A century and a half later, I find a tattered paperback copy of Little Women in my grandmother’s library in Bulgaria, among the books that belonged to her father, Georgi. I never met my great-grandfather—he died six days before I was born—but I got to know him through my grandmother’s stories. An astronomer and mathematician born at the dawn of the twentieth century, into Bulgaria’s nascent monarchy after five hundred years under the Ottoman yoke, he lived through two world wars only to see his homeland, ravaged by centuries of oppression and decades of war, succumb to Communism in the 1940s.
...more
