The Second Exile Jhumpa Lahiri Analysis

When Jhumpa Lahiri returns to America after spending a year in Rome, she quickly misses Italian, “Not the be able to speak it and hear it every day distresses...” (125) her greatly and though she has barely been back in America she has a “...aching sense homesickness.” (125). Lahiri shows in the chapter titled “The Second Exile” that though she has only been away from Italian for a very short amount time it has already forced her to miss the language she is just coming to learn, also showing her fear for losing the language of Italian. In this chapter Jhumpa Lahiri speaks of her parents as she wrote “In America, when I was young, my parents always seemed to be in mourning for something. Now I understand: it must have been the language.” (127).
Lahiri understands that her parents mourned for language, she understands how they feel now, she is now like them, she is separated from Italian with an ocean between her and what she loves. Lahiri shows that she knows her parents feeling and understand the loss of something as meaningful now.