My son and I traveled to Chicago together.

For a few days, we walked the same streets, looked up at the same buildings, ate at the same tables, and collected the same small stories.

Then, at the end of the trip, we went to the airport.

He flew home to Helsinki.

I flew home to Seattle.

There was nothing unusual about it. At least, not for us. Families like ours become fluent in airports. We measure distance in flight times rather than miles. We know how to calculate time differences without looking them up and how to plan visits months ahead. We learn to say, "I'll call you when I land," as naturally as "See you tomorrow."

And yet, somewhere between the airport security line and the two flights carrying us in opposite directions, I found myself thinking about the geography of families.

For a long time, the story of migration seemed to have a fairly simple map. You left one country and made a home in another. The old country remained behind, the new country grew around you, and somewhere between the two, you tried to preserve the language, traditions, and values you hoped your children would carry forward.

But what happens when the family no longer has one place it simply calls home?

Children grow up and build lives in countries their parents eventually leave. Brothers and sisters settle on different continents. Grandparents remain in Romania. Cousins speak to each other from time zones eight or ten hours apart. We gather in Cluj, Helsinki, Seattle, Edinburgh, or sometimes in a city like Chicago that belongs to none of us. Then we return home, except home is no longer the same place for everyone.

The map keeps changing.

Maps tell us where a family is.

They don’t tell us how a family is.

What deserves our attention isn’t where our families live, but what still makes them feel like family.

Part of the answer is easy to see. We share a language, memories and traditions. We make a conscious effort to keep those alive because they help us remember where we come from.

But the things that make us a family are often more subtle.

They live in the way we tease one another, in the silences that don't need filling, in what we consider rude or polite, or how long we linger at a table after the meal is over. They are there in the flavors we search for in unfamiliar cities, in stories that grow richer with every retelling, and in laughter that begins before the punchline because everyone already knows what's coming. Sometimes they might even appear in that stubborn instinct to send someone away with food, regardless of how many restaurants, grocery stores, or airports stand between here and their next meal.

Our children may carry these things into lives very different from ours. They may speak several languages, build families whose maps are even more complicated, and be shaped by every place they call home. Romania will be one of those places, even if it is no longer the only one. They may never know where one influence ends and another begins.

Perhaps they don’t need to.

Perhaps this is another place where culture lives.

Not only in the things we deliberately preserve, but in the rhythms of family, in habits that no one remembers teaching, in ways of welcoming, worrying, laughing, celebrating, and saying goodbye.

Romania is present in those rhythms, even when our homes are scattered across the world.

At the airport in Chicago, my son and I went home in different directions.

But for families scattered across countries, home is no longer where we meet. Home is who recognizes us when we arrive.

July has arrived, and with it comes that familiar feeling that life slows down just enough for us to notice the things we usually rush past.

Some of us will travel. Some will return to Romania for a few weeks. Some will spend their days listening to the waves of an ocean or a sea, others will hike mountain trails, wander through museums, explore unfamiliar streets, enjoy evenings on a porch with family, or simply find a quiet afternoon with a good book.

Summer has a way of collecting moments we don’t expect to keep.

A handwritten menu tucked inside a book. An old church bell at noon. A tiny museum no one told you about. The smell of pine after rain. A conversation on a train. A bakery you wish existed back home.

If you find one of those moments this summer, don’t let it disappear.

Share the street you couldn't stop photographing. Tell us about the book you couldn't put down. Introduce us to the café you'll remember long after you've forgotten its name, or the place that made you pause, smile, or feel unexpectedly at home.

We can’t wait to see what this summer brings back with you.

Happy summer from all of us at ARCS!

May it be filled with good books, unexpected conversations, beautiful discoveries, and moments you’ll want to remember long after the season has passed!

Send your story to: sanda.berar@arcsproject.org. We’ll select a number of submissions to publish in the ARCS Journal throughout the fall.

One of the challenges of sharing Romanian culture abroad is that language can become a barrier.

Many members of our community read Romanian. Their children often do not. Friends, spouses, colleagues, and neighbors may be curious about Romanian literature but have no way to access it. Translation helps bridge that gap.

As part of our effort to make Romanian culture more accessible, the ARCS Community Library is gradually expanding its collection of books available in English translation.

We are pleased to introduce two contemporary Romanian novels that offer very different journeys into Romanian history, imagination, and storytelling.

