American British Canadian Studies22

AMERICAN, BRITISH AND CANADIAN STUDIES

Volume Twenty-two • June 2014

SPECIAL ISSUE

Faces of Globality: American Studies and the

Romanian Diaspora

GUEST EDITORS

MIRCEA M. TOMUȘ, Kirkwood Community College, Iowa

WILLIAM STEARNS, Independent Scholar

LUCIAN BLAGA UNIVERSITY PRESS

American, British and Canadian Studies, the Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, appears biannually. It is a peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore the intersections of culture, technology and the human sciences in the age of electronic information. It publishes work by scholars of any nationality on Anglophone Studies, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Social and Political Science, Anthropology, Area Studies, Multimedia and Digital Arts and related subjects. Articles addressing influential crosscurrents in current academic thinking are particularly welcome. ABC also publishes book reviews and review essays, interviews, conference reports, notes and comments. Contributors need not be members of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. Decisions on articles submitted are normally made within two months. Articles published in ABC are abstracted and indexed on the journal’s official website. Detailed guidelines for submission are given on the journal’s official website http://abcjournal.ulbsibiu.ro/. Authors are responsible for the accuracy of their references. Contributions can include: articles, in-depth interviews with both established and emerging thinkers and writers, notes on groundbreaking research, and reviews of recently published fiction and critical works.

The Academic Anglophone Society of Romania was founded in 1997 to promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries in English Studies within Romania. It welcomes applications for membership from scholars interested in any aspect of academic scholarship in English and the humanities. Enquiries concerning current subscription rates and applications for membership should be addressed to Dr Ana-Karina Schneider, Department of Anglo-American and German Studies, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Bulevardul Victoriei 5-7, 550 024 Sibiu, Romania, or at [email protected]. © The Academic Anglophone Society of Romania Lucian Blaga University Press 2014 Bulevardul Victoriei 5-7 550 024 Sibiu ROMANIA [email protected] http://abcjournal.ulbsibiu.ro/ Printed in Romania by Lucian Blaga University Press, Sibiu

Contents Editorial WILLIAM STEARNS 5

Lost and Found in Translation

MIRCEA M. TOMUȘ 9 From Ionuț’s Apprenticeship MIRCEA M. TOMUȘ 16 A Romanian Jew in Hollywood: Edward G. Robinson RALUCA MOLDOVAN 43

Poet in America IOAN ȘERBAN 63 Poems FEVRONIA NOVAC 68 Poems ROXANA CAZAN 76 Contemporary Romanian Art in the United States DANA ALTMAN 87

In Memoriam Behind the Curtain of Clouds: In Memoriam Val Paraschiv SAM-CLAUDIA PARASCHIV 98

“Sunset,” A Poem in Memory of My Husband SAM-CLAUDIA PARASCHIV 99

Hands-On: On Stage with Val Paraschiv VALENTIN TEODOSIU 99 A Tribute to Nicoleta Răileanu MARTHA TOWNSEND 102 A Tale of Two Universities: the Intersection of Sharing New Ideas NICOLETA RĂILEANU 107 Reviews 112

Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER 113

Ion Mihai Pacepa, Ronald Rychlak, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism GABRIEL C. GHERASIM 118

Andrei Codrescu, Bibliodeath: My Archives, With Life in Footnotes WILLIAM STEARNS 124

Angela E. Stent, The Limits of Partnership: U.S. – Russia Relations in the Twenty-First Century ADRIANA NEAGU 131

Notes on Contributors 135

Call for Papers 140

Call for Membership 143

American, British and Canadian Studies 5

Editorial

It’s great to have roots, as long as you can take them with you.

Gertrude Stein

The Romanian diaspora in America is and has been composed of

immigrants, exiles, émigrés, refugees, nomads, visitors, travelers, tourists and

commuters--all migrants but each category with its unique experiential

characteristics and unique personal negotiations of the passage between the

question “freedom from what?” to the question “freedom for what?”1 When

it comes to the Romanian-American Republic of Letters, there have been

actors, theater directors, film directors (Edward G. Robinson, Liviu Ciulei,

Lucien Pintilie, Jean Negulesco), historians of religion, essayists, short story

writers and novelists (Mircea Eliade, Ioan P. Couliano, Norman Manea),

a political activist and Nobel Prize winner (Elie Wiesel), founding father of

the school of “ecological economics” (Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen), poets

(Nina Cassian and Andrei Codrescu) and an influential political scientist of

communist and post-communist societies (Vladimir Tismăneanu). It even

might be interesting to query the lovely and supremely talented actress,

Natalie Portman, about her paternal grandparents’ Romanian roots.

The topic of this small volume, “Faces of Globality: American

Studies and the Romanian Diaspora,” as expansive as it is, has necessarily

settled down into its particular niches. What we have here in this special

issue of ABC is more personal, of a more simply human scale: Romanians

writing in English, Romanians writing about Romanians writing in

English, Romanians translating Romanians into English, Romanians

writing about Romanian-Americans, Romanians writing about Americans,

Romanian-Americans writing about America, Romanian-Americans

writing about Romania, Americans writing about Romanian-Americans,

American, British and Canadian Studies / 6

Americans writing about Romanians. Such is the texture of the Romanian-

American Republic of Letters: people, ideas, genres and ideologies in

constant interchange with their own becoming, stretched between the

European East and the West which is North America.

Mircea Tomuș has graced this volume with two chapters of translation

from the highly regarded novel, The Marten Brothers (Fraţii Jderi). His

translation from Mihail Sadoveanu’s Romanian classic invokes Medieval

and late Renaissance English in order to capture the evocative world of

medieval and early modern Moldova so masterfully conjured up by

Sadoveanu. Poets make their appearance in these pages as well. Ioan Șerban

reminisces about his poetic peregrinations in New York and wonders if the

poetic profession is a productive expenditure in the world of casino capitalism.

Fevronia Novac’s poetry has a Romanian, American and Canadian social

and political provenance and reminds one of poet Adrienne Rich’s call for “a

politics of location” in a world characterized by (following sociologist

Zygmunt Bauman’s coinage) “liquid globalization.” The politics/poetics of

location in this selection of Novac’s work is sexed, gendered and native

American/First Nation – and, one might surmise, “cruising more and more

furtive horizons.” The poetry of Roxana Cazan represented here is about the

tragedy of a body in ruins, meanings fixed in the fleeting encounters with

doctors and the medical paraphernalia of human expiration – “life and

death gorging on heartache” and “let[ting] sighs slide off at night.” Still, a

grandmother from Alba Iulia is remembered fondly saying, “cooking with

someone you love is like walking on clouds” – though, to be honest, the

onions were cruel. Dana Altman’s concise and insightful history of

contemporary Romanian visual art in America and Romania, from the

scoundrel days of a “combination of Chicago School economics and

communist era clientelism,” to the accelerated but often opaque flows of

contemporary cultural globalization, concludes with a guarded optimism

about the rediscovery of civil society which in turn may nurture an

appreciation of the uniqueness of Romanian art and ensure its durability in

“the epoch of fifteen minutes of fame heralded by Andy Warhol.” Raluca


Moldovan’s thoroughly delightful and informative article, “A Romanian Jew

in Hollywood: Edward G. Robinson,” will no doubt surprise readers with

new information and perhaps make them begin to look at Hollywood – so

often simplistically characterized as some cultural monolith – with different

eyes. Edward G. Robinson, born in Bucharest, an iconic Hollywood actor,

first known for his gangster roles, but later appearing in an unsurpassed

number of great American noir classics (Double Indemnity, Scarlet

Street, The Woman in the Window, Confessions of a Nazi Spy,

Key Largo, and the cult classic neo-noir Solyent Green) and directed by

some of the “best of the best” (Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Cecil B. DeMille,

John Huston) spoke seven languages, was an avid collector of fine art and a

muscular political liberal who stood up to fascism in the 1930s and to the

bullying of the American film industry during the “red scare” of the

McCarthyite 1950s.

Finally, this issue includes In Memoriam contributions marking the

singular lives of two remarkable Romanians whose careers spanned Romania

and North America, Val Paraschiv, actor, dramatist and teacher, and

Nicoleta Răileanu, teacher and scholar. The In Memoria here assume

different forms, but commemorations of this kind have a constant bittersweet

core: the celebration of unforgettable lives, loves and accomplishments and the

recognition that they will never happen again.

It has been a pleasure to work with Mircea Tomuș as a fellow guest

editor as well as under the most capable guidance of ABC’s editor-in-chief,

Adriana Neagu. Intellectual debts are, after all, the most agreeable ones.

WILLIAM STEARNS

Sibiu, Romania


Notes:

1 Vilem Flusser, “Taking Up Residence in Homelessness,” in Vilem Flusser: Writings, Andreas Strohl, Editor, Transl. Erik Eisel (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 93.

Lost and Found in Translation 9

Lost and Found in Translation

MIRCEA M. TOMUȘ

As the main author of the Declaration of Independence and foremost among the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson is one of the easiest recognizable iconic figures in American history. His carved image looms over the monumental Mount Rushmore in the august company of Theodore Roosevelt, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln. His picture appears on the two-dollar bill (still in circulation but becoming exceedingly rare in what is perhaps another historical irony – Jefferson died at the age of 83 in dire poverty, from a boil in the buttocks). His ubiquitous name still resonates on the façades of numerous high-schools and street signs throughout the entire nation. What is less known though is Jefferson’s keen interest in the Anglo-Saxon roots of the country whose third President he became in 1801. He was an accomplished Anglo-Saxonist, planning to finalize an Old English grammar and to adjust the contemporary language accordingly (mercifully, he never completed the project). He also insisted that Old English be taught in public schools, to replace Greek or Latin that were part of the traditional scholastic curriculum, such as it was at the time. The University of Virginia, an institution that Jefferson patronized and felt particularly connected with, introduced Anglo-Saxon studies following Jefferson’s 1818 Report to its commission.

Fully aware of the power of language, Jefferson was so fascinated with its “genetic code” that he pushed for the integration of two mythical Anglo-Saxon heroes, Hengst and Horsa, into the national Great Seal. For him, Hengst and Horsa were emblematic of an incipient democracy. In or around 449 A.D., at the request of the British chief Vortigern, the two chieftains stepped forth bravely and led the Angles and the Saxons to stave off an invasion from the North. Jefferson was inclined to see them as symbols of a healthy entrepreneurial spirit embodying the same demotic


drive that fuelled the relentless expansionism of the day. (Jefferson is the political architect under whose guidance America doubled its size while he was in office.) The significant detail that Hengst and his son, Aesc, eventually betrayed the British and conquered them to their own mercenary ends was conveniently lost in Jefferson’s rendering of the original source: Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.

Rather than blithely pointing out that history tends to repeat itself, it is incumbent to note the multi-faceted problems that any translation poses, reaching as far out as ideology and politics. The cliché traduttore-traditore has been taken for granted as an inevitable collateral damage ever since the times of Dante. Thomas Jefferson was certainly correct in the attention that he gave to the roots of Anglo-Saxonism, but his interpretation of the original events was colored by his insistence on seeing what he expected to see. Short of being fully immersed in the culture of the original and sensitive to the original language that has engendered its representation (in which case the act of translation becomes moot) readers are left between a rock and a hard place: should they trust the translator’s additional authority, or should they avoid translations altogether as dubious and imperfect artifacts? Organizations such as the reputable Pen Foundation make desperate attempts to level the odds, with little effect, since the ultimate touchstone of consumerism is self-referential. Unsurprisingly, in this market economy, only 2 to 3 percent from the total number of books published in English are actual translations from other languages.

Prior to the 1989 Revolution, Romanian readers could access the world masterpieces mainly in translation. Information, including the writings that managed to transpire across the barriers set up by Communist censorship, became hard currency. One may say that the translations were “good” as long as they touched a readerly nerve, which they did, for lack of anything more potent. Aside from the masterpieces from the Western World, the earlier translations from Russian literature were so good, no doubt, since the translators had an additional incentive to reveal the supreme richness of the language of the Soviets, as postulated by Stalin. At the other end of the spectrum, readers who had not benefitted from a hasty re-education in Soviet Russia’s cultural exchange programs

11 Lost and Found in Translation

were keenly attuned to the absurdities of their own political regime to enjoy Mikhail Bulgakov or Ilf and Petrov in their wickedly ebullient translations. Readers privately chuckled, feeling vindicated by the satirical twists that managed to penetrate the shroud of censorship. It is quite likely that the censors themselves took pleasure in releasing a text that had circumvented the scrutiny of their Big Brothers.

Unsurprisingly, the value of this hard currency on the world exchange is different. Bulgakov’s classic, The Master and Margarita, has appeared in several English translations over the years, and Mirra Ginsburgh’s is arguably among the better ones. Nevertheless, the novel rendered in English lacks the purchasing power of all the details that undermine the Soviet regime. It is not so much that the English-speaking audience’s sense of humor is different from the European, or even East European one. Something else is lost in translation: the small change that removes any hard currency from the realm of financial abstractions. In order to learn its value, one has to recognize, accept, and handle the small coins as well.

The idea of attempting a translation of Mihail Sadoveanu’s Frații

Jderi (The Marten Brothers) came to me as an exercise in stylistics. In 2005, I submitted a proposal to the Pen Foundation for translating Vasile Voiculescu’s novel Zahei Orbul (Zakhei the Blind One), an intriguing piece of fiction in the vein of the much-appreciated genre of fantastic realism. (The translation made it to the short list, but eventually lost to contenders from the Middle East.) The act of translation was relatively straight-forward. Voiculescu’s language is surgically precise, despite occasional incursions into the surreal and some unavoidable regionalisms that came with the setting – the Romanian pre-Socialist countryside. The obstacles in rendering in English the sub-culture of peasants, beggars, con-men, convicts on the fringes of society were not insurmountable and neither were some overtones proper to the twilight of feudalism. Mihail Sadoveanu’s language is very different. The 1955 translation of Baltagul (The Hatchet) completed under the auspices of a Socialist publishing house is justly deemed unsatisfactory by every reader who is familiar with the Romanian original. It has been marketed abroad ever since as a detective story set against a quaint, folkloric backdrop, and spawned an


equally mediocre movie. There’s not much to be gained in pursuing this narrative thread.

Sadoveanu’s linguistic genius risking to be lost in this translation is even more apparent in Frații Jderi. Whereas in Baltagul his characters are mythically anchored in a whole oral tradition which may not be all that readily transparent to readers of English, they still function in a “familiar”, late 19th century universe. On the other hand, Frații Jderi begins in the spring of 1469. Instead of going back to a genuine medieval vernacular (which even so would have percolated to Romanian readers only via Neculce) Sadoveanu’s language is antiquated, to be sure, without sounding dusty or pretentious. The language his characters use has been described as “ageless” in the sense that the traditional image we have of a Romanian village is “ageless.” It is the language that prevails “in illo tempore,” as Mircea Eliade would have it. Not only do the characters speak this way, so does the narrator when he bridges over the dialogue as a virtual witness.

