Histria Books is pleased to announce the release of Coming to America: A Jewish-Romanian Story of Belonging by Ana Doina. This memoir is published by Histria Perspectives, an imprint dedicated to publishing outstanding works of nonfiction that illuminate history, culture, and society.
In Coming to America, Ana Doina brings together stories and essays about growing up in communist Romania and learning to live in the United States. She approaches that passage through details that grand accounts of exile often miss: a family toast that resists translation, the etiquette of eating pizza, the instinct to save what others throw away. Her poet’s ear catches the distance between speaking a language and feeling at home in it. Affection for Romania sits beside anger at its repression; gratitude for American freedoms leaves room for sharp questions about American life. Family recipes, forbidden writing, and the silences surrounding Jewish ancestry make history tangible without reducing it to a lesson.
At a time when immigration is so often discussed in numbers and slogans, Doina offers something more intimate and less easily categorized: the daily negotiations of a person who carries two countries, and can see neither uncritically.
Ana Doina is a Romanian-born American writer living in New Jersey whose poetry, fiction, and essays explore memory, displacement, belonging, and the search for freedom. She holds an M.A. in History and Philosophy from the University of Bucharest and left Romania during the Ceauşescu regime amid political and social pressures. Drawing on her experiences under communism and as an immigrant, she embraces the tradition of “writing as witness” to illuminate the personal and communal legacies of the twentieth century. Her work has appeared in national and international magazines, anthologies, and textbooks, and her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations and an Honorable Mention in the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards for Poems on the Jewish Experience. Her books include the poetry chapbook The Later Generation and the full-length collection Legend of Bread.