• Too Great a Sky (Capătul drumului) by Liliana Corobca, translated by Monica Cure

• The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vineri) by Doina Ruști, translated by James Brown

Too Great a Sky by Liliana Corobca, translated by Monica Cure, explores one of the lesser-known tragedies of twentieth-century Eastern Europe: the deportation of Romanians from Bukovina to Kazakhstan during the Soviet period. Through memory, loss, and resilience, Corobca gives voice to experiences that shaped generations but remain unfamiliar to many readers outside the region.

The Book of Perilous Dishes by Doina Ruști, translated by James Christian Brown, meanwhile, takes readers to Bucharest in 1798. Blending historical fiction, folklore, mystery, and culinary magic, the novel follows a young apprentice drawn into a world where recipes possess unusual powers and food becomes a gateway into a richly imagined past. Doina Ruști blends historical fiction with elements of fantasy and culinary storytelling, creating a world that feels both strange and familiar, humorous and profound.

At first glance, the books have little in common. One confronts historical trauma and displacement. The other delights in folklore, imagination, and adventure.

Yet both demonstrate the richness and diversity of contemporary Romanian literature. Both are deeply rooted in Romanian history and culture while telling stories that resonate far beyond Romania’s borders. And both remind us that literature offers one of the most powerful ways to understand lives, places, and experiences different from our own.

Whether you are already familiar with Romanian authors or are looking for a place to begin, we invite you to borrow these books from the ARCS Community Library and discover where Romanian stories can take you.

Because sometimes the best introduction to a culture is a good story.

Summer has a way of creating space for reading. Long flights, quiet evenings, weekends by the water, or simply a few moments away from the usual routine.

With recommendations from Ileana Marin, a passionate reader and champion of contemporary Romanian literature, we’ve put together a small summer reading list for anyone looking to explore today’s Romanian writers.

Whether you’re browsing a bookstore in Romania or searching for your next Romanian-language read from abroad, these books offer a wide range of voices and styles, from literary fiction and memoir to satire, autofiction, and historical novels. Some of these authors have joined ARCS events in the past, while others are names we hope to welcome in the future.

Alexandru Lamba — Șapte virtuți deșarte și o păcătoasă moarte

A novel praised for its inventive structure and memorable ending, which earned recognition for one of the strongest novel finales in recent Romanian literature. Lamba blends imagination, irony, and philosophical reflection in a story that stays with the reader long after the last page.

Ioana Drăgan — În căutarea nefericirii în continuare

The recently published continuation of În căutarea nefericirii continues the author’s sharp observations on modern life, relationships, and the human tendency to complicate things unnecessarily. Written with humor and self-irony, it offers both entertainment and food for thought.

Marius Balo — Păturica roz

One of the most remarkable debut novels of recent years. Drawing on experiences from his imprisonment in China, Balo transforms personal hardship into compelling literature. The result is a deeply human story about resilience, dignity, and survival.

Radu Paraschivescu — Recviem vesel pentru tata

Known to many readers for his wit, essays, and translations, Paraschivescu turns toward memory and family in this moving and often humorous reflection on loss, inheritance, and the stories that shape us.

Cristi Nedelcu — Cimitirul trandafirilor

Journalist, playwright, essayist, and novelist, Cristi Nedelcu brings a storyteller’s eye to contemporary Romanian realities. His latest novel combines strong characterization with a keen sense of observation and social nuance.

Doina Ruști — Nas de bulgar

Fresh from completing her book tour, Doina Ruști continues her autofictional exploration of memory, family, and identity. Readers who enjoyed Ferenike, our recent ARCS Book Club selection, may find themselves eager to continue the journey with this second volume.

Roxana Ruscior — Diavolul din Freisetzburg

A carefully researched historical novel that imagines events that could have unfolded within a Nazi concentration camp. Combining historical detail with literary imagination, it explores difficult questions about morality, power, and survival.

Ioana Nicolaie — Tot înainte

One of Romania’s most respected contemporary writers, Ioana Nicolaie often draws on personal and collective memory to illuminate larger social realities. Tot înainte offers a powerful and intimate reading experience.

And, of course...

No list of contemporary Romanian literature would be complete without authors such as Tatiana Țîbuleac, Matei Vișniec, or Mircea Cărtărescu, whose newest volume, Texistența, has recently appeared in bookstores.

These are only a few suggestions among many. Romanian literature today is vibrant, diverse, and full of voices worth discovering.

If you pick up one of these books this summer, let us know what you thought.

And when autumn arrives, come back and tell us: Which one should become the next ARCS Book Club discussion?

In traditional Romanian villages, scoarța, a handwoven geometric rug, was never meant to be walked on casually. It hung on the wall like a tapestry of collective memory, its intricate knots holding the stories, symbols, and history of the hands that spun it. Each thread carried intention. Each geometric diamond or stylized leaf carried a lineage. When a community relocates across the ocean, that physical fabric stays behind, and the quiet danger of cultural fraying begins.

