Encountering Romania - part V Memoirs

Amidst the huge groups of people who have suffered from war, starvation and murder over the past century, the inhabitants of Central-East Europe occupy their own particular niche which has been well documented by over the decades by people such as Arthur Koestler, Aleksander Wat, Czeslaw Milosz  and, more recently, by academics such as Norman Davies, Ann Applebaum and Timothy Snyder 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from lands which have been variously part of Austro-Hungary, CzechoSlovakia, Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine. Over thirty years he wrote marvellous prose about his early years in the town of Czernowitz when it lay in the northern redoubts of Romania eg  

• Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1979); 
• Snows of Yesteryear (1989)

Mihai Sebastian was a Jewish journalist in Romania whose Journal 1935-1944 TheFascist Years caused quite a stir when they were eventually produced after 1989 – the English version in 2000.

Norman Manea is Romania’s most translated author and still writes in Romanian although he left the country almost 30 years ago. The Hooligan’s Return (2005) is a powerful and bitter memoir.

The education of a political animal IIB – Book III A Diary of Nine Months in the Peoples’ Democracies 1959-60  by Arthur D Kahn (2009) gives us almost a hundred pages of fascinating insights from one political writer’s three- week visit to Romania in 1959. It was entirely by accident I came across it on the internet yesterday. It does not figure on any list I have seen but deserves its place on this list

Jessica Douglas-Home was one of a small group who spent a lot of time in the 1980s supporting dissidents in central europe (Timothy Garten Ash is the most famous) and wrote it up in Once Upon another Time; (2000)

The Eighties in Bucharest is a powerful record of life in Romania in that decade published by Martor (Anthropological Review of the Museum of the Romanian Peasant) - Number 7 (2002). The link seems to give the entire text - structured alphabetically eg starting with "abortion". The Review (and the Museum) is to be congratulated for its website which allows access to the entire run of this worthwhile journal!

The title of Carmen Bugan’s Burying the Typewriter; childhood under the eyes of thesecret police (2013)  says it all.

Since the 1990s there has been an explosion of diaries (in Romanian) about life under communism. An English-language  Sibiu cultural magazine has an article about the artefacts which figured in old households which lists the titles of some of these

Surrealism and Survival in Romania - part IV of Encountering Romania

One of the chapters of Inner Lives of Cultures, mentioned in the last post, is “Surrealism and Survival in Romania” by Carmen Fimen (at pp 177-193) and is worth quoting at length -

The symbol of Romania is the peasant. Looking old and wise, or just tired, dressed in a long fur coat, a shepherd scrutinizing the horizon, or just searching for his magical ewe or lamb, he represented the essence of this place – agrarian by excellence, resilient over time, the iconic image of stability and persistence. One of the dramatic consequences of the Communist ideology in Romania was the destruction of the villages along with their traditions and customs, and the humiliation of the peasant torn from his natural surroundings, forced to leave his land, his church and his belief and to move to the outskirts of the big cities, in order to work in socialist mammoth factories, where he lost his ancestral identity, where he felt depersonalised and estranged from his native environment........Romania can be described as a country rich in ethnic diversity striving to preserve its uniqueness at the crossroads between the East and the West, between the Balkans and the Orient, with a people that displays a Mediterranean temper in the South combined with Balkan customs, a Slavic pace in the Northeast, or a rigorous diligence in Transylvania.  

The inter-bellum period - The period of glory for Romania is considered by many to be the era between the two World Wars.After the unification of all its territories in 1918, Romania looked like a fairly large and prosperous state, going through a time of important reforms, a time of economic and cultural flourishing, development of its industrial sector, and it became one of the most important exporters of oil and wheat. Bucharest, nicknamed ‘little Paris’, as rumours have it, could stand next to any major European metropolis. .....A new artistic movement emerged, the Romanian avant-garde, which eventually conquered Europe and contributed to the birth of surrealism in visual art, literature and cinema.......Between the two World Wars, Romanian culture was for the first time in sync with the latest Western trends in Paris or London, becoming a strong participant in the international dialogue of values. Remarkable avant-garde and surrealist talents emerged in Romania, featuring a cosmopolitan cultural attitude. In 1916, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian émigré to Zurich, invented Dadaism. There were three distinctive groups of artists: modernist – focused on Western, urban and intellectual culture; traditionalist – oriented towards the religious orthodoxy of the rural world; and the third, proclaiming the birth of the national character, situated at the crossroads between tradition and modernity. But even this time of prosperity had its paradoxes: except for a few big cities and the wealthy elite, the rest of the country was still impoverished and illiterate and there was no time left for profound changes.

 Fifty Years of Isolation - Romania entered the harshest dictatorship in Europe, weakened and humiliated by the Fascist regime and the Iron Guard that compromised the country’s prestige during the Second World War. Years of terror followed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist gulag continued the Fascist horrors. For almost 50 years, Romania experienced isolation and was cut off from the West.The local Communist leaders annihilated any trace of intellectual opposition.

Between 1948 and 1964, one Romanian out of nine (meaning about two million people) was sent into a Communist concentration camp. The official literature, or so-called socialist realism, glorified Stalin, his politics and the new proletarian class. 

Despite all the official oppression, intellectuals gathered in informal discussion groups to keep their sanity and, slowly, a counterculture was born. Several groups of artists rejected the aggressive intrusion of the Communist propaganda, bringing along a fresh, nonconformist subversive voice, opposed to the official ideology. Although Romania didn’t have an organised Samizdat, individual voices of courage made themselves heard, like the political dissident Paul Goma in 1977 or, later, the ‘Blue Jeans generation of writers’. Over the years, Romanians were perceived through various stereotypes, more or less warranted: a people hesitating between excessive praise and self-disparagement, between laments or victimisation and an ostentatious superiority; coming up with dark plots and conspiracies to explain historical events, but also with an interesting, rich culture and a lively artistic life, with sophisticated intellectuals; xenophobic, nationalistic, but still tolerant in many respects; hospitable, enthusiastic, genuine and warm; inclined towards constant ridicule, with a predisposition to mock everything. 

Ways of Coping....We lived under one of the toughest dictatorships in Europe, watched by the secret police, and isolated from the rest of the world. We did our best to survive within a closed society. One way was to get together in groups selected on the basis of affinities which had to do with art, literature, philosophy or simply a few common tastes.
 Our lives were simple. We didn’t care about cholesterol, pollution or the negative effects of smoking; nor did we worry about the dangers of obesity, drug addiction or violence. We didn’t need anti-depressants, although we had good reasons to take Prozac. No one sought psychoanalysis, therapists or shrinks, although we had good reason to be depressed. When you live in a cave, with few choices, all sorts of self-defence mechanisms spring into action. One is interpersonal communication. In a society like ours, communication involved sincerity and spontaneity. People talked loudly, gesticulated profusely and even cursed often; they lived and hated passionately. They used to make grandiose plans in the evening, over many glasses of alcohol, only to discard them as impossible to achieve the next morning. And yet these people were authentic in their despair and passionate in their fantasies.

Paradoxically, in such an abnormal and repressive society, they were anything but alienated. In fact, they practiced a type of group therapy, unorganised and without clear goals. In that Balkan atmosphere, their conversations in the shadow of ruined ‘little Paris’ were delightful, a never-ending chatter, spectacular and useless, over full ashtrays and cheap alcohol, all-night-long discussions and hung-over mornings. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. They had no place to go.In the opaque world of Communism, time meant nothing. The dictatorship seemed permanent. To keep our sanity, we had only the refuge of books and an inner language of freedom, parallel to the official one. Words had no power to change our destiny, but they could keep us sane. And our soul? Nobody mentioned it, but it was there all along, in the arabesques of our lamentations, in the last cigarette butts crushed at sunrise against the background of a hideous smoking factory at the outskirts of the city.

