Many Years of Nowhere Behind Us

A friend once described the experience of being a refugee as being in a space shuttle losing one engine after another, catapulted into the infinite darkness of the universe. You and I share that experience: of losing ground and surviving in a vast empty space. It is that common vector which draws me to your books, especially in moments near death — that great darkness, la gran eskuridad, as you call it, “the void into which we were spilled, alive, to die.”

In the summer of 2019, I read your book, , which tells the story of your parents’ flight from the Bosnian war of 1992-1995. I read it beside my husband’s bed in a local Florida hospital. The war had erased thousands of lives and made millions of people into refugees, including your parents, my mother, many of those we love. My husband, an American, was cheered by the stories of your parents’ life in North America, by the humor and the