We know this danger intimately. We have felt it in the silences between generations, in the slow forgetting of words, in the distance that opens when memory has no place to live. What we carried with us across the ocean did not remain whole. It shifted as it passed from one hand to another, thinning in some places, stretching in others. But within that very change, we began to recognize a different kind of continuity, one that depended on use, on touch, on being shaped again with whatever threads were available where we landed.

The community initiatives at ARCS are parts of this weaving, they are the raw thread, the weavers, and the pattern that keep our cultural memory together.

The Raw Thread

You cannot weave without material. You need color, texture, weight, and the foundational fibers that carry memory forward.

For us, the ARCS Community Library serves as that raw thread, a collection of books in Romanian, stories carried across borders, language preserved.

Give a book, get a book. The gesture is simple, but the principle mirrors the roadside wells our ancestors dug in the village, built not for the self, but to ensure that anyone passing through the village can quench their thirst, and leave the water for the next traveler.

These books are the wool we spin into new forms. They are the mother tongue passed from hand to hand, the grammar of belonging, the vocabulary of home. Without the weight of these books, the loom sits empty, and there is nothing to hold the pattern together.

The Weavers

Yet, a rug is never made by a single pair of hands. It requires a collective rhythm, weavers who bring different skills, different tempos, and different visions to the very same wooden frame. This is the purpose of the ARCS Artist Network.

It aims to bring painters, sculptors, photographers, filmmakers, and word makers to the same shared loom. Here, one medium can freely inform another, allowing unexpected patterns to emerge from the exact places where our individual threads overlap.

This is not collaboration for its own sake. It is the recognition that diaspora art, art made in translation, in dual languages, in the space between two worlds, requires more than isolated voices. It requires a chorus. It demands the friction and beauty of many hands working side by side, creating something none of us could have made alone.

We are the weavers. And the loom we share is Washington, a place far from the villages of our grandparents, but close enough to each other to keep weaving.

The Finished Pattern

A tapestry, however, is not fully complete until it is seen. It must be hung on the wall, stepped back from, and allowed to speak directly to those who stand before it.

The ARCS Journal is where that speech begins. It is the surface where our separate, scattered threads can show their true shapes side by side. By gathering the stories, art, and poetry of this cultural moment, it becomes a vibrant record of our presence here, answering our collective motto: Remember Who You Will Become.

A living culture stays fluid as it moves from one set of hands to another, and the journal captures the steady, patient rhythm of that movement. It is the place where the threads are being straightened, held at the proper tension, and prepared. In these pages, we record the unique knots we are tying today, the stable foundations we are stretching across the frame, and the language that defines us in this generation, ensuring the fabric remains unbroken for those who come next.

We weave because the alternative is unraveling.

Culture in diaspora is fragile, yes, but it is also elastic, adaptive, capable of holding new colors and new shapes without losing its essential form. The scoarța our ancestors made maybe did not cross the ocean. But the skill of weaving is within us, we have the memory of patterns, the instinct to gather, to make, to pass something forward that crosses every border.

So we weave. With books and language. With artists and intersections. With words and images that become part of the record.

And row by row, the tapestry grows.

Forward. Alive

On June 1, Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu celebrates his birthday.

Two of his books are sitting on my shelf in Seattle right now: Solenoid and Theodoros. But the book that made me fall in love with his writing was Orbitor.

I first read it while living in Finland, a few years after leaving Romania. Cărtărescu was writing about Bucharest. I grew up in Transylvania. Different city. Different streets. Different childhood.

Yet while reading Orbitor, I often felt as if someone had recovered a parallel version of my own childhood, with its apartment blocks, long summers, children claiming the neighborhood until late in the evening, and adults lingering on street corners for hours or calling to one another from balcony to balcony.

When we leave a country, memory tends to preserve its landmarks. The grocery store on the corner. The schoolyard. The old cinema building. The route we walked so many times we no longer noticed it.

What is harder to preserve is atmosphere. The feeling of a summer evening that seemed endless. The conversations drifting through open windows. The comfort of a familiar taste. The strange importance of things that, in retrospect, were entirely ordinary.

I went on to read his later books with equal pleasure, and years later, living in Seattle, I still have Cărtărescu’s novels on my shelves.

But when I think of his writing, I still think first of Orbitor.

Of the rare experience of recognizing yourself inside someone else’s memories.

And of the unexpected comfort of discovering that childhood, at least in literature, can sometimes survive migration better than we do.