Dream in a Suitcase: The Story of an Immigrant Life

Second Edition

Domnica Radulescu

Foreword by Michèle Sarde

Dream in a Suitcase unravels a fast-paced journey of survival, resilience, and the transformative power of love. It is the first English-language memoir by a female Romanian American survivor of one of the most brutal communist dictatorships behind the Iron Curtain.

The narrative offers a rich multicultural mosaic of a life divided not only between two cultures and languages—the heroine’s native Romania and her adoptive United States—but also between Chicago’s urban landscape and a small Virginia town marked by a heavy Confederate legacy. Deeply relevant to our times, this book invites American-born readers to gain a more nuanced understanding of those who arrived as refugees in search of freedom, peace, and their own versions of the American Dream.

First published in 2021, this autobiography has now been reissued and expanded, featuring a new foreword by writer Michèle Sarde.

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Domnica Radulescu is a Romanian American transnational fiction writer, playwright, scholar, and educator. She arrived in the United States in 1983 as a political refugee, escaping the Communist dictatorship of her native Romania. She holds a PhD in Romance Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. Radulescu is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, Train to Trieste, Black Sea Twilight, Country of Red Azaleas, My Father’s Orchards, of a novel written in French, Tu viens du pays des vampires, and of award-winning plays. Train to Trieste was published in thirteen languages and is the winner of the 2009 Library of Virginia Fiction Award. Radulescu received the 2011 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia. Two of her plays, "The Town with Very Nice People" and "Exile Is My Home," were finalists for the Jane Chamber Playwriting Award. She is the author of more than fifteen scholarly books and edited collections, among which Women’s Comedic Art as Social Revolution and Theater of War and Exile. Radulescu is twice a Fulbright scholar and the founding director of the National Symposium of Theater in Academe. She is a distinguished service professor of French and Comparative Literature at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, United States.

234mm × 156mm; 386 pages
Paperback 978-1-917904-11-7

Published 30 September 2026

“An extraordinary memoir of fortitude and freedom, a narrative that is vibrant and lyrical. Radulescu takes us from Romania’s dark dictatorial past to the world of literature and beauty, back to the landscapes of her beloved native country, then to her new home in America, and always to the geography of the earth. This is an extraordinary read and a covenant to the power of truth and words.”

—Marjorie Agosín, winner of the Latino Literary Prize and the Peabody Award, author of I Lived on Butterfly Hill and Secrets in the Sand: The Young Women of Juárez.