Remember Us

Remember Us takes its reader to the Balkans at a time of sweeping nationalism in the late nineteenth century. Greek and Bulgarian ambitions collide during the last gasps of the Ottoman Empire. Guerrilla warfare and ethnic cleansing precede the Balkan and First World Wars. Eleni, born in Sozopolis, a small city on the coast of the Black Sea, clutches her baby girl and sees her husband killed in a deadly pogrom. In mountainous Macedonia, Dimitraki, a boy whose life will eventually intersect Eleni and her daughter’s, fails in his attempt to assassinate a reviled Turkish governor. He eludes the hangman, but suffers the bastinado. Independently, they escape the Balkans’ cauldron of chaos, and cross the Atlantic to forge new lives, leaving homes and loved ones behind. But in America, separately and together, they face new trials — loss of place, poverty, deaths, scandal, and financial crisis.