Overview

Raised in Chicago and its suburbs, Yasmina Kishanov Blackburn grew up in a household influenced by the aftershocks of World War II in the Balkans. Her mother was born an orphan in a refugee camp; her father escaped an oppressive regime by crossing the border on foot. Their histories didn't sit silently in the background. Every day life was filled with stories and culture, tempers and expectations, that left Yasmina feeling both deeply loved and completely out of place in the world. As she grows older, Yasmina begins to understand how much those earlier generations shaped her inner life - the pressures she carried and the instincts she couldn't explain, patterns that felt older than she was. Emerging research on epigenetics shows what she has long sensed: that the past can leave traces in the body and mind. Moving between her family's postwar Balkan landscape, the world her parents survived, and her own coming of age in Chicago, Where the Mountains Raised Me blends modern prose with a journey into a region scarred by war, political oppression, and survival. It is a memoir about migration, identity, and the imprint of ancestral experience - about confronting the anxiety shaped by generations before her and learning how to protect her own mental wellbeing. Piecing together her family's past becomes the way she finally makes sense of her own.

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