I spent countless summer nights listening to my grandma read me stories from this book. I learned many life lessons from these short stories. Both my parents immigrated to the US from Romania in 1998 and I was born shortly after. My parents still didn’t know English very well while I was a baby so I grew up immersed in the Romanian language and culture. My childhood included watching old Romanian movies, eating traditional foods and flying to Romania to visit relatives every summer. During one of my visits, my grandma gave me this book. She loved writing poetry and teaching me literature. The title of this storybook is one of Tolstoy’s stories “The ant and the dove.” Even though this book is a collection of translations of stories from the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, everything else about this book is authentically Romanian, from the illustrations to the stylizing of the text on its old pages. Nothing makes me feel more nostalgic about my childhood than when I pick up this book, flip to a random page and start reading. 

– Fabiola Radosav

Relationship:  Child of im/migrant Child of im/migrant