Rozalia Alone

Rozalia Alone"is the story of a young girl's ability to navigate through different cultures and mentalities during shattering historic events.Born in Romania to a Christian Mother and a Jewish Father, she experiences the horrors and atrocities of Pogroms and World War II. Through the combination of sheer luck and the flexibility of a contortionist with an inordinate appetite for life, she escapes to Brazil. While she discovers the new continent, her sensuality is awakened by a man older than herself.Her search for the aunt who prepared her intellectual development in childhood and arranged for her escape, leads ultimately to a playful relationship with a husband whose universe is radically unlike her own. Permanently bruised, unable to forget the atrocities she has witnessed, Rozalia eventually finds motivation and success in her work.A spectator to greed, corruption, treachery and crime, she becomes involved in the quest for justice. She wins her fight, not in the courts of law, but by surviving life's tribulations with irony and humor."An engaging, disturbing, charming, elegant, teasing, lush, lean and altogether desirable writing. I was moved, I was pleased, I was teased, I did laugh."Clinton Smullyan Bibliophile"One has known Rosita Fanto as an artist. We knew her as a memoirist. And now we know her to be a genuine novelist. And in fact an epic one. I was not prepared for what turns out to be the sweep of her tale, from the thirties in Romania to Brazil and Europe, from rural and urban Romania to the jungles of Brazil and the heights of luxury in Rio, London and the south of France over a span of decades. It could all make a fascinating movie or miniseries-and should.Morris Beja Author of James Joyce: A Literary Life, Film and Literatureand other books. Professor Emeritus, The Ohio State University