Choosing the most appropriate dialect to convey Sadoveanu’s approach to his literary material is truly challenging. Beowulf’s Old English is out; not only would that render the translation incomprehensible to the average reader of English, but it would also provide a restricted vocabulary to capture the complex linguistic tapestry of the original. Chaucer’s early Middle English gets closer to the mark, but it is still too removed from the “ageless” language that Sadoveanu uses. Shakespeare’s Elizabethan English corresponds roughly to the historical period of the novel, yet it is too elaborate and too stage-oriented, lacking the casual spontaneity of the original. The main hurdle, however, is to successfully capture the organic “naturalness” of Sadoveanu’s accomplishment without making the rendering sound bookish or contrite. It seems that the language of the medieval mystery plays such as Everyman combined with the quick wit of the metaphysical poets would achieve the desired results. The intended audience of the mystery plays was, after all, similar to Sadoveanu’s heroes. The translation was completed bearing this principle in mind, and with the additional assistance of Dan Collins, a thorough and competent Shakespearean scholar, with a good ear for Medieval English.


Frații Jderi appeared between 1935-1941 prior to the advent of Socialism in Romania. During the Communist regime, Mihail Sadoveanu swiftly achieved the status of a cultural icon in his own rights. He quickly took the spotlight by gravitating towards the Soviet regime, visiting the Soviet Union and lecturing on its benefits and achievements under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. Even after the turbulent times when many prominent intellectuals from the pre-Communist days were “purged,” Sadoveanu managed to preserve his seat as an Academician, with all the material benefits that his position entailed. Just like Jefferson’s, Sadoveanu’s influence went beyond the political immediacies of the day. He took a keen interest in modifying the Romanian alphabet, and an active part in finalizing the new constitution fashioned after the Soviet model. Sadoveanu was revered as the Honorary President of the Writers’ Union, recipient of the Soviet Lenin Peace Prize, and “Hero of Socialist Labor.” His historical novels became and stayed part of the high-school curriculum.

Its literary genius notwithstanding, Frații Jderi also includes an ideological message that must have resonated well with the Communist leaders of the day. Nicolae Ceausescu himself took great pleasure in painstakingly projecting a persona that demanded an uncompromising analogy with Stephen the Great, the historical figure at the heart of the novel. During his lengthy reign, the Moldavian king managed to centralize his royal power, to ensure economic and political stability in his realms, and to block effectively the menace of the Ottoman Empire that was threatening Western Europe from the South-East. His stern, righteous ruling propelled Moldova into a mythical golden age. The subversive sub-text, fully endorsed by the Communist ideologues, is also clear: it is precisely the absolute, unquestionable authority of the divinely anointed king that triggered national prosperity, while keeping ruthless invaders and foreign meddlers at bay. Not only the blaze of a Muslim threat, but also the light of the Soviet red star happens to dawn in the East. One of the most effective leverages that Ceausescu had used to keep the country under control was the implicit assumption that under his rule, Romania played the role of a maverick in the East European block, free from overt Soviet influences.


The sheer bluntness of this ideological message overshadows other details that might be more readily rediscovered in translation. Some of the ethical conundrums that the text purports may be passed over reinforcing the slippery principle that the end justifies the means. In order to insure a unique blood-line to the throne, the Moldavian king has his own uncle assassinated, invoking the Biblical precept of just retribution. (The patricide is also conveniently atoned for by building a Holy monastery.) Stephen the Great’s goal is to provide his offspring and heir, Prince Alexander, with a smooth transition to the helm of his realm by eliminating any other possible contenders and it has been practiced throughout history by a great many royal family. The Prince’s qualities as a political figure and a leader are nowhere as evident as his father’s, something that King Stephen himself has to acknowledge. Therefore, he protects his son and heir with a blind persistence that has less to do with the well-being of Moldova and more to do with a genetic “choice by default.” The same principle is still functional to this day, in the modern dynasties that North Korea’s Kim Il Sung and Romania’s Nicolae Ceausescu ruthlessly attempted to secure.

The Martens’ medieval allegiances are primarily to their king rather than to the abstract realm of Moldova. The double-bind they find themselves in when it comes to protecting their own kin duplicates the tragic dilemma of the old man in Beowulf, whose son “has sinned against the king” and was rightly put to death. The idealized clan of the Martens has adopted a wayward Tartar (saved from his own murderous kin) who has been thoroughly and effectively converted to Christianity. Yet George the Tartar occupies a conspicuously lower social rung; even as a trusty servant in the household, he lacks a room of his own and sleeps in the hayloft. Torn between his own contradictory loyalties to the patriarch of the clan and to his hot-headed son, the Tartar is the one who still speaks flawlessly the language of the Invaders and who enables the Christian brothers’ foray into the Muslim camp. Sadoveanu cares little whether the Tartar’s mother tongue is indeed similar to the language spoken at the Turkish outpost, but his ultimate point is clear: the hero would have been lost without his translator.


Works Cited Beowulf. Ed. C. L. Wren. London: Harap, 1974. Lines 2443-2463. Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita, Trans. Mirra Ginsburgh. New

York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1987. Frantzen, Allen J. Desire for Origins. New Brunswick and London: Rutgers

University Press, 1990.

Ionuț’s Apprenticeship 16

Ionuț’s Apprenticeship

from The Marten Brothers by Mihail Sadoveanu

Chapter I Concerning the day of the patron Saint of Holy Neamțu Monastery, and a story told by Nechifor Căliman, Head of the Royal Hunting Grounds On the day of the Ascension and of the patron Saint of Neamțu Cloister, a great many people had congregated outside the monastery walls and in the back yard. Some came for the holy services, others to receive the abbot’s blessings and the Eucharist. Many showed up in hope for prayers to ward off sickness, or to bring relief to their raving spouses who were urged to kneel under the stoles of those monks blessed with the gift of reading. None was more skilled than Abbot Joseph for his healing touch and his fame had spread far and wide, not only within in the realm of Moldova, but also without, reaching as far as the kingdoms of Poland and Russia. People were also mindful of their chance to partake of the abbey’s foods and wine, since the bountiful hospitality of this holy place was also well-known: goods and foodstuffs were plentiful in the cellars, what with the monastery’s herds that mottled the pastures in the mountains, with its vineyards on the hillsides, and with the grain from its tilled lands that stretched as far as River Prut. There was enough to feed even larger crowds than those that thronged the place on that bright morning in the year of our Lord, 1469. The apple-trees were blooming in the abbey’s orchards and the honeyed sunshine robed them in a pinkish haze. The early morning services were over in the citadel’s main church. The sharp sound of the bell in the tower above the gate mingled with the grave, slow-paced tolling of the ancient monastery bell.

17 Ionuț’s Apprenticeship

The fretful crowds started to swell; people began to wonder, at first by puzzled glances, then aloud. Some jostled towards the entrance, surrounding the well and the pavilion from whence begins the blessing of the waters, right after the New Year. Far too few people had known (and those who had, must have been all among the councilmen and priests) what the crowds were now beginning to learn, at long last. It became known that a couple of clerics had been privy to the news, full two days earlier, but kept it from the commoners who came for the holy celebration. Two days before, on Tuesday, as it were, two riders had come at full gallop from the city of Suceava, with written message for Abbot Joseph. One of them stayed at the monastery overnight. The other one spurred his horse on, towards Timiș where the royal horses are tended in a place by the waters of river Moldova, under the scrupulous care of Manole Dark-Hair, chief horse-master and old friend of late King Bogdan, father of His Highness King Ștefan.

The message that Abbot Joseph labored to read by placing a wax candle between the parchment and his sickly eyes spoke of King Ștefan’s arrival on the day of the patron Saint of the monastery. Now the crowds became aware of the good news, too. While the great bell gave voice over the people’s heads, the monks were milling around in their dun robes, bending their beards towards those willing to listen. As gunpowder catches instant fire, so did the voices in the throng burst out, at first from the outer fringes of the crowd, but quickly rising to a general clamor. The womenfolk, who always lack good sense, as everybody knows, started wailing and clasping their foreheads, calling out for their children.

Alack! If the great bell keeps tolling and His Highness is bound to arrive, who knows what else may betide? There may be a flood, and the waters of the Moldova might spill over their old river-bed. There may be a war, even! Back on the farm, the cat’s locked in the pantry and the chickens are on their own, with no one to feed them! The wise thing to do, certainly, is to have the men hitch their horses to the carts and rush back to their homes – but not before one knows for sure how things stand and not before everyone who had never lain eyes on Ștefan King might steal a glance at His Highness… for it is well-known that only the bravest might dare lift their eyes and meet the king’s gaze. The lowly ones will fall to


their knees, with their forelocks in the dirt. Notwithstanding, womenfolk will try to squint a little, hoping to catch a glimpse of His Highness. Could it be true that the king is so frightful-looking? Does he have a broad sword to chastise some of the haughtier boyars and take off their heads in a flash, as some say he does? If even King Matthew of Hungary backed off and cowered at the battle of Baia when His Highness Ștefan showed himself at the head of his armies, riding his white stallion, then what’s a poor commoner to do? The famed Hungarian king was so rattled that he took to his bed for three months after that battle. His hosts were scattered and he lost his great cannons. Every crowned head from the neighboring realms has come to know His Highness King Ștefan, who took back the citadels of Hotin and Chilia from the Turks. Some say that his father, late Bogdan King, had his son blessed and anointed in great secrecy, in a church on holy Mount Athos, so that His Highness King Ștefan might rise against the Pagans, wage war, and beat them into the ground once and for all.

Therefore the cat in the pantry and the chickens in the backyard will have to fend for themselves, at least until the eyes of the people have caught a glimpse of their king and their ears are filled with all the gossip of which the courtiers and the soldiers are ever heedful. Besides, there’s eating and drinking to be done. How can one set on a journey with an empty belly? Whoever heard of such a silly thing? Who are those who jabber about war and flooding so that the folk will hastily depart this place, before they get to see what’s to be seen, to hear what’s to be heard, and eat and drink what’s been prepared in the kitchens of this holy site? Only mindless men such as the Moldavians might think it proper to leave. Thank God for their womenfolk, who are still here to set things aright… It is neither right nor proper for the people to flee screaming at the sight of their Lord and King. Nay, the best thing to do is to come out in the open and welcome him heartily.

Thus womenfolk were eager to be told at what place and hour the King’s suite was bound to turn up.

But that, unfortunately, was still unknown. Neither clerk nor no monk could be found to tell the people the place and hour upon which King’s retinue was due.

What! Then what good are the clerks and the monks if they are


unmindful of such things? Let the clerks and the monks search into their books, and squirrel out the proper answers.

Alas! The clerks and the monks of today have less skillful books than in the days of yore. Some say that the King does not come at all. The bells toll in vain, or just to get the people riled, while His Highness attends other business.

That’s how things stand in this world: the boyars and the land-lords get to see the King every blessed day, while the commoners never get to see His Highness at all. A wondrous world would this be if there were fewer boyars around – or none at all – and if the monastery would offer celebrations daily. Better still, if His Highness showed himself to the people at such celebrations, in his full majesty, at least once a year.

Word has it in the villages that King Ștefan is not an overly tall man, yet he makes everybody cringe when he scowls. But then again, when he comes to a holy monastery (if he truthfully is to come at all and if these monks do not pander empty words) he has no reason to scowl. He will have to look mild, for certain. He will see a babe here, a maiden there, or a wife, perchance, and he will ask: whose is this baby? Whose is this wife? For King Ștefan is the lord of this realm and he must know whose the babe or the wife is. Then the boyars will shuffle closer to his Highness and whisper in his ear: this babe and that wife is so-and-so’s. That’s how His Highness gets to know everything. He’s been a widower for so many a year, ever since Lady Evdochia Queen passed away, so he must needs gladden his eyes and soften his manly life just a little.

Say that His Highness will not look around but keep to his thoughts, for God only knows what’s on a king’s mind. Even so, his soldiers and his courtiers will.

Celebrating a patron saint is a good thing, forsooth, and it’s even better when a kingly suite appears.

On Wednesday around noon, people saw a youngster riding a grey through the monastery gates. His mustache barely showed. He wore a tunic of blue Flemish cloth, red boots of soft leather, and a dagger at his belt. He bore his lamb fur-cap at a rakish tilt, fully enjoying the gentle spring season. He came on the road from the citadel.


It quickly became known all around that the lad was Manole Dark-Hair’s youngest son. The old horse-master had sent him from Timiș to welcome King Ștefan.

So the King must be on his way. Who said that His Highness would not come?

Besides, if the King is not bound to arrive, why are they still ringing the bells and breaking everybody’s ears?

Keen people also found out from the holy brothers that the lad’s name was Ionuț, but he was better known by his nickname. His father, Manole the Horse-Master, also went by the name of Marten. Thus, his youngest son came to be called Little Marten. Womenfolk quickly noticed that he was left-handed and eagerly read in this certain omens concerning his love-life. They also read his handsome bearing that showed him a worthy offspring of his father; it was also known that his father had him late in life, and cuckoo-fashion, in a foreign nest. After a while, Manole brought him to his domains, among his lawful sons. Old Marten used to maintain that Ionuț was a god-son from the Lowlands, but his wedded wife, lady Illisafta the Marteness, knew better and would smile crookedly. Be it as it may, since everybody took a liking to Little Marten, she liked him too.

Little Marten appeared to have come to see his older brother, Father Nicodemus, who was a cleric at the holy monastery of Neamțu. Father Nicodemus allowed him to kiss his hand and hugged him fondly, after which they stepped outside and into the crowds.

Doubtless, His Highness must soon arrive. Among the folk that thronged around the fountain stood old

Nechifor Căliman, Chief of the King’s Hunters. He took his time and stretched out his lanky body, asking leisurely whether anyone might care to know for what reason His Highness Ștefan King would come to the holy monastery on that very day. People closed in anon, pressing so much they could barely breathe. Old Nechifor Căliman was the King’s man, and that was a well-known fact. Also well-known were his services to late King Bogdan. Căliman was a hard old man, lean and wiry. He wore a royal silver token on his fur-cap and his staff had a hatchet head. When he spoke, he would twist his nose and squint a little, spitting on the side to


damn the devil. His hairless cheeks (that looked as if pecked by geese) were deeply creased. He was more than seventy years old, and yet his locks were still raven-black. Only his left eyebrow was white where he had been struck by iron, an old story.

“If you all good people wish to learn why the King would come here on this holy day, then prick up your ears and harken,” drawled old Căliman spitting on the side. “Damn! If you don’t wish to learn, I’ll keep quiet.”