 People learned not to trust the official language in the press, in schools, and at work. Most of them doubted any official political speech and cultivated disbelief and irony as part of their self-defence mechanism.Everybody was aware of living in a ‘make-believe’ world, fully aware of its duplicity.As writers, the metaphor was our main weapon to evade political censorship.

Although biographies and memoirs were almost impossible to squeeze through the tight net of censorship, poetry and prose could be enveloped in a protective shell of metaphor and allegory, esoteric enough to get the forbidden truth out regardless of whether it was about political or social reality. Communism disregarded metaphors. It identified the soul as its main enemy. Demolishing churches and synagogues was not enough. That merely eliminated places of worship, but they also got to destroy the metaphors of spirituality, making them appear weak and misleading.

Another source of refuge was humour, carelessness or frivolity. In spite of our bad times, we managed to maintain our sense of humour. There was no shortage of jokes in those days, which acted like some sort of a safety valve. We seemed to be a surreal people who could not stop laughing, even while we were slowly dying! We were like patients in a militarised hospital, subjected to a utopian treatment for an imaginary disease, feeling both guilt and absolution. Guilt, because of the cowardice each one of us had to practice; absolution, because the collective farce so perfectly played on us. 

After Communism.......After the fall of Communism, other clichés became associated with Romania, describing a country still haunted by the ghosts of the Communist nomenclature which was soon back in power, by stray dogs, orphans, AIDS victims infected by contaminated blood which they had received in hospitals, human traffic, impoverished Roma population, pickpockets and thieves making headlines in the Western media. I’m not fighting against clichés. They are based, after all, on reality, however exaggerated or generalised it might be. But Romania, despite all its problems, continued to produce an intense cultural life. Even during the totalitarian era, culture had symbolised resistance within the Communist censorship, defence from the absurdity of the system and an underground form of freedom. In the late 1980s, a visitor from England remarked in awe: ‘This country looks surreal to me. You have nothing to eat but wait in line for hours to buy theatre tickets and books…’ It was our form of survival, sanity and refusal to submit to alienation.

Getting under the skin

Let me explore more this question of how outsiders can hope to understand a foreign country. My strength as a school pupil was French and German basically because my parents took me to these countries in the 1950s - when such travel was very rare.

And I continued my studies of things French and German until my second year of University (after which I switched to politics and economics) although never losing my fascination with these two countries. It was, frankly, my love life which gave me a chance to develop my French language skills (in the 1980s); and writers such as Richard Cobb, Theodor Zeldin and Julian Barnes have helped sustain that interest.

But I have had more reasons actually to learn about Germany – with a brief but important 2 weeks in 1961 at a course at Gottingen University (which introduced me to the immediate post-war novels of Heinrich Boll); then a couple of months living in Berlin in 1964 and working in a Germany company (Robert Bosch Elektronik no less). This Berlin stay introduced me to the works of people such as Bertold Brecht, Kathe Kollwitz and the German Realist painters in the Berlin galleries.

And then there various visits to Berlin in the years immediately before and after 1989 – the latter thanks to a project in Prague with German company (which rather spoiled my perceptions of Germany – although the company was actually Prussian!

Things went further downhill in 2010 when I resigned from a project in China managed by the Germans – mainly because I felt so claustrophobic in the anthill which is Beijing but also because the German bureaucracy was so intensive.   

My readings of, and experiences with, German history, literature and society have been complemented recently with two major books – Peter Watson’s German Genius of 2010 (which righly criticises the contemporary fixation of Brits with the Nazi period) and Simon Winder’s Germania of the same year.  

