Romania as a Trauma: Considerations upon Romanian-American Literature

The aim of this paper is to analyze trauma as constructed in a corpus of texts identified as Romanian-American literature. More precisely, we have focused on the violence of departure from Romania and the violence of adaptation to America in the novel Train to Trieste by Domnica Rădulescu, in Petru Popescu’s The Deputy, and in Alta Ifland’s collection of short stories Elegy for a Fabulous Land. All these writers were born in Romania and were confronted with totalitarianism and its impositions upon individual identity. For many years escape was the main target of their identity politics.