Helena de Groot grew up in Belgium and is now a radio producer living in New York City. When I found out she was about to take her citizenship test, I asked if she’d be willing to record herself talking about what it feels like to become an American…and she agreed.
Helena is the host and producer of the Poetry Foundation podcast Poetry Off the Shelf and senior producer of The Paris Review Podcast, and she teaches at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Once a year she goes home to Belgium, and then comes back home to New York. Ten years after they first met, she still thinks David is the most beautiful man on the entire planet.
Dear Erica,
Thank you so much for this episode.
I’m annika, Helenas mum. I laughed and I cried with the episode, and most of all, I’m so grateful of what you did. I think you captured the essence of Helenas ‘struggle’ and who she is in just 20 minutes. That’s amazing.
The talking, laughter, music etc in the background, and her (their) story on top of it, it is great.
I’ve listened twice and I heard a lot more the second time. The first time I was just overwhelmed,I think.
Thank you very much,
annika
No higher honor than approval from YOU!! Who knows Helena best!
This was a beautiful portrait. I found myself longing for Belgium right along with Helena despite never having been there.
Your latest episode featuring Helena’s experience with cognitive and emotional dissonance between life in Europe and life here in the states really hit home for me. In my early 20s I lived in a small village outside of Bangalore, India teaching ESL at a rural high school. The very last week of that experience I met a Swiss woman and to truncate the story, wound up following her back to Basel, CH where she was from. For the next three years I lived there and went through an intense time of reckoning with the cultural and logistical differences. ( many positive, some negative )
Towards the end of that relationship, we attempted to live in Somerville/Cambridge which was where I could best function as a professional musician. In Helena’s story, I found many echoes of my swiss girlfriend’s observations and difficulties about American life, which I could/can very much relate to. It has left a legacy that to this day, almost 20 years later, still creates a feeling of being a refugee in your own country. Not to appropriate the bone seriousness of that word, refugee, but once you’ve experienced this, it is near impossible to ignore… the feeling that for all of the things one can be thankful for here, there is the knowledge that there are better ways, saner ways, to live, saner things to focus one’s time and values on…. It is very difficult to fully convey this to other americans that have not had it. I feel very thankful for this, even though it’s a melancholy and confusing thorn in the side at times.
–Gregorio
Loved this, Erica – I am really enjoying your podcast!
Thank you lady!!!