num_pages: 294
description: Sweeping from postWWII rural Romania to the cosmopolitan Budapest of 1990 Christina Sheas Smuggled is the story of Eva Farkas who loses her identity quite literally as a young child when she is smuggled in a flour sack across the Hungarian border to escape the Nazis.Five-year-old Eva is trafficked from Hungary to Romania at the end of the war arriving in the fictional border town of Crisu given the name Anca Balaj by her aunt and uncle and instructed never to speak another word of Hungarian again. Eva is dead she is told. As the years pass Anca proves an unquenchable spirit with a lust for life even when political forces threaten to derail her at every turn. Time is layered in this quest for self culminating in the end of the Iron Curtain and Ancas reclaiming of the name her mother gave her. When Eva returns to Hungary in 1990 a country changing as fast as the price of bread she meets Martin an American teacher and Evas lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle as her cross-cultural relationship with Martin deepens through their endeavor to rescue the boy downstairs from abuse.An intimate look at the effects of history on an individual life Smuggled is a raw and fearless account of transformation and a viscerally reflective tale about the basic need for love without claims.
language: English
title: Smuggled
publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat