Retired Greek American broker Alexis Grivas, a New Yorker, mysteriously falls in love with Sofia, a school teacher in the Republic of Moldova, after seeing her photo on Facebook.
His first book, Screwed: Dancing with the Generals, published by Amazon in 2015, is a memoir that takes the reader inside Ceausescu\'s Romania and sheds light on Urma\'s time as an AP reporter there, highlighting just how dangerous the political climate was during this ill-fated chapter of modern history..
After arriving in the United States in 1990, he worked on AP\'s International Desk in New York as a reporter and business news editor until 2014, when he retired after 40 years with the news organization.
Forced to leave the country by Romania\'s communist authorities, he worked in Vienna, Austria, as an AP reporter covering Eastern Europe and the anticommunist revolutions occurring there.
After a two-year stint as a reporter for the state-run Radio Bucharest, he joined the Associated Press as a correspondent. in English Literature.
About author(s): Sergiu Urma was born in Romania, where he earned an M.
A.
What happens next will shake you to the core.
We were happy in that hole, two young people in love alone, isolated from the world, surrounded by the enemy, with no chance to run away, waiting to be caught, killed or separated.
Making love in a ditch to your sweet wife, perhaps for the last time, hidden under tree branches and leaves, while Tatars were burning and ravaging your village, turning it into a smoky ruin.
Here the mystery is revealed in its naked tragedy: during a Crimean Tatars\' foray to plunder, kill the men and take the women and children into slavery, Maria and Simion (who is today\'s Alexis) hid in a hole in the ground and enjoy a last moment of ecstatic love.
To find out who this woman was before, he travels to Elizabethan London where he was an apothecary; to Renaissance Florence where fanatical and autocratic friar Girolamo Savonarola, much like 20th century dictators, ordered a bonfire of the vanities, i.e., the burning of books, paintings and objects of art that he considered sinful or pagan; to the 19th century Wild West where he was a woman; to Paris during the French Revolution where he was a journalist; to medieval Europe where he was a clairvoyant; to Soroca, a small town in Moldova where three hundred years ago he was a deacon in the local church, married to Maria (who is today\'s Sofia).
Retired Greek American broker Alexis Grivas, a New Yorker, mysteriously falls in love with Sofia, a school teacher in the Republic of Moldova, after seeing her photo on Facebook