“Speak forth, then,” the farmers urged him. “If you don’t tell us, our womenfolk will die of curiosity.”

“So I will, good people. But mind you, my story begins a long time ago.”

“Begin wherever you must, but don’t let us suffer in this heat and ignorance.”

“All right, beloved folks, now be quiet and listen. I say to you that His Highness Ștefan King will come to this holy cloister Neamț, on the blessed day of its patron saint, to meet Nechifor Căliman face to face. Damn!”

The menfolk burst into a deep laughter, while the women giggled shrilly.

“Damn!” spat the chief hunter, twisting his nose and scowling askance. “You had better also know that His Highness set me a judgment date here, on this very day, to right the wrongs that have been done to me by sundry malefactors. I’d met His Highness some other times in the capital city of Suceava and begged for justice, but now King Ștefan bid me be here, on the day of the Ascension. One might say that His Highness and I share an old friendship, going all the way back to a wedding that took place seventeen years ago, in the village of Reuseni. Have you, good people, heard about that village?”

“We have!” “Damn! Good for you if you have. It happened in the days of late King Bogdan, may God rest his soul, that he was humbly asked to come to a wedding by one of his boyars called Agapie Ciornohut. This Agapie Ciornohut was marrying his only son, and wished to have King Bogdan at the celebration. So late in the autumn after the harvest, His Highness rode


to this wedding. As for myself, being the Chief of the Royal Hunters, I loaded my horses with eight deer for meat, I stuffed twenty seven tubs with freshly caught trout from the river Ozana, and hurried to the appointed place in the company of two of my men. When we crossed the Siret, we ran into a bunch of foreign soldiers which made me wonder. They asked me where I was going and I hastened to tell them truthfully, whereupon they snatched my venison and my fish and tied me up in a bundle. I meekly submitted to their wishes, like the humble servant that I was, but also pondered: what might these Polish warriors want, other than get a taste of royal dishes? They seem to be heading to where I wanted to go. And what might be on their leader’s mind, the slender one with a thin beard and waxen countenance, who was privily whispering to the other soldiers? (Later I was to find out that this was Prince Petru Aaron.) So they left me in a village on this side of the river, all tied up and with a guard to watch over me. As soon as they were gone, I fell to the ground all ready to give up my ghost and begged for a priest to confess my sins and give me absolution. When the guard stepped outside to fetch the priest, I rid myself of the ropes, snuck out, mounted the guard’s horse and left in a hurry, for my business was elsewhere. I rode straight through the woods. When I reached a mount that overlooked the village, I chanced upon a group of youthful merry-makers, and in their midst none other but young King Ștefan who was the merriest of all; the same as the one whom we await to do me justice on this day. His Highness King Ștefan had no inkling of any stirrings; he had come for the wedding along with his companions. I told him quickly what I had found out and begged him to start worrying and to make haste. His Highness did not appear to worry too much, but he did make haste plentifully. Damn! When we rode towards the village, we ran into several royal guards chased by their foes. ‘They caught His Highness Bogdan King! They cut off his head and now they’re looking for his son, King Ștefan!’ the guards bawled. Truly, it was already dark, but one could hear the commotion in the village. Riders appeared with torches and they were coming our way. I behold the young king shaking off his mantle and cast his royal headdress upon the ground; he draws his sword and urges his companions to be bold. Damn! 'The whole thing stinks, Your Highness!’ I say. ‘Doubtless, this boyar


Ciornohut has sold out our King, most likely to the prince with waxen countenance. And if King Bogdan was betrayed, his son is also bound to bleed to death under the sword.’ It seems to me wiser to grab his horse’s reins and turn it the other way, so that we might lose ourselves into the forest; I had to take my lord away from the danger, and wait from afar for God’s will to be done. So that’s what I did, good people, but that young, stout king would have none of it. He struggles and curses, but I still hold him tight. He beats me with his sword’s guard and I squeeze my eyes shut and hold him even tighter. He strikes me across the forehead drawing blood and leaving the mark on my eyebrow that you can see today. That’s when I found out that old bones do better in times of woe. So we took the path of exile and we did not return until the time was right and God set King Ștefan on his father’s throne. That day I could also return to my home, as head of the royal hunters. I found my sons in good health back home, and I rejoiced. I found my wife a little fatter, and I rejoiced also. I found the lands of my forefathers taken by others, and I rejoiced less. My wife said: ‘that was God’s will….’ On the other hand, I found a child in the house who was not mine. I asked my wife: ‘That may be God’s will also?’ ‘It is,’ she said, ‘Blessed be His name.’ Ever since that day, I have been sitting in judgment for my lands. His Highness Ștefan King has set the judgment date today, at last. Damn!”

A portly, bolder woman from Daveni wasted no time to ask old Căliman a burning question: “Pray do tell us, what did you do when you found that addition, along with your lack, to your household?”

Nechifor Căliman twisted his nose and squinted her way, and saw her nudging her companion.

“My good woman,” he said, closing an eye and squinting even harder. “One could tell by your outfit that you own a prosperous inn.”

“True!” the woman answered proudly. “And the man next to you is your traveling companion, is he not?”

“He is.” “And your wedded husband must be back home, minding the inn?” “Indeed.” “Damn! I will gladly answer your question, but I wonder verily


what these good wives and husbands are laughing at so hard…. All right then, since you’ve all quieted down, I will tell you everything. Methinks the bells have stopped tolling, too. Soon enough the heralds will announce His Majesty’s arrival. All the bell-ringers around will be pulling the ropes in the belfries, from the villages of Saint-John all he way to Vovidanie, and the sound will scale the Heavens so that the saints would know and take the news to God the Father: ‘Look, there’s his Highness Ștefan King riding to Neamțu where he will raise his right arm, the one that wields the mace, for to do justice to Nechifor Căliman, about some old accounts that go back twelve years.’ Like I said, good people, when I returned home, I saw that the lands of my forefathers have dwindled by half. Worse still, my vineyard in Boiceni was Judge Ciopei’s now. I didn’t tarry much around my house in Vinatori, not longer than a full year, I mean. Damn! So I rode all the way to Suceava, where I arrived on the holy Sunday after Easter. I beheld soldiers on the ramparts of the city; people were no longer allowed to ride in as they pleased. There was sternness at the main gate and no more huddling as in the days of yore. The guard propped his spear against my chest: ‘You can’t walk right in,’ he barked. ‘What do you mean, I can’t walk in? I am Nechifor Căliman, His Highness’s old friend.’ ‘Step back and wait,’ he commanded. So I did.

That saddened me a little and I said to myself: ‘Damn! In the kingdom of Moldova, friendships are as shifty as the royal crown is. Ecumenical Patriarch Teoctist was doubtless right to bemoan his busy life. When he anointed Ștefan King, he said that in this land of ours, royal heads tend to last for hardly a year, or one month even; of late, he’s been anointing Moldavian kings right and left until he got a cramp in his right arm. He had just anointed late Bogdan King’s son on the Holy Easter day; come Christmastime, one wonders who will be next? Alack, our poor little country! If King Ștefan keeps on going to weddings, as his father did, they will catch him, too. On the other hand, I know him to be wise and mindful. I can see that his guards are strict; he cares not about carousing at weddings, but about arming his troops. But what if he would give free rein to the great and mighty boyars, just as all Alexander the Elder’s sons and great-sons have done? In the land of Moldova, only the king is fleeting; the great land-lords stay on and always have the last word. Sadly, so said


his Holiness Teoctist, too, and he is plumb right, one might say….’ Then I saw some stately boyars riding through the gate and the

guards lowering their spears as one. ‘A-ha!’ I said to myself. ‘Everything’s in its proper place. There’s still hope for justice.’

The trumpets sounded and the boyars pulled back to make way. His Highness rode out through the gates, his guards following him closely. We all bowed to the ground. I fell on my knees, bending my head.

The King reined his horse in. I heard his voice which made my heart flutter.

‘Raise your head, Chief Hunter Căliman,’ His Highness bade. ‘Methinks that you came to your Lord and Master on account of an old grievance. From this day onwards, you will be wearing a royal silver token, so that the guards know you are free to come and go as you please. Speak up!’

‘My Lord,’ I spoke boldly. ‘My grievance will find a hearing in the king’s court, where my king and his retainers tend to the country’s needs. The first and foremost reason why I’m here is to confide in an old friend of mine, much younger in years than I am.’

‘Step into the castle and wait for him there!’ His Highness snapped back, but he smiled.

I saw the King surrounded by warriors wearing helmets and in full armor. When I stepped into the castle, I saw many more dressed likewise; they were all hardened soldiers, and no slackers.

‘Our friend knows his business,’ I said to myself. Then some clerics walked in and bade me to follow them into a

chamber. ‘His Highness would have us feed you properly,’ one of them said.

‘So you wait here, Hunter Căliman, until around noon, for King Ștefan has business with the Polish merchants concerning customs fees. Once he is done with them, he’ll be back into his council chambers, to receive messengers from Warsaw. His Highness commanded the Polish land-lords to deliver him Prince Petru Aaron, who murdered the King’s father.”

‘His Highness commanded them to do so?’ I marveled. ‘His Highness commanded them to do so.’ ‘Damn!’ I thought and my heart leaped with joy. ‘Our friend Ștefan


works for the benefit of Patriarch Teoctist’s overtired arm.’ I did not have to wait longer than His Highness wished me to.

Trumpets sounded again around noontime. The armored warriors flashed their polished weapons. A deep silence ensued, and I was seized by awe. I could hear His Highness’s spurs jingling in the passageway. I heard his voice, too. You don’t know that voice, good people, but I knew it full well from the time we spent together in exile. His Highness King Ștefan’s voice rings kindly, but I advise you not to stake your trust upon that kindness.

‘Bring me Nechifor Căliman, Chief of the Royal Hunters,’ his Highness commanded.

I walked in. He gazed at me and smiled. The two of us were alone, face to face, in his chambers.

‘Speak up, old man,’ the king said. I spoke up. His Highness listened to my troubles and gently patted

my shoulder. ‘Chief Hunter Căliman,” the king said. ‘Pray grant me a respite to

finish my war. We will have enough time to settle your affairs after.’ I kept my mouth shut, but wondered much within. The country was

at peace and there was time enough for judging matters. ‘I mean my war, Chief Hunter Căliman,’ his Highness said to me

with a smile, while his green eyes flashed keenly. ‘It is my war against lawlessness in this country. In the realm of Moldova, as you know, wrongdoings are piling up like dead leaves under the trees. I have come to the throne to find one kingdom with countless masters. There ought to be only one. So I must wage war against all these land-lords who also deprived you of your lands. In this country, there ought to be one law only, in every burg and village, and safety on the roads, too, so that merchants and tradesmen could move around freely. So pray allow me to win this war, Chief Hunter Căliman.’

‘I allow you to do so, my Lord.’ ‘I thank you, Chief Hunter Căliman. Until that day, you shall have

full use of a mill on the White Creek, and of two acres from the royal vineyard of Cotnari. Also, I grant you as much land from the king’s pastures on the Ozana as you are lacking today.’


So I heeded his command and I waited. I returned home and bided my time. His Highness did win that war and my matters were brought up in court. The trial lasted for a long while, until the battle of Hotin. After the King seized that citadel from the Poles, there was another hearing in Suceava. Then the Chilia war broke out. Once His Highness took Chilia, too, I had yet another hearing. Years passed and His Highness won the campaign against the Hungarians. After his quelling of the Imperial troops became common knowledge, there was another hearing and more delays for me in store. Then it so happened that last year, Ștefan King took Petru Aaron prisoner in Transylvania, gave him judgment according to the Holy Writ, an eye for an eye, for what he had done at Reuseni. So the time has come for my grievance to be righted and methinks that another proud nose, such as judge Ciopei’s, will be rubbed into the ground.”

“But how about your gain, beloved master hunter?” asked the unrelenting inn-keeper, nudging her companion again.

“Damn! What gain, woman?” “The gain you found home upon your return, the one that came

from God.” “That’s right. I found a babe that wasn’t mine. And I would beg this

good company to refrain from smirking and to meekly pray for the memory of my deceased wife Varvara who is with God now. She is blameless. Holding the babe lovingly and handing him over to me, she said: ‘Husband of mine, this child is a foundling; a devout nun brought him here. He was born in the Lowlands, on the other side of the Nistru; his mother is my blood sister and she died soon afterwards. On her death bed, she confessed who the father of that love child is. Once the child grows up, God willing, take him back to his true father, so that he might know and cherish him with the same love he had had for his poor mother.’ That’s what she said, good people, and when the time was ripe, I did take the child to his father. You have just seen him, strutting around in his blue coat. He was heading for the Abbey, in the company of his elder brother, the one they call Father Nicodemus. Damn!”

Damning the devil one more time, the master hunter spat and concluded his tale. Suddenly the balmy spring air resounded with the tremulous sound of the cloister bells. The crowds rippled like a stormy


sea; people called each other by name and urged each other to move; then the crowds roared shrilly. From the monastery walls, monks and commoners were waving. The bell ringers crowded one of the tower’s windows, sticking their heads out in bunches and peering towards the valley. In the back yard, the cart drivers climbed on their front seats and stretched out their necks in the same direction, striving to see what was happening in the glades on the banks of the river. They were pointing at the rare pines below where riders in colorful garb were drawing near under the blossoming cherry trees; they seemed to advance too slowly in the bright sunshine, looking like crawling ants, on account of the distance.

So His Highness was coming on the road from Risca. The crowds poured out through the monastery gates and flooded the narrow streets of the village, rushing downhill towards the river to welcome the procession. A squad of riders appeared from behind the monastery; they were proud yeomen led by a royal captain to fence off the mob. A messenger lifted his fur-cap at the end of his spear to notify the crowds that he had something to say.

The crowds stopped to listen. The messenger stood up nimbly in his saddle, towering about everybody else, and bellowed over the sea of heads:

“His Highness wishes that you wait for him here; make way when he comes, so he can step on unencumbered to the holy icon of the monastery, our Saint Mary full of grace!”

To make the crowd heed the messenger’s urgings, the yeomen lowered their spears and rested them between their horses’ ears. A second squad of riders descended hastily from the upper glades. Soon the streets of the village were teeming with German mercenaries led by their captains. Others rode along the walls of the monastery and posted themselves along the main road. Another group guarded the road up to the mountains.

According to the local royal custom, the captains made sure that all the monastery keys were handed over to the king’s guards, for the duration of his stay.

