Two books by writers from Moldova, set there, that give a real sense of the place: My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest and The Good Life Elsewhere.
Very little writing from Moldova is available in English, though its people have long sung ballads such as Miorița, a shepherd's tale shared with Romania. Most written literature is in Romanian, which Soviet authorities called Moldovan and printed in Cyrillic until the Latin alphabet returned in 1989. Bessarabia, the land between the Prut and Dniester rivers, was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, and writers worked under censorship until independence in 1991.
Start with Paul Goma's My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest, translated from Romanian, an autobiographical account of a 1940s Bessarabian village as Soviet annexation and war arrive. Goma, born there in 1935, became a dissident and settled in France. Steven J. Zipperstein's Pogrom revisits the 1903 Kishinev massacre in the city now called Chișinău, and Charles King's The Moldovans explains how language and borders shaped the country's identity, including breakaway Transnistria.
“Find a copy” goes to Bookshop.org. If you buy, we earn a small commission and independent bookshops get a share too.
A memoir of growing up in 1940s Bessarabia as Soviet annexation and the upheaval of war reshaped village life.
A darkly comic satire of Moldovan villagers' desperate schemes to escape poverty and emigrate to Italy, capturing post-Soviet Moldova's emigration-driven despair.
Albania Andorra Austria Belarus Belgium Bosnia and Herzegovina Bulgaria Croatia Cyprus Czechia Denmark Estonia Finland France Germany Greece Hungary Iceland Ireland Italy Kosovo Latvia Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg Malta Monaco Montenegro Netherlands North Macedonia Norway Poland Portugal Romania Russia San Marino Serbia Slovakia Slovenia Spain Sweden Switzerland Ukraine United Kingdom Vatican City