Creative Matters

“Welcome to America,” fragment from Dream in a Suitcase. A Story of My Immigrant Life

Authors

  • Domnica Radulescu Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.8.35460

Keywords:

memoir, anti-memoir narrative, imagination, journey, home, country, refugee, belonging, cold, suitcase

Abstract

Memorialistic chapter about the author’s arrival to America and her first months in Chicago in 1983, during the coldest winter of the century.

Author Biography

Domnica Radulescu, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia

I am a Romanian American writer living in the United States where I arrived in 1983 as a political refugee, having escaped from the communist dictatorship of my native country.  I have chosen English as the language of my written expression in all my academic, fiction and dramatic works. I am  a Distinguished Service Professor of Comparative Literature at Washington and Lee University in Lexington Virginia where I teach French, Italian and Comparative Literatures. I live, write, and function in the hyphenated spaces between cultures, languages and artistic universes. I am the author of three internationally acclaimed novels, Train to Trieste (Knopf 2008 &2009), Black Sea Twilight (Transworld 2011 & 2012) and Country of Red Azaleas(Hachette 2016) and of award winning plays, of which one, Exile Is My Home was produced off Broadway, at the Theater for the New City in New York, in 2016.  I am in the process of completing my fourth novel My Father’s Orchards and a memorialistic book titled Dream in a Suitcase. A Story of My Immigrant Life.

Published

2019-05-21

Issue

Section

Creative Matters