“Gone are the days of such weddings when kings were roped in unawares,” muttered the Chief of the Royal Hunters to himself, casting


keen glances around and taking it all in. A captain of the third rank followed by a flag bearer appeared at the

far end of the village street, leading two hundred riders. The horses advanced slowly towards the village main square, making room for the local procession: at its head, Abbot Joseph, bedecked in his canonicals, flanked by two deacons bearing torches. A third deacon stepped ahead, holding the Holy Gospel book, bound in silver. Local land-lords and royal servants were following the devout monastic figures.

The bells were tolling ever more loudly as the main procession appeared from the lower glades, advancing under the pines and the blossoming cherry trees. The on-lookers on the cloister walls could barely discern the King’s white horse in the distance, dazzled by the uncertain flashes from the rider’s helmet bedecked with jewels. Chapter II Wherein we encounter a Great Lord and a Little Marten In the profane world outside the monastery walls, His Holiness Brother Nicodemus used to be the blood son of Manole Dark-Hair, the Chief Horse-Master from Timiș. Now he was a different man, searching for wisdom in sobriety and in the Scriptures. Hard as it was, he wished to forget that people used to call him Marten the Second. Too, he had a sign on his cheek in the corner of his left eye: an oblong birthmark as wide as the tip of a thumb, with hairs in the likeness of the fur of the beast by whose nickname his father was known. Every one of the Horse-Master’s sons bore this mark, and they were five in all.

Formerly, there had been only four sons, but for the past seven years, a fifth one had joined them. When he first arrived at Timiș, stepping shyly between Horse-Master Manole and Old Căliman, the Chief of the Royal Hunters, nobody guessed that the willowy boy was of the same blood as the others. He was taken in as a stranger and an orphan. Within three years, however, Lady Illisafta the Marteness, who was a sharp


woman, started eyeing more closely that saucy youngster and came to discern the marten mark taking shape by the corner of his left eye; at first, the skin grew darker, then sprouted short, fine hairs on a spot no larger than a thumb mark, akin to the ones her other sons showed. Lady Illisafta was befuddled; she counted on her fingers the birthdates of her sons, whereupon she grew even fonder of the poor foundling and hugged him closely, pressing his cheek with the marten mark against her chest. Her ladyship had a bountiful chest and a stately figure that had been famed throughout the Highlands in her youth. Her piercing eyes shone keenly under her black eyebrows and her words were arrow-swift and true. They always found their mark, but without meanness. “This child’s unfortunate mother,” she used to reflect for the benefit of those meant to hear, “must have been younger and much comelier than I to make my beloved husband get off his horse at her gate, during his lonely journeys throughout the Lowlands. But the Almighty had marked this child and had sent it to me, to take his mother’s place… whoever she might have been and wherever she might have ended her days… for this thing is hidden and unknown to everyone, leastways to the Horse-Master himself….”

The child arrived at Timiș about the time when Marten the Second was given his tonsure at the cloister of Neamț, along with Abbot’s Joseph’s holy blessing. He was no longer Nicoară Marten, but Brother Nicodemus, humble monastic cleric. That was another sign that the Almighty knows best as He watches over us in endless wisdom; the Lord had taken Nicodemus from the Horse-Master’s household and rendered him another son in exchange. Therefore, the cleric was less familiar with his youngest brother and he was pleased to meet him from time to time.

Whenever the youngster sauntered in his monastic cell, Brother Nicodemus smiled, pushing away the ancient parchments stained with wax drops that burdened his table. He would hug the child and kiss the crown of his head that smelled pleasantly of wild flowers. He liked to hear him speak of sundry childish things. Sometimes the cleric tried to impart some wisdom, but his attempts were always met with laughter. The child could not be pinned down. He was flighty like a butterfly or a flickering flame; the boy was a changeable imp.

He wasn’t strikingly handsome, for certain; his nose was a trifle too


large for his face, just like his father’s was. He showed early signs of vanity and weakness for fine-looking garb. “It’s not hard to tell who he takes after,” Lady Ilisafta would mutter, raising her eyes towards the holy icons on the wall. “The fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree….”

He was always restless and loved to fool around. He’d learned fast and easily everything related to the craft of hunting from old Căliman, and now he was becoming skillful in tending horses, as the helper of his older brother Simon. He felt fully at ease among the royal horses at Timiș and did not shy to mount the wildest of stallions.

Father Nicodemus and Little Marten were still talking as they ambled down the path that led from the western grove towards the abbey, to join the assembly of local dignitaries. The monastery bells were beginning to subside.

“I caught a glimpse of His Highness three years ago,” Ionuț recalled. “His hand touched my cheek and my hair; I minded his ring and the large seal upon it. I dared not to look up at His Highness then, but I will today…”

“Were you frightened?” the cleric asked him with a smile. “I was. As frightened as I’d been years before, when I truly felt my

heart shrinking. But that was once upon a time, when I was a little child.” “When was that?” “That must have been, brother Nicoară…” “I bade you not to call me ‘brother Nicoară’ when others are

around…” “That must have been, Reverend Father Nicodemus… (but pray let

me call you softly ‘brother Nicoară’)… that must have been, Reverend Father, when I was barely five years of age. We used to go hare hunting with uncle Căliman. He has his clever way of catching a hare by smacking it with a bent stick of hard wood, that he casts from afar. The dogs raise the hare twenty paces away, he throws his stick, and never misses. Sometimes he has the dogs catch it for him, but I like it better when he throws his stick. Afterwards, he would sit me in the saddle in front of him and we’d trot home. Aunt Varvara would be greeting us at the gate. It so happened that day that Aunt Varvara had no one to send to the mill for a peck of corn to bake some rolls. ‘The mill’s not far,’ she says. ‘You can


see it from here. Why don’t you go, Ionuț, and tell the miller we’re in need of some flour?’ So I did. I took the path to the mill. The bushy-haired miller stepped outside, and I did not shy away. I boldly told him my errand and he had me wait. While he was grinding the corn, I paced up and down outside, biding my time, until I found myself in his back yard and Lo! I beheld a one hundred year old hare turning its head and glaring at me. Then I shrieked and fled home sobbing, to tell Aunt Varvara what befell me…’

“What do you mean, a one hundred year old hare?” “Nay, it was the miller’s donkey,” the lad smiled. “I could tell you

about other things, brother Nicoară and Reverend Father Nicodemus, which have befallen me. Now time is short; the King is about to arrive…”

“Tell me, Ionuț, why did you choose this path instead of cutting straight through the crowds?”

“I chose another path, you say? Strange! I wasn’t aware of such a thing…”

“Do not defile your mouth with untruthful words, my boy…” “What sort of untruthful words, dear brother Nicoară?” “Why did you go out of your way to avoid the Master-Hunter?” “Which master-hunter do you mean, beloved brother Nicoară and

Reverend Father Nicodemus?” “Cease squirming like a little woman! You know not which master-

hunter?” “I do, forsooth.” “Then why do you slyly avoid him? Are you ashamed that he is a

lowly churl while you have found yourself a richer father?” “Nay, Your Reverence. It’s his way of greeting me. Whenever he

sees me, he shrills: 'What-Ho! Here comes my little colt!' Now that is sweet of him, but I’m ashamed to be called a colt amongst strangers and womenfolk besides…”

The cleric quickly turned his face away, rubbing his fair beard against his right shoulder in order to conceal his smile.

The youngster was distraught: “I know full well, Reverent Father Nicodemus, that I am sinful and

unworthy of my older brothers. Our father the Horse-Master finds daily


reasons to pride himself with you all: he often bulges his chest and roars: ‘Those sons of mine!’ He means you and the older ones. He looks at me as he would a pismire.”

“He has no reason to trust you yet. You’re but a child.” “Nevertheless, Mumma’s afraid that I will leave her nest soon….” “Which mumma?” “Indeed, I forget. Your Holiness no longer has an earthly father or a

mother. You live far from this world. Mumma is her ladyship Illisafta the Marteness. When I used to come back from the fair, I sometimes found her in the kitchen where she was pulling the freshly-baked loaves out of the oven; she’d always give me a roll shaped like a bird with specks of ashes for eyes. Sometimes I chanced upon her watching over the gypsy women kneading the dough and she’d push me away with the ladle. Now she bows to me and marvels that I am sprouting a mustache; hence, methinks that I no longer am a child. I have noticed that the gypsy women are beginning to shy away from me.”

“You have noticed that?” “I have. I even confessed it to the Horse-Master, but he merely

laughed. He said I was swelling too much for my own good. He had those gypsy women who tend to Mumma in her chambers sew me a kerchief… for to wipe my snotty nose. So you see, Reverend Father, I have my share of woes, too. Why add another when uncle Căliman greets me with his ‘What-Ho! There goes my little colt?’”

The youngster heaved out a deep, troubled sigh, but his face brightened anon.

The soldiers were beginning to line themselves up in two tight rows, making room for the noble procession lead by Abbot Joseph, who were about to cross the wooden bridge over the rivulet. The two brothers joined the dignitaries. The crowds who were hungrily watching seemed to have frozen under the blaze of the late noonday sun.

Trumpets blared. The bridge was narrow, but the rivulet shallowed underneath and could easily be crossed by horses. Abbot Joseph stopped to welcome the Royal Procession.

The riders reined their horses in, while their armors and helmets clanked and glittered. His Highness cast his eyes around as two pages


dashed to hold his reins and his stirrup. The King dismounted first, followed closely by his personal guards who all hit the ground as one. Prince Alexander, the king’s fair-haired son and heir, leaped nimbly off his saddle scorning the stirrup. He was arrayed in the same guise as his father--Venetian brocade with fine Morocco leather trimmings and a royal cap lined with sable. Three of the King’s foremost advisors, his Privy Secretary Toma, Steward Bodea, and Iuga the Seneschal, left their horses behind with the servants and stepped forward onto the bridge.

Opposite, the monks intoned in rather rough voices the time-honored hymn reserved to royalty: “’Tis meet to bless thee, Lord…”

At that time, King Ștefan was still in his forties. His sun-burnt face was clean-shaven, save for his mustache which showed traces of white. He had a way of pressing his lips together and casting a green glance around; even though he was a short man, those who faced him ten paces away always appeared to be looking upwards.

Abbot Joseph advanced from between the two torch bearers, swinging the incense-holder to the sound of the hymn. He then raised the Holy Gospel, adorned with enamel icons that formed a cross on its silver binding, and offered it reverently to His Royal Highness.

The King made Christ’s sign over the Holy Book and touched it with his lips. He gently signed to his son and heir to do likewise. Commoners and lords alike bowed deeply and fell to their knees, while His Holiness the Abbot kissed the golden seal upon his Lord’s ring. The King himself returned the honor in kind, paying his respects to the aged abbot. Anon the cloister’s steward stepped forward offering bread and salt on a tray, to wish him a hearty welcome according to the custom. The King broke the crust and dipped it into the salt; no sooner had he brought it to his lips than he strode willfully towards the monastery. The horses’ hooves made the pebbles on the riverbed ring. As His Holiness had trouble moving fast in his heavy canonicals, the King smiled and slackened his pace.

“Our abbot has a frightful beard, but he is lacking in vigor,” Little Marten thought, never missing a thing and grinning freely. “He wishes to speak forth, but he is too busy panting. His eyes are forlorn, and would fain beg His Highness to slow down a little, but he cannot….” Prince


Alexander has also marked the old monk’s predicament and, being the scamp that he was (albeit a royal one) he allows himself a chuckle, turning his face away and pretending to gaze into the distance. His gaze meets Little Marten’s, who can laugh openly and shamelessly. Their eyes lock in a trice. Ionuț understands that the prince has remembered him, and he is content. “We’re about the same age,” he muses. “I will show him all I know about hunting….”

The procession finally reached the gates of that holy site. The King stopped and patted his left thigh, where he was wont to wear his sword, showing a slight impatience. He was wearing only a dagger with an ivory hilt upon his right hip. Chiriac Sturza, the Third-Rank Armorer, stepped forth on the instant, offering His Highness’s sword which he had in his trust. It was a straight-bladed sword, its cross-shaped guard adorned with rubies.

“Your Holiness,” said the King, leaning towards Abbot Joseph. “You and your clerics may enter the chapel. I have to show myself to the people first, and then I will join you properly.”

Without waiting for an answer, His Highness waved to the pages that held the reins of his horse. He climbed into the saddle and stood up in the stirrups, receiving the sword in his right hand. He lifted the sword over the bent heads of the kneeling, silent crowd. The people in the first rows did not dare to raise their eyes towards their Lord and King. Nevertheless they all strove to steal a glance at him by twisting their necks and peeking askance, according to the Moldavians’ sly and wicked ways.

The King urged his white stallion to take a few steps forward. He gazed over his huddled subjects, who waited in silence, filling the main square and the adjoining village streets. They were more than twenty thousand souls. The bells were no longer tolling, but their former sounds still seemed to be floating overhead.

“Let the people arise,” commanded His Highness, “to behold their Lord and his son and heir, Prince Alexander.”

The foot soldiers who had been fencing off the people repeated the commandment; a brief rumble swirled across the crowds. Wave after wave of people rose to their feet. The men shook their forelocks, while the womenfolk adjusted their headkerchiefs. A few women shrieked,


overcome by the sight of their King upon his stallion, against the searing sun.

“Good Christian people!” the Lord spoke again, lifting his cross-shaped sword bedecked with rubies next to his right temple. “You know the token of my reign; this cross stands for our faith in Christ the Lord that always has and will prevail in our realm. I wish you all good health and prosperity; and let the common people know that our judgment will never fail to uphold what is right, according to His commandments who is above life and death!”

Those in the front who were close enough to hear felt no little amazement and awe upon listening to these fearsome words. They conveyed them to those in the back, like so many murmuring rivulets. Three sharp cries resounded in the crowd; they sprung from a spot where the crowd swirled and ebbed. They were womanly cries. His Highness was told anon that a wife overcome by awe and by the tumult had just given birth to a babe.

His Highness smiled. “Where is that woman from?” The crowds parted. People pulled back as the King stepped

forward. Elderly wives with tall headdresses hid the new mother behind towels. One of them lifted up the offspring wrapped in his mother’s apron. Upon hearing the babe’s frog-like cries, Prince Alexander started to laugh. The King glanced severely at his son, but changed his demeanor quickly as he faced his subjects again, smiling and waiting for an answer.

“She is from Drăgușeni, Your Highness,” a bony old man gave the answer, elbowing his way through the throng. The King lowered his eyes and recognized him on the spot.

“I thank you for the answer, Master Hunter Căliman. I see that you have come for justice”

“I am here to obey my king’s command and bidding,” was the meek response, but Nechifor Căliman could not help but swell with pride amidst the prevailing astonishment.

“You have done well, Master Hunter. But tell me now; judging by its voice, I cannot say whether this is a boy or a girl.”

“He is a boy, Your Highness.”