But perhaps the best single text for understanding Germany is Germany – unravelling an enigma

I came across recently a fascinating collection of essays about this issue of understanding other cultures - Inner Lives of Cultures (2011) ed Eva Hoffman which had this to say -

We live in a world in which various kinds of cross-national movement – migrations, travel, various kinds of both enforced and voluntary nomadism – are ever on the rise; and in which flows of fast communication are multidirectional and constant. If we are to meet with each other on the basis of trust rather than tension or insidious indifference, we need to have ways of getting acquainted with each other which are more than cursory, or purely instrumental. But how can this be accomplished? What kind of knowledge is needed to feed meaningful cross-cultural contacts? To enter into the subjective life of another culture – its symbolic codes, its overt beliefs and implicit assumptions – requires, as any immigrant or nomad can tell you, a considerable effort of consciousness and imagination; a kind of stretching of self towards the other, and a gradual grasp of differences which are sometimes imperceptible and subtle.Of course, cultures are neither static nor monolithic organisms – they are complex, changeable and internally diverse. What is considered healthily assertive in one culture may be seen as aggressive or hostile in another; certain kinds of personal disclosure which may seem quite unproblematic in one society may be seen as embarrassing or entirely unacceptable elsewhere.

Finally some nice photographs celebrating Romania's landscape here

Writing about Romania - part III Histories

Three names stand out for English speakers for their efforts in trying to make sense of this complex country – Lucian Boia, Dennis Deletant and Tom Gallagher. The first for the sheer courage and fluent coherence of his prolific writings (he is 70) on the history of the country – particularly his valiant and so necessary work on demystification and demythologising; the second for the intensity of his focus on the communist period; and the latter for the uncompromising critique of the corruption of the post-communist political class. 

Boia is a delight to read – and two of his key books can be read in full and in English online -

• Romania; borderland of Europe (2001) - reviewed here 
• History and myth in Romanian Consciousness (published in Romanian in 2001)

Dennis Deletant’s Hitler’s Forgotten Ally – Ion Antonescu and his regime 1940-1944 (2006) is a departure from his books about the Communist period of the country.

In 2005 Tom Gallagher gave us in Theft of a nation – Romania since Communism and followed it up in 2010 with a typically trenchant expose Romania and the European Union: How the Weak Vanquished the Strong

An ex- Us diplomat, Ernest Latham, wrote recently Timeless and Transitory - 20th century relations between Romania and the English-speaking world 

A fourth historian deserves a mention - the Scot, Robert Seton-Watson who played an important role as journalist and academic a hundred years ago in assisting the aspirations of the various nationalities which were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire break free of Vienna. Sadly, however, his "History of Romanian People" is no longer available.  

Interestingly the lovely Pallas edition of "Romania" edited by John Villiers and produced in 2009 has a nice bibliography (at page 347) which lists almost 50 books about Romanian history!

Writing about Romania - part II novels

It’s important to recognise the various genres which can be used to try to penetrate the soul of a country. Travelogues may be the easiest but there are also

• novels;
• histories;
• social and cultural histories (including jokes);
• memoirs and diaries;

which I will cover in this series of posts. The other important genres are

• caricatures and paintings (most Romanian painters produced marvellous line drawings)
• films
• plays eg Ion Caragiale 
• photographs eg Andrei Pandele’s secretive shots of the 1980s 

to which I will try to do justice in 2014.

Novellists can presumably give fuller vent to their imagination than other categories of writers and 

Miklos Banffy’s Writing on the wall – The Transylvanian Trilogy gave us a wonderful picture of the privileged slice of Transylvanians living in the first couple of decades of the 20^th century  .

Banffy’s trilogy was originally published in Hungarian in the 1930s and has taken all of 75 years to become appreciated in the English-speaking world as the literary masterpiece it is  - the three books are

• They Were Counted 
• They Were Found Wanting ; and
• They Were Divided 

Gregor von Rezzori is one of the most neglected of writers from this area which has been variously part of Austro-Hungary, Romania and now Ukraine.

