My New Romanian Life

Eighteen year-old Elena Mitulescu's life demanded that she seek beauty in those things most others perceive as mundane. Her beginnings within communist Romania had ordained a life of oppression and put her destitute family under watch from an abusive regime. But where others might submit to a tyrant and lend their lives to a cycle of corruption, Elena had no plans to forfeit her existence. Since her earliest memories she had wanted to be a physician and dedicate herself to the nation's impoverished orphanage residents. But even that noble goal has come under duress of governing officials who threatened to extinguish a life's work of planning.

Above these battles with authority, Elena's family offered their own challenges. Her parents arose from a race that outsiders had branded as Gypsies and regulated to a gauche part of Europe's backyard. Her older brother, Stefan, had left that destitute homestead and found a national revolution brewing within liberal Bucharest politics. But like the government authority above her, numerous personal trials couldn't retain the young Elena and her inextinguishable goal to help the unwanted children of her country.

My New Romanian Life is a story of the perseverance that was needed for those who lived in the communist East Bloc of 1980s Romania. It was a bleak time of absolute corruption under one of the most feared dictators of the Twentieth-Century. The story follows that oppression through the eyes of an intelligent young woman and her unyielding desire to understand the wrongs instituted above her. Elena Mitulescu would never submit to tyranny. She would always seek a new Romanian life.