“Then let him be our god-son and let his name be Ascension, in the aspect of this holy day. After forty days, bring him to us, along with his mother and her man. And let this boy Ascension become a royal hunter, under your guidance.”

“I have heard your wish, my Lord, and it shall be done. Until that appointed time, Your Highness, pray join us in celebration as a worthy godfather would, and deign to taste the goods we have brought you…”

“Master Hunter Căliman,” the King said. “Firstly, your king must go to the chapel. Then you will have to wait for him to pass judgment upon those in need of it. Then you will be granted leave to taste the wine also. But tell me, are you still able-bodied as the Chief of the Royal Hunters?”

“God be thanked, Your Highness, and you also. We’re still able-bodied, indeed. Why claim otherwise when we still are? Minding that death is drawing near, we taught our sons everything about the royal hunting craft. I have seven sons, and they are all Your Highness’s hunters. About four years ago, we began to acknowledge that we will not live forever, and we asked a local carpenter to build us a casket, perchance, if woe betides. So every now and again, when life gets grievous or too cumbersome, we start thinking of our soul, and we lie down in that casket overnight. But come last spring, our sons saw that we were still hardy and showed no sign of dying any time soon, so they moved the casket to the stable, to feed horses from it.”

The Lord laughed pleasantly and the crowds in the back started laughing too, without knowing full wherefore.

His Highness was still smiling when he stepped underneath the arched entranceway, heading for the holy chapel. Passing through the rows of monks holding candles, the king stepped quickly towards Holy Mary’s icon, famed for its miraculous powers. The icon, handiwork of Luke the Evangelist, had been offered to this holy site by Emperor Palaoilogos himself, in olden times. On that joyful holy day, the icon stood adorned with white veils that glimmered in the uncertain candlelight like a meadow bedecked with dewy flowers.

After the choir intoned the hymns in memory of the departed ones, His Highness advanced towards the tomb of his ancestor Ștefan Mușat


King and lit a candle. His son and his retainers followed him, with mournful countenances. The King did not look overly despondent, even though the bitter history of his ancestry was unfolding in his heart:

So it passed that Ștefan Mușat King murdered his brother Ilieș Mușat King Whereupon Roman King who was Ilieș’s son killed his uncle,

Ștefan Mușat And Roman King was poisoned in his turn And Bogdan King was murdered by his brother, Prince Petru Aaron And Bogdan King’s son, Ștefan, had his uncle Petru Aaron

beheaded…

The King touched gently his kneeling son’s head and Prince Alexander looked up towards his father and smiled sweetly. Nevertheless, His Highness stepped out into the sunshine wearing a frown on his face and snapped a command. His secretary Toma handed him Căliman’s complaint, all tied up in a green scroll and sealed with the privy seal. After so many long years of waiting, justice was to be done. The old master hunter could see for himself how bailiffs would replace the former markings that established the borders of his family domains. Judge Ciopei was proscribed for ill treating one of the King’s most worthy and loyal subjects, and commanded to pay a levy to the Holy Church in token of atonement.

Meanwhile, the time being five hours past noon, the doors to the kitchen were flung open and food was being handed over to the poor, while wide tables were readied in the abbey for His Highness and his retainers.

At long last, Little Marten had a chance to approach the King with much uneasiness, stepping abashedly at the heels of Father Nicodemus.

“Is this the youngest son of our Horse-Master Manole?” the King asked with a smile.

“Indeed, Your Highness. Prince Alexander knows him, having hunted with him last year.”

“True. Your name is Ionuț, is it not? I have seen you before.” “Ionuț Dark-Hair, Your Highness,” Little Marten said. “One would doubt your name, were it not for the clear mark on


your cheek,” said the King. “So old Căliman taught you the craft of hunting?”

“He did his best, Your Highness.” “He has his own dogs and hawks,” Prince Alexander added. The King seemed duly impressed and he patted Ionuț’s shoulder. “You have your own dogs?” “I do, Your Highness, but only two of them: a Dolca and a Bora.

And I have but one hawk that I use for quail hunting.” Prince Alexander rushed again to shed light on the matter: “It takes a lot of patience. He spent eight months taming the hawk.” “How did you go about it, Marten?” His Highness inquired. The youngster blushed pleasantly: “My Lord, I starved him first.”

“You starved who?” “I starved the hawk, Your Highness. His name is Arrow. First I had him fast for two days, then I started feeding him morsels of meat. Uncle Căliman taught me how to do it and he also gave me a gauntlet for my right fist. I am left-handed, Your Highness, so I must wear the gauntlet on my other fist. I put a piece of meat on the gauntlet and call the hawk: he comes to pick it off my fist. Once he is hungry, he learns to come, little by little. I whistle and he comes. I shout: ‘Arrow! Come hither!’ and he does. Once he has learned to know his place on the gauntlet, I teach him about quails. Hawks like the head of the quail. They are so pleased that they shriek as they peck at it. So does Arrow. We go into the open, and I tie a leather head-gear with a little silver bell to the hawk’s head, just above his beak. The dogs raise the quails. I release the hawk from my fist. He flies fast and straight to his prey—and catches it in the air. They both tumble to the ground, and I listen for the sound of the bell in the grass or in the bushes. I go to him, take the bird away and give him its head; that’s his boon. Then I have him back onto my gauntlet. Therefore, I have also brought you some of these quails freshly caught from our fields. And my father, Horse-Master Manole Dark-Hair bid me to humbly kiss your right hand and let you know that all’s well with the horses and that you are very much missed and keenly awaited at Timiș.”

The King stared at the lad, still smiling.


“What is your trade?” “Your Highness, I have no skills to speak of yet, unless it’s aiding

my brother Simon. We mind mares with foals. Some stallions are wild enough. We are horse doctors.”

“Can you handle such matters?” “I can, Your Highness. Brother Simon climbs onto one such

stallion. I, onto another. He leaps like a grasshopper to the right; I, to the left.”

“It appears to me, Prince, that you would like to have this young Marten as a servant and companion, would you not?” the King asked, turning towards his son. “If that is your wish, shake hands with Ionuț Dark-Hair. You may sit next to each other at the table. Your Holiness Abbot Joseph, be so kind as to bless the bread and the meat that we will partake of, unworthy as we are, if only the Almighty were to measure our appetite by the size of our deeds.”

Abbot Joseph stretched his arm and blessed the food. The servants brought in the silver dishes; the appointed one tasted from the King’s first. The cup handler poured the wine, and faithfully took a sip from his own cup, according to the custom.

The monks in the choir cleared their voices with sundry coughing and hacking and burst into singing, having chosen the 103rd Psalm that his Highness relished in particular:

Let my soul rejoice in my Lord’s blessedness, Almighty God, for Thou art great and wondrous In Thy splendor and Thy peerless glory…

The King’s eyes misted over slightly. He sat deep in thought for a while, as his table companions hastened to put their jaws and their teeth to good work. The servants kept coming in, bringing new dishes, filling cups, wiping dripping hands that were stretched away from the table. The table guests spoke in soft voices. Soldiers in full armor were flanking the doors and the windows, performing their usual duty. The noise from the people outside in the cloister’s yard was wafting into the room through the open windows, along with the afternoon sunshine.


“Abbot Joseph,” His Highness commanded. “Have Father Nicodemus take the seat to my left. I wish to listen to what this other son of Manole Marten’s has to say.”

“He is Manole Marten’s former son, my Lord. Now he lives his life in humble devoutness, away from all that is worldly and fleeting.”

“So he does. Nevertheless, I wish to listen to this monk, too. Has he been on pilgrimage to Holy Mount Athos?”

“He has, Your Highness. He has returned this spring, verily.” “Has his learning increased thereby?” “Your Highness,” Abbot Jospeh whispered. “Nicodemus has

acquired new knowledge about the vision of Saint John the Theologian. Your Highness foremost ought to hear what His Holiness has to say.”

“He is able to unriddle the Apocalypse, you say? That pleases me. This is why you must have him sit by my side.”

Minding the King’s commandment, Father Nicodemus drew near and sat meekly on a stool at His Highness’s left elbow.

“Father Nicodemus,” the King spoke, pushing away the silver plate. “I have come to ponder over those things we two had spoken about formerly; spiritual matters are usually woeful. If these faithful lords of ours and these most devout monks would deign to cease their talking, I wish to hear again what the Theologian’s vision bespeaks in chapter 19.”

Silence descended upon the wide table where people were getting merry, as it usually happened on certain days when the King was wont to celebrate. Father Nicodemus’s face seemed to grow grimmer and longer as he strove to remember. Little Marten shuddered. The monks’ lips quivered wordlessly, and then his voice was heard, coarse and hard at first, but growing milder:

“Whereupon I heard a strong voice in the sky,” the monk uttered the verses from the Apocalypse, with his eyes half closed, as if intoning a dirge. “It was like a medley of countless tongues that all intoned ‘Hallelujah! God Almighty is the One who has the salvation, the power, and the glory. They are all His.’

I beheld the skies opening up and Lo! Out stepped a white horse. The rider’s name is Faith and Truth. He judges everybody justly and he fights the right battle.


His eyes are burning like fire. His forehead is adorned with imperial diadems. His name is written down, but no one can read it. He is the only one who knows it.

He is bedecked in bloody garb. Heavenly hosts are following him. A mighty sword is coming out of his mouth ready to strike the

nations.” “Your Highness and my Lord,” Brother Nicodemus pursued in a

changed voice. “That warrior on a white horse stands for the new law that Christ has given us. Time is come when this warrior commands the worldly kings to wipe out the beast that has become the bane of so many nations. Mahomet is the beast: it has seven heads which stand for the seven deadly sins and ten horns to break the Ten Commandments. It is written that the warrior on the white horse shall meet the beast and strike it down, shedding its foul blood upon the ground….”

His Highness sighed. His face brightened a little and he bade his cup bearer pour him some wine. Prince Alexander nudged his companion. The two youngsters availed themselves of the opportunity to step outside into the light.

Translated by MIRCEA M. TOMUŞ

Kirkwood Community College

A Romanian Jew in Hollywood 43

A Romanian Jew in Hollywood: Edward G. Robinson

RALUCA MOLDOVAN

Babeș-Bolyai University

Abstract The present study aims to investigate the contribution that actor Edward G. Robinson brought to the American film industry, beginning with his iconic role as gangster Little Caesar in Mervyn Le Roy’s 1931 production, and continuing with widely-acclaimed parts in classic film noirs such as Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street. Edward G. Robinson was actually a Romanian Jew, born Emmanuel Goldenberg in Bucharest, in 1893, a relatively little known fact nowadays. By examining his biography, filmography and his best-known, most successful films (mentioned above), I show that Edward G. Robinson was one of classical Hollywood’s most influential actors; for instance, traits of his portrayal of Little Caesar (one of the very first American gangster films) can be found in almost all subsequent cinematic gangster figures, from Scarface to Vito Corleone. In the same vein, the doomed noir characters he played in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street are still considered by film critics today to be some of the finest, most nuanced examples of noir heroes. Therefore, the main body of my article will be dedicated to a more detailed analysis of these films, while the introductory section will trace his biography and discuss some of his better-known films, such as Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Key Largo. The present study highlights Edward G. Robinson’s merits and impact on the cinema industry, proving that this diminutive Romanian Jew of humble origins was indeed something of a giant during Hollywood’s classical era. Keywords: Edward G. Robinson, Hollywood, film industry, film noir


Biographical facts and filmography overview

Edward G. Robinson. The cocky, ebullient tough guy. He was Little Caesar, the quintessential gangster success and failure story. Robinson had defined for the huge Great Depression moviegoing audience the idea of the snarling, immigrant anti-hero – a vicious and repentant underdog going down in a hail of bullets. (ix)

This is how Alan Gansberg, Robinson’s biographer, describes the actor in the introduction to his book, Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson. I believe that this is the image that most cinema-goers recall when thinking about an actor that rightfully earned his placed among the silver screen’s most recognizable faces. But what was beyond the tough guy exterior, behind the mask of the seemingly all-powerful gangster? Few people know that Robinson was a liberal democrat and a political activist, as well as an avid art collector – and even fewer are aware of his true origins.

His family, whose history went back about two hundred years, was a typical Romanian Jewish family living in Bucharest near the turn of the 20th century; they belonged to the small bourgeoisie and were somewhat assimilated into Romanian culture, although they still retained some of their Jewish traditions, including the Yiddish language. Edward G. Robinson’s parents, Morris and Sarah Goldenberg, had already had four sons when another boy, baptized Emmanuel, was born on December 12, 1893; he would eventually be the second youngest son (Gansberg 1; Brook 95; Spicer 262; Mayer & McDonnell 357). According to the biographer, the Goldenbergs, who were “urbanized but far from emancipated”, lived in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood “where Jews were assigned to live,”1 in a “traditional Jewish home” (Gansberg 2). The family placed great value on the children’s upbringing, arranging for them to receive a religious education, as well as language lessons in Hebrew, Yiddish, Romanian and German (Gansberg 3). The family were also frequent spectators of the theatre performances staged by the Bucharest Jewish Theatre, a place where many talented actors started their career.

45 A Romanian Jew in Hollywood

It should be said, at this point, that Romanian Jews at the end of the 19th century were still subject to discrimination and persecution – probably the most significant of all being the refusal of successive Romanian governments to grant them citizenship rights. In fact, the issue of naturalizing Romanian Jews had polarized Romanian public opinion and politicians since the end of the war of independence (1878), when the great European powers (particularly France and Britain) wanted to condition the recognition of the independent Romanian state on granting full citizenship rights to its Jewish population. Additionally, spontaneous bursts of violence were not uncommon – for instance, during one of these episodes, one of Emmanuel’s brothers was hit on the head by a thrown brick; he would never completely recover from this injury and would eventually die in America (Gansberg 3). This incident may have precipitated Morris Goldenberg’s decision to leave Romania and emigrate to America, where he hoped that his family would find a better life.2 The Goldenbergs did not travel all together: first, the father and the oldest three sons left, followed by Sarah and the three younger children, who made their way to Vienna via a kind of “underground railroad” aiding Jews to reach the western European embarkation port of Le Havre. Thus, Emmanuel Goldenberg finally arrived in New York in 1903, at the age of 10. As he confessed in his autobiography, “My mother may have given birth in Romania, but I was born the day I set foot on American soil” (Robinson 4). The Goldenbergs settled in the overcrowded, predominantly Jewish Lower East Side, where the younger boys – including Emmanuel – started school. The young boy knew no English at the time, but he found it quite easy to learn the new language, as he had an obvious talent for it (Gansberg 4). Interestingly enough, Emmanuel (or Manny, as his family called him), went to the same high school later attended by George Gershwin and Manny’s own cousin – another iconic gangster figure, who first portrayed Scarface on film – Paul Muni. Initially, Emmanuel wanted to become a rabbi and started training in this sense, but soon enough, discovering the calling of the stage by acting in high school plays, abandoned the religious path and focused on becoming an actor, hoping to be starring on Broadway one day (Gansberg 10). His dream would come true in 1915, when – after starring in several plays in the New York


Yiddish Theatre District – Emmanuel (who had by now changed his name to Edward G. Robinson, in an attempt to make it sound more American and minimize his immigrant heritage – a trait characteristic for many new immigrants who were trying to “blend” into American society) made his Broadway debut in 1915 (Mayer & McDonnell 357).3 His very successful gangster role in the crime drama The Racket brought him to the attention of Hollywood producers, who saw his potential and hoped that his stage persona would translate well to the silver screen. The industry was in the midst of making the transition from the silent films to the talkies and Robinson apparently had all the qualities to successfully negotiate this change, unlike other actors, whose careers were killed by the advent of sound.

