At the age of fifty-two, I took my cat and flew off from the San Francisco Bay Area to a new life in Barcelona. I had gone salsa dancing, met and married a Catalan, and we were going to live in his hometown.
The adventures began before we even left, with the purchase, sight unseen, of an apartment in the Barri Gotic, and subsequent horrible discovery in a guidebook of what went on in that street. Then there was the shock of the deed arriving in the mail with a different price – a much lower price – than what we had paid.
Once there, things didn’t work out as planned and that set off an even greater adventure than I had bargained for. Things that should be normal weren’t: buying bedding, keeping drunks from peeing under our balcony, buying Chanukah candles in a country where there have been essentially no Jews since 1492.
"Autobiography is a notoriously difficult genre, whose authors often slide into rampant egocentrism or report details that may have mattered very much to them but are of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. Happily, Dvora Treisman has avoided such pitfalls and has produced an entertaining if sometimes melancholy memoir about her life in Catalonia, full of episodes which might appear trivial at first but in fact deftly push the narrative forward so that the reader is, more often then not, left wanting to find out what happens next." From the review by Matthew Tree, in the June issue of Catalonia Today. You can find the review here.
You can purchase the book on all the Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, Casa del Llibre, Come In Bookshop in Barcelona, and most brick and mortar bookshops in the U.S. and Britain.
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