Romanian Immigrant Travel Routes to America

This paper claims the existence of various immigrant travel routes in American literature. The literary argumentation relies on Domnica Radulescu and her first novel Train to Trieste and on Alta Ifland‘s collection of short stories Elegy for a Fabulous Land. Both writers were born in Romania and were confronted with totalitarianism and its impositions upon individual identity. Travel and mobility have shaped the identities of these two writers in decisive ways which draw the contours of an emerging hyphenated ethnic literature: Romanian-American literature.