Capitalizing on the success of The Racket, in 1931 Robinson was cast in the role of the ruthless Caesar Enrico Bandello in Warner Brothers’ Little Caesar, one of the very first and most iconic portrayals of the gangster in American cinema (Spicer 262; Hark 12; Mayer & McDonnell 357). It can be argued that this part helped create many stereotypes associated with the gangster hero (not the least of which the typical American rags-to-riches – and, in this case, back to rags – story), stereotypes exploited by the studios that kept casting Robinson in similar roles throughout the 1930s, relying on the public’s familiarity with his mobster persona: Smart Money, 1931; Tiger Shark, 1932; Kid Galahad, 1937; A Slight Case of Murder, 1938 (Brook 96; Gates 65; Neale 72). Actually, in the last film, Robinson parodied the character he helped create, by bringing to life a “reformed” gangster in the post-Prohibition period who started a legitimate business (Hark 214). Probably the best-known spin-off role based on the character played by Robinson in Little

Caesar is John Houston’s 1948 Key Largo, where he was cast opposite Humphrey Bogart (Spicer 106). In this film, Robinson played an aging Little Caesar figure, the gangster Rocco (seemingly based on the real-life mobster Lucky Luciano), who wanted to return to America from deportation to start his old ways again (Munby 132); his nemesis was war veteran McCloud (Bogart), who thwarted his efforts. However, the message of the film was that the gangster’s own hubris brought about his downfall (Dickos 118; Studlar 375).


During the late 1930s, Robinson – partly because of his Jewish origins – became an outspoken critic of fascism and Nazism, donating more than a quarter of a million dollars to various anti-Nazi political groups between 1939 and 1949 and hosting the 1938 meeting of the Committee of 56 (made up of various figures from the film industry) who signed a “Declaration of Democratic Independence” calling for a boycott of all German-made products. He even starred in Warner Brothers’ 1939 Confessions of a Nazi Spy, the first American film that presented the threat posed by Nazism to the United States. The release of this film that outspokenly denounces Nazi ideology is all the more remarkable considering that the Production Code4 made it almost impossible to release films criticizing foreign powers (Maland 240). Here, Robinson played an FBI agent who investigates a spy network in the US that was stealing military secrets and selling them to Germany; the film employs a semi-documentary style that blends together voice-over narration and authentic footage of Nazi rallies in Germany (Maland 240; Milberg 13-14). Robinson also played a Jewish scientist in the 1940 production of Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet – the first role in which he was required to portray an explicitly Jewish character (Brook 96). The second Jewish character he played was Paul Julius Reuter in A Dispatch from Reuters (1941).

Starting with the mid-1940s, Robinson began to move away from playing the kinds of roles that had made him famous and approached some very different characters in a series of films that would later come to be known as film noirs.5 His supporting role as claims insurance agent Barton Keyes in Billy Wilder’s 1944 Double Indemnity revived his career and proved that he was capable of creating diverse and challenging roles; in contrast to his earlier, tough-guy parts, the characters Robinson played in film noirs were sensitive, vulnerable, and thoughtful. In his autobiography, Robinson confessed that he did not readily accept the part Wilder offered him in Double Indemnity, primarily because it was a supporting role; however, after thinking about this offer for a while, he understood that “at my age it was time to begin thinking of character roles, to slide into middle and old age… I was never the handsome leading man; I could proceed with my career growing older in roles that would grow older, too” (Robinson 236; Mayer & McDonnell 358). In a very


fortunate way, this role paved the way for some of his best-known parts: Professor Richard Wanley in The Woman in the Window and Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street, both of whom are middle-aged men faced with their own mortality (Irwin 253). The list of Robinson’s film noirs

includes, besides these three undisputed classics, Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948),6 House of Strangers (1949), The Stranger (1946), Vice

Squad (1953), Illegal (1955), Nightmare (1956) and the sci-fi neo-noir Soylent Green, his very last film made in 1973.

In the early 1950s, just as his career was taking off again, Robinson came under scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee; he was called to testify before this body three times in 1950 and 1952, after the notoriously racist congressman John Rankin accused him, alongside other Jewish actors, of being a communist sympathizer (Brook 95-96). Robinson was threatened with blacklisting (Spicer 19). He refused to give the names of other communist supporters and took steps to clear his name by allowing an accountant to verify his checkbooks and prove that no funds had been sent to subversive organizations. His reputation was eventually rehabilitated, but his career suffered in the aftermath of this infamous affair, as he started being offered minor and less frequent roles (Spicer 262).

His career was revived in 1954, when legendary director Cecil B. DeMille cast him as the villainous Dathan in his grandiose biblical epic The Ten Commandments. In the late 1950s, Robinson started accepting roles in television films and virtually stopped appearing on the big screen. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him an honorary Oscar in recognition of his merits in 1973; unfortunately, this remarkable honor came too late for Robinson to enjoy: he had died of cancer a few weeks before the ceremony, so the golden statue was conferred posthumously.

Despite unfounded accusations of communism, Robinson remained a liberal democrat all his life, even attending the Democrat Party Convention in Los Angeles in 1962. In contrast to his many tough-guy roles, the real Robinson was a sensitive, soft-spoken and cultured man, who spoke seven languages (including Romanian) and possessed a vast and valuable art collection – a passion he had inherited from his father.


In his half a century-long career, Edward G. Robinson completed 101 films belonging to a wide variety of genres; his very diverse roles bear witness to his tremendous artistic potential and to his remarkable acting skills, as well as to the dedication with which this Romanian Jew served the American public and the noble art of cinema.

The classic ethnic gangster: Little Caesar

Little Caesar is both the film that made Edward G. Robinson a star and launched the first cycle of gangster talkies in the early 1930s; alongside Mervyn Le Roy’s production, one can include here William Wellman’s 1931 The Public Enemy (starring James Cagney), Howard Hawks’s 1932 Scarface (starring Robinson’s cousin, Paul Muni, born Frederich Meyer Weisenfreund) and Robert Mamoulian’s 1931 City Streets (Irwin 211; Leich 23; Munby 39). What all these films share is a typical American story: the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches tale of a markedly individualistic gangster who rises high in social hierarchy only to fall to his inevitable doom in the end. These gangsters, inspired from real-life figures who had made a name for themselves during Prohibition (such as Al Capone or Lucky Luciano) and who held a certain fascination for a relatively large portion of the American public (probably because these people – like the mobsters – had worked hard and seen all their wealth ripped away by the Great Depression) were all charismatic, appealing figures (Hark 13; Rubin 72; Rabinowitz 263). That is why scriptwriters were particularly careful to see that these heroes were punished in the end, so as to eliminate any trace of moral ambiguity and to avoid drawing the sympathy of the public on the side of crime, as the Production Code required.7

Another trait that distinguished these gangsters is their ethnicity: Rico Bandello (Little Caesar), Tommy Powers (Public Enemy) and Tony Camonte (Scarface) are all “hyphenated Americans” torn apart, to some extent, by the dilemma of living in two worlds and not completely belonging to either (Munby 20).8 As Jonathan Munby points out, “essential to the drama of these gangster films is precisely the accentuation of hyphenated identity as a competing authentic American condition” (26). None of the three actors came from schools of “high


acting” – instead, they were the product of the ethnic and popular theatrical tradition of New York’s Lower East Side; this, I believe, granted them a biographical proximity to the characters they were playing: these actors, like the gangsters they were playing, wanted to belong, to fit in the American society, to “make it” in this promised land.9

Despite the popularity of this genre, critical voices expressed their objections in terms of a moral paradigm (the appealing gangster figure “corrupting” the moral fiber of the American society). However, this moral indignation may have disguised a more complex apprehension towards the ethnic and cultural “other” (Munby 44). Objections to these films were not limited to questions of morality, but also to the representation of the American society that was less than flattering (Munby 107). In Little Caesar’s case, for instance, his quest for legitimacy was more than a mere question of building a front to disguise the illegal nature of his dealings; it is also a quest to gain access to the upper social strata (a recurring motif in the film, as Rico confesses several times that he wants to “be somebody”). It is evident for anyone that Rico was “the other”: his name, his accent and behavior betrayed his distinctly ethnic origins.

In fact, the film begins with Rico expressing his desire to escape his dead-end small town and move to the big city – a sort of a symbolic passage from innocence to corruption that foreshadows his fall from grace. In a sense, the film can also be read a critique of capitalism: the rise of the machine, of industry and technology are a deviation from a simpler way of life that corrupts the soul and produces criminals and rebels (Munby 45-46). Rico rises from nothing to the top, only to die in the gutter at the end, perhaps as a punishment for his attempt to transcend his limitations. What sets Little Caesar apart from all the previous Hollywood gangster and crime films is the fact that, for the first time, the public sees the world through the eyes of the gangster; previous crime stories had always been seen through the eyes of society, the criminal was a mere bad guy who had killed somebody and was then punished for his deed (McGilligan 58). As Rico rises through the ranks of the big city criminal gang, his material circumstances notably improve; he pays a great deal of attention to these outer signs of success to the point of ostentation by


wearing elegant suits, smoking fine cigars, displaying flashy diamond rings and collecting fine paintings (Munby 48).10 The irony is, of course, that although Rico and his distinctively ethnic partners in crime proudly display these signs of success, they have no means of appreciating their real value: for instance, when invited to Big Boy’s opulent house (where he clearly feels like a fish out of water), Rico’s only criterion for assessing the value of the painting is the presumably huge cost of its massive golden frame.

Another significant moment in this respect is captured in the banquet scene, a celebration organized by Rico’s band to celebrate his rise to fame. This actually resembles a parody of a high-society event. Although the participants are appropriately dressed, they have no notion of the sense of protocol that should be observed in such circumstances: no one can give a coherent speech and the event degenerates into a food fight, while the gift Rico receives turns out to be stolen (Munby 48). Despite his best efforts to integrate into mainstream society, Rico is condemned to playing the role of entrepreneur from the wrong side of the law; despite the promise extended to all immigrants that they could become legitimate Americans, Rico is only allowed to mimic legitimacy (Munby 50). Even though both his acolytes and the men of the law admit that Rico “is getting up in the world,” his ultimate demise proves that integration into the American society requires more than wealth.11 No one is more surprised than Rico at the end, when he is gunned down by the police under a poster advertising the next show of his former associate Joe (who left the criminal underworld in order to pursue a legitimate career as a dancer, for which – the films shows us – he was rightfully rewarded). In true tragic hero fashion, he asks the audience in astonishment: “Mother of Mercy! Is this the end of Rico?” (Dickos 115). Of course, Rico could have escaped with his life and live out the same existence he presumably had before becoming famous; but, since the Production Code would have made it impossible to release a film in which the bad guy manages to evade the law, Rico has to pay for his crimes, after he is lured out of hiding by a typically WASP policemen playing on his ego.

Robinson would reprise his role as ethnic gangster in John Houston’s 1948 film, Key Largo, where his character, Rocco, borrows


quite liberally from the traits with which he had endowed Little Caesar. Whereas both gangsters are undoubtedly strong masculine figures, his roles as Professor Richard Wanley in The Woman in the Window and as Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street depart significantly from Robinson’s established screen persona. In contrast to the impulsive and arrogant gangsters, these later parts show Robinson as a meek, even effeminate man who falls victim to the manipulation of ruthless and selfish femme fatales.

The noir hero in Double Indemnity, The Woman in the

Window and Scarlet Street

Double Indemnity (1944) is almost universally acknowledged as the first major film noir, marking the beginning of a series of films characterized by expressionist mise-en-scene, low key lighting, and down-and-out characters, in stark contrast to the usually upbeat and proactive Hollywood hero (Rubin 91). The film tells the story of an insurance agent (Walter Neff, played by Fred MacMurray) who conspires with a treacherous wife (Barbara Stanwyck, in a role that set the tone for future femme fatales) to murder her husband and get hold of the life insurance money. Edward G. Robinson plays the third lead, Neff’s boss and close friend (Barton Keyes), who values following the rules above anything.12 The entire narrative structure of the film takes place in flashback, as a dying Neff dictates the story of his downfall into a recording machine in the form of a confession to his friend and mentor, Keyes. The two men have a very warm, almost parental relationship, although one seems to be the complete opposite of the other: Neff is tall and handsome, Keyes is short and stocky; Neff smokes cigarettes, Keyes smoked cigars (which Neff always lights for him, as Keyes never carries matches (at the end of the film, Keyes returns the favor and lights a cigarette for his dying friend) (Spicer 78; Duncan 33)). Neff is ultimately a criminal, while Keyes is a man of the law (Naremore 90). Nevertheless, they have a deep mutual respect for each other and Keyes actually represents a sort of father figure to the younger and more impetuous Neff. Still, Neff considers Keyes too inflexible (Keyes even had his fiancée checked before their wedding and


abandoned her when he discovered something shady in her past (Duncan 33).13

The film suggests that, in this case, the male-female relationship is poisonous and lethal (Neff and Phyllis end up killing each other), while the male-male relationship is one of genuine affection and mutual trust and admiration. Neff pays the ultimate price for eventually cheating the insurance company (and implicitly betraying Keyes, as the latter is clearly a “company man”). Ironically, Neff’s deceit is discovered precisely because he returns to his office to record his confession to Keyes (Abbott 149; Naremore 90). Some critics have suggested that the Neff-Keyes relationship is another play on the male-female relationship, in the sense that the masculine Neff would be the male counterpart to the diminutive Keyes’ “feminized” position (Maxfield 32).

The film is based on a novel by James M. Cain, a well-known American author of hard-boiled fiction. There is one major difference between the book and the screenplay written by another famous American writer, Raymond Chandler: director William Wilder felt that Keyes’ character (which is a relatively minor one in the book) deserved a bigger role – probably one worthy of Edward G. Robinson’s talent (Irwin 249-250; Spicer 78). And Robinson made it into the best supporting role of his career.