An Ermine in Czernopol (1958) ostensibly centred on the curious tragicomic fate of an Austrian officer of supreme ineffectuality gathers a host of unlikely characters and their unlikelier stories by way of engaging the reader in a kaleidoscopic experience of a city where nothing is as it appears-a city of discordant voices, of wild ugliness and sometimes heartbreaking disappointment. Rezzori "summons the disorderly and unpredictable energies of a town where everything in the world is seemingly mixed up together, a multicultural society that existed long before the idea of multiculturalism". This book is effectivelt part of a trilogy - with the other two books appearing in the "memoir" section which follows.

Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy is rather now overshadowed by Banffy’s magnum opus. The first part of Manning’s trilogy focuses on life in Bucharest at the commencement of the Second World War   and was produced in Britain in the early 1960s

Novels by Romanian authors focusing on Romania which are worthy of mention include -

• Norman Manea's "Compulsory Happiness" (published in 2012 – but written in the 1980s)
• Mircea Carterescu Nostalgia (2005 in English – 1993 Romanian) and Blinding
• Nobel prize- winner (but oh so depressive!) Hertha Mueller 
• Domnica Radulescu's rather lighter Train to Trieste (2009) 

If you want to know more about Romanian writers - then there's a good list of 100 contemporary writers here (although the most famous - Carterescu - is missing!!); and an excellent book Romanian writers on writing (2011) edited by Norman Manea. The link will give you the list of another 100 more classic writers.  

Foreign novelists’ works using Bucharest as a location include -

• Dean’s December; Saul Bellow (1982) 
• Rates of Exchange by Malcolm Bradbury (1982)  
• The Long Shadows; Alan Brownjohn (1999)
• Uncle Rudolf by Paul Bailey (2002) 
• The Last hundred Days; Patrick McGuinnes (2011) 
• Painter of Silence by Georgina Harding (2012) 

update; I’ve since come across this ten-page bibliography on writing about....Transylvania 

Travelogues - about Romania

Romania is a large country – but remote - several days of driving are required before travellers from northern Europe will reach Bucharest in its south. Hardly surprising therefore some have chosen to walk or cycle!

I have identified at least a dozen Travelogues for this first part of a series about books about Romania -

The most famous was Patrick Leigh Fermour whose trilogy of his walk from the English Channel to Istanbul in the 1930s was finished only this year.

• A Time of Gifts (1977) covered mainly his experience of Nazi Germany;
• Between the Woods and the Water (1986) of Hungarian aristocratic houses in Transylvania; and, after a 25-year gap,
• The Broken Road (2013) dealt mainly with the Bulgarian and Greek sections of his trip.

A few years later Sacharverwell Sitwell used motorised transport and gave us Romanian Journey (1938) 

In 1999 Alan Ogden published “Romania Revisited – on the trail of English travellers 1602-1941” but the same author also edited an Englishman’s description of Romanian villages in the 1930s – “Romanian Furrow - Colourful Experiences of Village Life”; Donald Hall (Author) and Alan Ogden (Editor) (2007). Sadly neither of these books are currently available.

“Stealing from a deep place” by Brian Hall (1985) recounts experiences touring by bicycle through Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, a two-year trip (1982-1984) made possible by a travel fellowship. "He focuses", the blurb tells us, "on the political milieu which has led to food shortages and inadequate housing for a growing proportion of the population. Among the private citizens of the countries visited, he found great warmth and curiosity coexisting with an avarice and mistrust brought about by necessity".

Clearly travel was easier after 1989 – although only 4 books seem to cover the 1990s -

• In another Europe - a journey to Romania Georgina Harding (1990) - see also part 2 of this post (novels)
• Transylvania and Beyond; another bicycle trip, this time by the indefatigable and great Irish writer, Dervla Murphy (1992) 
• Looking for Gheorge; Love and Death in Romania; by Helena Drysdale (1992) 
• Clear Waters Arising by Nicolas Crane (1997)  was actually a walk over the mountains which stretch from Spain to Romania.

