, and as the post-Edenic world has never been short of any of these flavorings, there’s no historical period that lacks its banished or their poignant stories: from Ovid, Cicero, and Boethius, to Muhammad, Dante, and Petrarch (his family exiled from Florence by the same thugs that had expelled Dante), to Rousseau, Byron, and Napoleon, to Mann, Freud, and Einstein, to—in recent years—Khomeini, Brodsky, and El Duque.

Some eras, however, have been particularly flush. Rome under its worst despots, for example, was so productive of exiles that the empire’s mandarins were stimulated to develop a typology of expulsion that included three genuses: exsilium, relagatio, and deportatio. (The first distinguished from the second in that it included the loss of citizenship as well as locale, and the last distinguished from the previous two in that it included the use of chains during transport.) And exsilium and relagatio were themselves blessed with subspecies. In the case of the former they were, in order of awfulness, banishment from a particular place, banishment to a particular place, and banishment to an island (not Capri or Santa Catalina, presumably).

No era, however, could hope to compete with the century that just closed and its estimated 100 million-plus “displaced persons,” a phrase that had to be invented during those hundred years along with equivocations such as “concentration camp,” “ethnic cleansing” and “internal displacement.”

As it happens my four grandparents were among those 100 million. Fleeing a variety of poverties and tyrannies, they landed in the United States as young men and women, and never recovered from the displacement, never quite caught up with the punch lines, the utility of avocadoes, the signals in the shadow of the catcher’s mitt, but remained to their last days somewhat wistful onlookers at the American fair, shy and lost in what Victor Hugo called “the long dream of home.”

Czeslaw Milosz, who as a consequence of his antipathy to totalitarian regimes spent most of his adult life writing poems and essays in Polish beside San Francisco Bay, understood the havoc wreaked by exile, the way it tatters memory and language and heart. In a sequence of poems called “The Separate Notebooks,” he writes

I had a dream of return. Multi-colored, joyous, I was able to fly.

And the trees were even higher than in childhood, because they had been growing during all the years since they had been cut down.

The aching poets of Israel and Greece would have understood.

Our cover story, written by one of the 33 million refugees that our new century already harbors, and drawn from a book produced and edited by Boston College’s David Hollenbach, SJ, begins here.

Read more by Ben Birnbaum