Dream in a Suitcase, With Domnica Radalescu

Dream in a Suitcase from Domnica Radulescu is a fast-paced, true story of survival, resilience and the power of love, told from the perspective of a female Romanian-American survivor of the worst communist dictatorship behind the former Iron Curtain.

The story opens against the backdrop of 1983 Bucharest. The food lines are interminable, the secret police are omnipresent, and college student Domnica Radulescu is reluctantly preparing for a daring journey that will take her first to Rome, and eventually, the United States.

Domnica traces the defining moments in her life, beginning with her traumatic escape to Italy in 1983; back to several pivotal events in the her early childhood and adolescence in her native Romania; her arrival and first years as a fresh political refugee trying to adjust and survive in Chicago; and the saga of her resettlement in a small Southern town as a single working mother. 

With uncompromising irony, self-deprecating humor and unapologetic feminist rebelliousness that calls to mind Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, Dream in a Suitcase is a powerful memoir that immerses readers in the mind of a woman who makes the bold but heartbreaking decision to leave behind her family and country to pursue the illusory American Dream.