The last few years have seen a little more interest –

• Moons and Aurochs; a Romanian Journey; Alan Ogden (2007) is impossible to find
• Along the Enchanted Way by William Blacker (2010) an upper-class Englishmen who chose to live first in Maramures and then in Transylvania for a few years, conducting a couple (admitted) of love affairs with gypsies in the course of the latter - but writing beautifully before disappearing to Italian and English country houses
• To Romania, with Love  by Tessa Dunlop (2012) perhaps belongs better to the memoir section which will follow shortly
• Never Mind the Balkans – here’s Romania by Mike Ormsby (2012) is difficult to categorise - amusing sketches of contemporary life in Romania written by an ex-pat
• The way of the Crosses; Peter Hurley (2013) is a genuine traveller's tale which I wrote about in my previous post

Kindness in Romania

One man who met with great kindness here was Irishman Peter Hurley who made a snowy pilgrimage from Sapanta on the border with Ukraine arriving in mid December last year in Bucharest, overnighting mostly in village houses on the rural tracks he was using.

I was prepared to dislike the book he has just published on his journey - as another example of outsiders imposing themselves on unsuspecting locals - noting that a quick flick indicated that there was no mention of other books written about the country. 

But Hurley is not your typical expat – resident in the country for almost 20 years and developing a variety of musical and rural networks from his work some of whom are tapped for hospitality. Most of his overnight stays, however, are made in houses he chances upon late in the evenings as he finishes his daily treks and whose impecunious residents clearly take to this eccentric visitor. His vignettes, with a different pen, might have been found intrusive but Hurley's help create a gallery of highly sympathetic portraits of people living off God's land.... 

The book’s descriptions of the landscape make it a charming read and it contains several positive stories of (sadly rare) cooperative work in some villages for the production of milk and apple juice; of those practising craft skills which are (also sadly) disappearing; and of at least one good priest doing (very) good work (interestingly in Cristian near my own village).  
The book is entitled The Way of the Crosses - from the habit he adopted of prayer at the small roadside crosses (troite) he meets on his way. He says early on that he does not consider himself a religious person but he certainly seems to have made amends during his journey! As an agnostic myself, I might have found this note jarring - but the author's basic goodness rescues that and clearly inspires those he met. We can do with more of this in our lives!

The book has spurred me to make a list of the books I know of in English about Romania. A year back I had posted about good guides to the country and referred to a list I had found in one website . And, in 20102, I also did a guide to blogs about Romania. 

But I know of only one (short) list of books which have Romania as their focus – whether novels, histories or whatever and that is in the blog Bucharest Life - although John Villier's "Romania" (Pallas Guide) had almost 100 book references (mainly histories) 

So thank you Peter for inspiring me to make what is probably the first real attempt at such a list of books in English about Romania. Currently it has 35 books on it - novels, travelogues, memoirs and histories.

Law-breaking in Romania

One of the few signs of public kindness left in Romania is.... hitch-hiking. At the exit of all cities you can see a few people waiting for lifts – which they will generally get in 10 minutes or so. As you leave the car – after a trip of 50 kilometres say – you will simply put a note worth a couple of euros in the driver’s hand as you leave. But hitch-hiking in Romania is being banned – with the guilty party now designated as the driver (as if we were the customers of prostitutes). 

So where does that place me when I am on the 6 kilometre stretch of track from the main road to the village where I live in the summer when I encounter villagers? No justification has been given for this stupid new law which, hopefully, will be ignored by all, not least the police (as it was for a previous effort some years back apparently). As if Romanians were not being crushed enough!

I referred some months back to a great book of black and white photographs of Ceaucescu‘s Romania by Andrei Pandele  which got a nice review on the BBC magazine. 

The author of the piece, Tessa Dunlop, wrote a novel recently about the period – To Romania with Love 

Finally, for those who want to know more about aspects of Romania’s history, there is an interesting review of the second-world war dictator Antonescu here