The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, both directed by the Jewish German émigré director Fritz Lang in 1944 and 1945, are part of the canon of classic film noir and are considered to this day some of the finest examples of their kind (Mayer & McDonnell 446). As Andrew Dickos points out in his history of American film noir, the two films can be seen in retrospect as films of temptation sublimated (Woman in the

Window) and temptation fulfilled (Scarlet Street) (26). The plot of both films is triggered by a wrongly taken first step and illustrate the terrible price to be paid at the hands of fate by those submitting to unbridled desire. Both of them feature an unassuming, mild, middle-aged protagonist (played by Edward G. Robinson) trapped in a hopeless love story with a manipulative seductress (Joan Bennett) and driven to murder and despair (Spicer 169; Mayer & McDonnell 447).

In The Woman in the Window, Robinson plays a university


professor of psychology, Richard Wanley, an “Old World gentleman, the professor who loves art and literature, after-dinner drinks and cigars” (Brook 97), but who is going through a midlife crisis despite the appearance of being in a happy and quiet marriage. Deep down, Wanley still longs for adventure, but is reluctant to give free rein to his impulses (Rubin 50). His contemplative approach to life (illustrated by his habit of gazing in the window of an art gallery at the portrait of beautiful woman) changes completely when the woman in the portrait, Alice, appears right next to him. From this point forward, Wanley starts sinking deeper and deeper into a web of guilty lies after he kills the mysterious woman’s lover in self-defense, following a brief struggle in her apartment. He offers to help dispose of the body, but he commits a number of errors in the process and he is nearly discovered when a policeman stops him for having a broken headlight while the corpse is in the car; he leaves his pen in Alice’s apartment; he hurts himself on a barbed wire fence while leaving the woods where he hid the body (Dickos 26). As it happens, the one commissioned to investigate the murder of the mysterious stranger (who was a controversial, but very rich businessman) is none other than Wanley’s friend, police chief Lalor. He actually invites Wanley to go visit the crime scene with him, a visit during which the professor stops very short of actually confessing to having committed the murder, but makes a number of “Freudian” slips that may indicate a repressed desire to be punished. Nonetheless, the policeman ignores these mistakes as he is convinced that Wanley is too respectable to be a murderer (Mayer & McDonnell 448).

Meanwhile, the dead man’s bodyguard turns up and starts blackmailing Alice, threatening to tell the police everything he knows unless she pays him off. Alice goes to Wanley for money; he is clever enough to understand that this sort of blackmail will never end and, instead, advises Alice to kill him by poisoning his drink with a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Alice fails to carry out the deed, and Wanley understands that there no way out for him now; he takes an overdose of barbiturates, just as Alice hears gunshots outside her apartment. Rushing out, Alice sees the blackmailer, who was the number one murder suspect, lying dead in the street. She runs back home to phone Wanley, but the phone rings on


without any answer;14 a slow track-in track-out shot reveals Wanley, who had fallen asleep in an armchair at the club where he and his friends usually had dinner, awaking with a start to realize that everything had been a dream (Park 170). This unexpected twist is surprising and unforeseen, but I believe it is a nod to the demands of the Production Code (which required that no bad deed should go unpunished). At the same time, it serves a more complex purpose, making the film appear as a conservative morality play and accommodating the vicarious pleasure of the audience at seeing a middle-aged man acting on his repressed desires and being punished for it, while at the same time rejoicing in a more or less typical Hollywood happy ending (Mayer & McDonnell 448). The last scene shows Wanley walking out of the club and stopping to admire the beautiful woman in the painting and a stylish young woman approaches him asking for a cigarette. Wanley runs away as fast as he can before he can be tempted once more to indulge his fantasies. The film uses its main character as a vehicle to explore the thin line between respectability and morality, between doing the right thing and giving in to one’s desires, underscoring how easy it is for any man to be caught up in passion, lies and deceit (Mayer & McDonnell 449). This theme will be further explored in Lang’s next film, Scarlet Street, whose main protagonist no longer survives through the fortunate dream device employed in The Woman in the Window - this time, the full extent of the tragedy resulting from acting on one’s repressed desires in revealed in all its grim glory.

Scarlet Street was Lang’s favorite among all his American films. It is actually a remake of a 1931 French film directed by Jean Renoir, entitled La Chienne, based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardiere.15 This film continues the idea explored by Lang in The Woman in the

Window – namely, an upright citizen trapped in a circle of lies and betrayal – with the same cast of characters (Edward G. Robinson, Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea) who deliver some of the finest performances of their careers (Phillips 76-77; Park 163; Mayer & McDonnell 366; Brook 96).

This film represented a serious challenge to the conventions established by the Production Code, in the sense that it lets a murderer go unpunished for his crime and instead lets another take the fall. The


protagonist, Christopher Cross, is the classic fallen hero,16 a rather pathetic character and a genuine victim of fate who develops an all-consuming passion for a woman of questionable morals and is ultimately driven to murder and insanity by her. Cross bears some resemblance to the character played by Robinson in his earlier film, The Woman in the Window; both are men of “effeminate manners, artistic leanings and elaborate deductions” (Brook 11). Moreover, Cross is a Sunday painter who describes his relationship to his art as a “love affair,” while Wanley fell for a woman portrayed in a painting.

Scarlet Street opens with a company party celebrating Cross’ 25 years of loyal service. This scene bears some similarities with the banquet scene in Little Caesar (Robinson seated at the center of a long dinner table, smoking a cigar in the manner of his famous Rico character), so a viewer familiar with his gangster screen persona might get the impression that Robinson is the head of a criminal organization (Grant 2007: 73). In fact, nothing could be further from the truth: he is nothing but a meek, repressed, law-abiding cashier. This scene is the only one in the film in which Cross seems valued by his peers and is safe from a ruthless world in which his timidity and naiveté render him vulnerable (Chopra-Gant 170). He reveals the emptiness and frustration of his life when he sees his boss leaving the party with an attractive young woman, clearly not his wife, and wonders what “it is like to be loved by a young girl like that.” Soon enough, wandering the streets of Greenwich Village at night (the street – usually at nighttime – is a recurring motif in film noir, a menacing, dangerous labyrinth, an eerie environment where evil lurks in the shadows) (Ryall 166-167), Chris happens upon a young woman being brutalized by someone she claims is a thief, but who is, in fact, her brutal and insensitive boyfriend, Johnny. He chases him away with his umbrella, perhaps imagining himself to be a kind of medieval knight using his spear to rescue a damsel in distress, and runs off to find a policeman (Grant 2007: 73). The composition of this scene reveals to the viewer much about Christopher Cross’ personality: the frame is dominated by the massive stature of the policeman, while Cross appears diminutive, submissive, emasculated and humble (a role that – as we find out later in the film – he also assumes in the presence of his shrill and domineering wife, Adele).


The girl, Kitty March, pretends to be an actress, while Cross leads her to believe that he is a successful and wealthy painter (so they both lie to each other from the very start). Chris, trapped in a loveless, unhappy marriage, becomes infatuated with Kitty almost immediately – a fact speculated by Johnny, who forces Kitty to demand more and more money from him, until Cross is forced to steal money from his company (Phillips 79). He sets Kitty up in an apartment where he comes to paint and to escape his bleak domestic life, while she continuously makes demands for more and more money. Johnny tries to sell one of Cross’ paintings and, when the art dealer is fascinated by the qualities of the work, he pretends that Kitty is the mysterious painter. She then becomes a celebrated artist whose paintings are exhibited in a prestigious New York art gallery. Upon discovering this deception, Chris – instead of being angry – sees Kitty’s appropriation of his work as a symbol of the bond between them. What he fails to realize, however, is that by allowing her to take credit for his work, he actually foregoes his own identity, letting Kitty control him to the point where he no longer has a will of his own (Phillips 80).17

Robinson’s character is similarly dominated by his wife, Adele; at home, we see him wearing an apron and performing domestic chores. Adele is such an obnoxious character that the viewer half-expects Cross suddenly to lose his calm and kill her. In fact, there is one scene in the film where Cross appears to borrow from Robinson’s earlier portrayal of Little Caesar, as the director teasingly raises the public’s expectations when Cross advances towards his wife with a long kitchen knife in his hand. These expectations are not fulfilled here, however, as the scene ends without any violence (Grant 2003: 122; Phillips 80).

When Adele’s presumably dead first husband shows up,18 Cross realizes that he is now free to marry Kitty and runs to tell her the good news, only to realize the full extent of her deception: she lied to him all along, as Johnny was the only man she ever loved. In a fit of rage, he stabs her in her ice-cold heart with the most appropriate weapon, an ice pick. He then frames Johnny for the murder so that the latter is condemned and executed for a crime he did not commit.19 However, Chris is fired from his job when his boss discovers his embezzlement and is left homeless, and destitute. He is forever haunted by his guilt and by Kitty’s


voice, as well as by the realization that he allowed her and Johnny to be reunited in death and tries to hang himself, only to be found and rescued by neighbors at the last minute (Phillips 81). The end scene shows Cross, now a pathetic bum sleeping on park benches, witnessing his final humiliation: his portrait of Kitty sold by Adele (Spicer 269). He walks on, a broken and tormented man, while the city slowly fades and melts away around him (Gustafsson 57; Phillips 82-83).20

The fact that Cross walks free at the end of the film is not quite as subversive to the Code as it appears; even though Johnny was executed for a crime he did not commit, he was hardly innocent, while Cross will be forever tormented by his own “inner court” and condemned more severely than any tribunal could have done (Mayer & McDonnell 367; Grant 2007: 75). Thus, Fritz Lang skillfully used the downbeat medium of film noir to explore once more one of his favorite themes, the nature of guilt, and his view of an implacable fate that no one can escape (Grant 2007: 75).

From the ruthless gangster of Little Caesar and Key Largo to the mild-mannered heroes of The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, from the Jewish scientist of Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet to the principled insurance manager of Double Indemnity, Edward G. Robinson infused each and every one of his roles with memorable traits that speak of his unmatched talent, profound understanding of his characters and respect for the public that admired him for over five decades. Notes: 1 I believe that the biographer’s information may be erroneous in this point, as the Jews were not “assigned” (i.e., forced) to live in certain parts of town; rather, they chose their residence based on their business interests – as many were merchants or shop keepers – or on where their relatives lived. The biographer mentions that this was “not a ghetto in the classical sense” (Gansberg 2). 2 In fact, this attitude was quite common among Romanian Jews at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Statistics show that about 70,000 Romanian Jews emigrated to America between 1900 and 1906 (Gansberg 3). 3 Edward G. Robinson’s autobiography actually begins with how he changed his name while at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts: “it was suggested to me, ever so tactfully, that Emmanuel Goldenberg was not a name for an actor. Too


long, too foreign and, I suspect, though no hint was made of it, too Jewish” (Robinson 15). 4 The Production Code was a form of self-censorship in the film industry that required all released films to have the seal of approval. The Hays Office, responsible for implementing the Code, approved the film for release in theatres; of course, this was a voluntary, rather than a compulsory measure, but films released without the approval of this institution were rarely picked up by movie theatres for exhibition and were thus guaranteed box office failures. Film content was checked for any overt sexual references, outright violence, offensive language, etc. 5 The term “film noir” was coined by French film critic Nino Frank in 1946 and it was used to refer to a number of American films made between 1944 and 1945 (including here Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window, both of which starred Edward G. Robinson) characterized by a visual style inspired by German expressionism and featuring down-and-out, unheroic characters. For more details, see Raluca Moldovan, “From Caligari to The Big Heat and Beyond: European Influences on Classical American Film Noir”, in Transylvanian Review, vol. XXII, Supplement no. 3/2013: 58-70; Brook 99. 6 Although Robinson considered this film as an “unadulterated hokum that I did for the money” (Robinson 254), critics applauded his performance as Triton, a reclusive aging man who has the capacity to foresee events, but is powerless to stop them from happening and is therefore met with disbelief. It is possible that Robinson made use of his own similar experience from his efforts to combat blacklisting and accusations of communist affiliation (Irwin 261-262). 7 The existence and the regulations of the Production Code are probably the main reason why this classical cycle of gangster films was so short-lived. 8 The actors playing these characters would have known this dilemma very well: Powers was an Irish-American gangster played by an Irish-American actor (Cagney); while Bandello and Camonte were Italian-American gangsters played by Jewish-American actors from the Lower East Side (Robinson and Muni) (Munby 39). 9 One clear indicator of this fact is the Anglicization of their names. 10 Interestingly enough, Rico, just like the characters played by Robinson in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, is very fond of paintings; unlike his later roles, however, Rico values only art that he knows is expensive, probably so he can impress his peers. It is well-known that the actor himself was an avid and refined art collector. 11 In fact, it could be argued that “Rico” achieves integration and acceptance in one of his later films, Bullets or Ballots, where he plays a man of the law who goes underground to infiltrate the mob (a plausible fact if we consider how the film plays on the audience’s familiarity with his former criminal roles). 12 Keyes claims to have a “little man” inside him who warns him whenever something is wrong (usually when someone tries to commit insurance fraud). 13 Some critics have argued that the warm and, sometimes adversarial, relationship between Keyes and Neff mirrors the film’s volatile but creatively


successful partnership between director Billy Wilder and scriptwriter Raymond Chandler (Brook 142). 14 Although Joan Bennett plays the femme fatale in both The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, there is a notable difference between the two characters: while Alice appears to be genuinely concerned about Wanley’s welfare, Kitty March is nothing but a duplicitous seductress who has no qualms about using her charms to manipulate Christopher Cross into funding her lifestyle and then humiliating him at every turn. 15 Initially, Lang wanted to use the English translation of the French original (The Bitch) as the title for his film, but the Production Code did not allow him to do so, so he finally settled on Scarlet Street, having in mind the biblical passage in the Apocalypse where the whore of Babylon is described as a scarlet woman (Phillips 77). 16 Even his name carries a special symbolism: on the one hand, both Christopher and Cross are clear allusions to Christ the Savior and to his martyrdom (Brook 99); on the other, the name alludes to how he was double crossed by Kitty and Johnny and how he double crossed them in turn – an effective act of crisscrossing (Grant 2007: 74; Phillips 81). 17 It is evident in the film that all of Cross’ paintings lack perspective, which may be an indicator that he does not see the depth of his own inner nature (Grant 2007: 74). 18 Adele’s first husband was presumed dead before she and Cross got married, but – as the plot shows – he had staged his own death to escape some mobsters, without anyone (including Adele) knowing about it. 19 It is Cross’ evidence at the trial that proves decisive in Johnny’s death sentence, as he declares that he did not paint any of his works of art, but merely copied them from paintings done by Kitty (an idea also supported by Adele’s testimony). 20 Lang uses this expressionistic visual metaphor to emphasize the fact that Cross has completely withdrawn from human contact and has condemned himself to life of isolation, perhaps in repentance for his guilt (Phillips 83). Works Cited Abbott, Megan E. The Street Was Mine. White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction

and Film Noir. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Print. Brook, Vincent. Driven to Darkness. Jewish Émigré Directors and the Rise of

Film Noir. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Print. Chopra-Gant, Mike. Hollywood Genres and Postwar America. Masculinity,

Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir. London: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 2006. Print.

Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name. A History of Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Print.

Duncan, Paul. Film Noir. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Print.


Gansberg, Alan L. Little Caesar: A Biography of Edward G. Robinson. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Print.

Gates, Philippa. Detecting Men. Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Print.

Grant, Barry Keith, ed. Film Genre Reader III. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Print.

- - -. Film Genre from Iconography to Ideology. London: Wallflower, 2007. Print. 1941–1991. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Print. Gustafsson, Henrik. “A Wet Emptiness: The Phenomenology of Film Noir.” A

Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer, Helen Hanson. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 50-66. Print.

Hark, Ina Rae, ed. American Cinema of the 1930s. Themes and Variations. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. Print.

Irwin, John T. Unless the Threat of Death Is behind Them. Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Print.

Leich, Thomas. Crime Films. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Print.

Maland, Charles. “Movies and the American Culture in the Annus Mirabilis”. American Cinema of the 1930s. Themes and Variations. Ed. Ina Rae Hark. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007. 227-52. Print.

Maxfield, James. The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Print.

Mayer, Geoff, and Brian McDonnell. Encyclopedia of Film Noir. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2007. Print.

McGilligan, Pat. Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Print.

Milberg, Doris. World War II on the Big Screen. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010. Print.

Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes. Screening the Gangster Film from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Print.

Naremore, James. More than Night. Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Print.

Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.

Park, William. What Is Film Noir? Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Print.

Phillips, Gene D. Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2012. Print.

Rabinowitz, Paula. “Gang Wars: Warner Brothers’ The Roaring Twenties Stars, News, and the New Deal.” A Companion to the Historical Film. Eds. Robert Rosenstone and Constantin Parvulescu. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 257-82. Print.

Robinson, Edward G., with Leonard Spiegelgass. All My Yesterdays: An Autobiography. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973. Print.


Rubin, Martin. Thrillers. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Print. Ryall, Tom. “Film Noir, American Painting and Photography: Questions of

Influence.” A Companion to Film Noir. Eds. Andrew Spicer, Helen Hanson. Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 158-74. Print.

Spicer, Andrew. Historical Dictionary of Film Noir. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Print.

Studlar, Gaylyn. “A Gunsel Is Being Beaten: Gangster Masculinity and the Homoerotics of the Crime Film, 1941–1942.” Mob Culture: Hidden Histories of the American Gangster Film. Eds. Lee Grieveson, Esther Sonnet, and Peter Stanfield. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 120-45. Print.

Poet in America 63

Poet in America

IOAN ȘERBAN

It was the fall of 1996, I was walking on Second Avenue in East Village when, from around the corner, Allen Ginsberg appeared, accompanied by a friend. He looked somewhat frail, but mostly he looked sad, resigned. I asked him how he was. I looked at him and he looked at me, but he took his time to answer, which was a bit unusual. We were old friends by then. I heard that he was happily moved into a nice loft, a comfort he always craved which eluded him for most of his life. I congratulated him for finally living like the king of East Village that he was. He told me he had cancer. I tried to be encouraging, I hugged him and I also told him about some miraculous plants used by skilled Romanian peasants, who cured cancer. I didn’t catch Allen at his most optimistic time, I guess. His voice was fainter than usual, he looked at me with the eyes of a condemned man, and told me that he already tried several natural treatments, and nothing worked in his favor… We said good bye… a few months later I heard that he was on stage again, his last, extraordinary appearance, in February of 1997, for the New York Poetry Slam. I always liked Allen’s explosive recitations, beating on drums, singing his verses, howling his poems, like a shaman disguised as revolutionary leader, a powerful presence, yet so carefully handling each sound, as to make sure that we all understood the reason behind each word, the message that was supposed to awaken in us an urge to change the ever stifling world around us. When he returned from China, many new poems written while meeting with thousands of his Chinese fans, he gave a recital in New York, and afterwards asked me what I thought about the poems, but also told me that although he found out that he had one million readers in China, the one hundred thousand American readers he had at home felt so much closer to his heart, because they knew his pain. I only truly liked one poem of all


that he wrote while in China, and I told him so. To this day I never understood why he actually agreed with me, or why he even asked my opinion about his writings, although when we first met and I gave him some of my poems he promised that, if I ever published them in a book, he would write a preface. He was a generous man. He was also gay. And I am as straight as it gets. In fact, I met my future wife at one of his poetry recitals, where he had some of his friends participating in that evening of sounds. That evening he introduced me to John Cage and Gary Snyder. It was the 80’s and the Village was still a place where poets could find a home, meet in bars, cafes or in someone’s home and slam together… St. Mark’s Church was the epicenter of New York poets at the time. Andrei Codrescu was a regular for a while, and so were so many others, young and old, known and newcomers, but one thing was quite obvious: if you were a poet, most likely you were broke or struggling to pay rent. That didn’t stop the women to gather around us, and Allen, who was equally admired and revered by men and women alike, made a deal with me: all the women who came on to him he would send them my way, and all the men who made a pass at me I was going to send them to Allen. He had a great sense of humor, like any Buddhist master should. He also believed that poetry is meant to be transmitted orally, spoken on stage, recited at street corners, sang, accompanied by music, in a word, poetry needed to be heard rather than read in solitude from a book.

Thinking about what it means to be an American poet, one with a Romanian accent no less, I can hardly ignore being forced to choose between living on the edge and continue writing, or working in some office. Living on the edge is so much more fun. The world with its rules and principles never appealed to me. I started writing poetry and plays while in Romania, and although I had the privilege of having a poet like Mircea Ivanescu as my friend and mentor for about ten years, and the apparent admiration of a few notable Romanian writers, actors, directors, I never managed to publish much. Nor did my plays get produced, although there were serious attempts, skillfully hindered by the cultural censors of that era. Imagine then how I felt, a poet from Sibiu arriving in New York in the fall of 1983, with limited knowledge of English, walking into a large library and seeing all these authors’ names, book titles, that were

65 Poet in America

completely foreign to me until then. I was a guest playwright of the American Renaissance Theatre, an Off-off Broadway theatre which offered to perform one of my plays (translated by a Romanian student right before I left Romania) but also asked if I could have a second play in English ready in two weeks, so they could make a full night dedicated to me. I quickly adapted a play where all my characters speak in unfinished sentences, and using a phraseology dictionary I “translated” as well as I could the text, in time to become an appreciated comedy which everybody understood that night, except me. There is no recipe to become a successful writer anywhere in the world, and in a country like the United States, being a poet is mostly a hobby, unless you are employed by a university or some other entity that gives you enough time to write when you’re not working hard to make a living.

I have to say that for the most part I felt quite lost in the first few years of my American Dream, and spending time in the company of other writers, sitting in the audience and listening to poets reciting their texts, actors giving staged readings of plays, engaging in conversations with the likes of Allen Ginsberg or Mark Strand, or later on arguing with W.D Snodgrass about the merits of his Eminescu translations, represented the necessary, although hardly sufficient, antidote to a life of unpublished writing efforts. In time I came to realize that the process of writing was fulfilling enough for me, and my plans to change the world through my writings weren’t realistic at all. Stepping into a new culture, trying to understand a vibrant, complex and challenging city like New York, was enough for my poet’s soul then and now. New York, after 30 years of living there, is still the same living organism, a voracious octopus sucking your energy, while giving you the sensation that everything is possible, that you can actually mean something in this world just by walking under its sky.

Actually, it is something that Mircea Tomus Jr. said to me before I left Romania that gave me reason to worry, although not for long: he asked me, since he knew that my English was so poor, how would I know, when I met a girl, whether she was a sophisticated vixen or some wide-eyed peasant from the Midwest in search of superficial adventures. That question emboldened me to devote most of my time in the first three


months to learning all the idioms I could discover, to the point when I would use some really unusual expressions in conversations with people I’d just met, obviously with the intention to impress them, and also with the obvious result of some very awkward moments. Luckily, people thought that my accent was cute, and most of my transgressions were quickly forgiven.

The question remains, though: why be a poet in America? What’s the use? In a country where money is the highest form of religion, where the arts budget is close to non-existent, why bother to write at all? The libraries are filled with books, the sales are going very well, but do people buy poetry or romance novels? The truth is: they buy almost everything. The hunger for anything that could feed the soul is evident, the offerings are sadly very poor… luckily we can still count on classics. When some young poet asks me for advice, I don’t recommend Allen Ginsberg or Sylvia Plath. I tell them instead to read Rilke’s Letter to a Young Poet. And Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Personally I do not have favorite poets but rather favorite poems, like Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or Mark Strand’s “Keeping Things Whole.” With the advent of the internet I noticed a resurgence of exceptional texts, classics or contemporary, going viral, accumulating thousands of “likes”, shares and comments. It looks like a good thing. Yet, given the infinite number of choices, combined with an over-heated system overwhelmed by contradictory criteria, I am not surprised to see so many young people confused as to what constitutes real quality. Suddenly, we find ourselves in a world with no real direction, no sense of common purpose and responsibility, a stock exchange of ideas that mimics the New York Stock Exchange in many ways: a corrupt culture of greed and indifference, putting on a happy face, asking us to believe in its honesty even though everybody knows that it functions like a vicious casino bent on stealing all of your money. The exaggerated cost of living in the so-called civilized world has pushed many young poets, artists, creative minds of every genre, into virtual prostitution. On the surface it looks respectable, legitimate, certainly legal. With the help of critics and paid commentators, many creations manage to reach a respectable status, allowing the creators to make a good living, yet I rarely sense real cultural excitement, rarely

67 Poet in America

get the feeling that I am witnessing a life changing artistic event, there isn’t anyone, be it a poet, playwright or novelist, to capture universal attention. It is as if we are all on automatic pilot, reading, writing, smiling approvingly before we even finish reading or hearing the text, polite, with an inbred aversion towards any conflict of ideas, avoiding almost any confrontation for fear of being perceived as problematic, rocking the boat, disturbing the peace, as if the false social harmony is more important than being truthful to yourself. It really feels like the con game instituted by corporations, banks and other cold blooded entities, has permeated every aspect of our life, including our purest form of interpreting the universe, which is poetry.

It is time to bring back Tristan Tzara, to shake up the establishment. I see no other way.

Poems 68

Poems

FEVRONIA NOVAC

When I first left Romania to study comparative literature in the US in 1993, I learned from some of the best scholars such as Ihab Hassan, James Soderholm, and Roy Swanson in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Glancing at the syllabi, I thought that I was going to boringly reread what I had already assimilated back home. It became clear very soon that not only had I still to discover new authors and theories, but that my way of thinking was to change radically, as a result of readings from Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Shoshana Felman, and Homi Bhabha. After a few years in the US, Canada became my country of adoption and the beauty of Canada and its people transformed me once again. Many of my poems have that touch of Canadian exquisiteness. I wrote a book in Romanian on the culture of the First Nations of North America.

In fact, the “American” influence on me, however eclectic, was to stay on and, even now it has been 6 years since I moved back to Europe and live in France, I still write my poetry in English. The American feminist influence on me is fundamental and so is the social activism in poetry, a characteristic that I would love to adopt more, however shocking this feature was in Romania where the “official” poetry under the totalitarian regime had to be steeped in social activism, which repulsed poets from writing it. My North American years have given me a different perspective on social engagement. I wish I could write like Adrienne Rich or Joy Harjo.

69 Poems

TRAIDOR AYER, TRAIDOR HOY, TRAIDOR … SIEMPRE

To Reinaldo Arenas

You look gorgeous in this picture you’re behind the fence of a park holding a sign in your left hand –

like an ID you wrote on it: traitor yesterday, traitor today, traitor forever You’re dressed in a colourful shirt from your island but the garden you’re in is the garden of exile and the sun reflecting on it is the sun of New York I think I’m your age in this picture How I would love to be a man to put my lips on yours between the bars kiss you for eternity or be your age when you were a boy Celestino Let me run with you to the cemetery steal the fresh wreaths from the more recent tomb bring them home put them on our chests when lying in bed to sleep soundly a quiet night like death like the moon Let us pretend we dream the poems we will write to each other tomorrow and the day after tomorrow forever on the trunks of slashed trees poems by counterrevolutionaries poems by homosexuals with books published abroad flawed poems of betrayal, of treason, of yesterday, of today and of time without end


Red Cloud

all birds are not alike and I am not like you you, poor and naked and the chief of a nation I am nobody and trying to learn from you you are brave and wise and share your religion with the birds you pray Manitou and Wakan Takan I live on your land doing well but not able to talk to you can’t find you anywhere except in tiny objects in the boutiques off Sparks Street you have been to the end of the earth and the water to find your friends I come to you unable to connect I pass you by every morning sleepless you in your slim sleeping bag by the side of the road wouldn’t let me dance in the jingle dress

71 Poems

Black Sea Goddess Smaranda/Sabina (I can’t remember her exact name) was of an unreal beauty. She used to bathe in the sun on the rocks at Neptun (Romanian seaside resort) and lived at the villa of the Writers’ Union. The boys at the villa always remember her on the highest rock on the banks of the Black Sea. They must have taken plenty of pictures of the beautiful mermaid, Romanian Lorelei, combing her magic hair, sitting and watching the horizon and dreaming nobody would guess what daring dreams. I am swimming towards the beaches of the former nomenklatura and reaching soon Ceausescu’s waters twenty years after his violent death. It is still well guarded serving as the villa of the new president but I don’t feel fear coming close to the forbidden zone. I could even get warned by the patrols and wouldn’t care. Twenty years later, coming back from faraway lands where I was able to build a normal life, I swim away and feel free. I remember overhearing a conversation my friends from the villa were having about one of their friends, this little boy who had just discovered the view of the girl on the rocks. As he couldn’t believe his eyes at her sight, he approached her and said: “You are so beautiful!” My friends were laughing at the recollection of this part. The girl chased him with a gesture of her hand as if she was deeply bothered and he was to go away. I am pondering as I am swimming towards and away from that rock: had the cruel sea goddess tried her most beautiful smile in response to the boy’s amazement at her gorgeous sight, would the little one have gone swimming away with no regret and no need to come back? Each one of my friends is that little boy with the bewildered smile on his face looking up to the Black Sea goddess who's looking away and who won’t be bothered. Like me, they are coming back every single year from their distant places and so different new homes to stare in amazement at the waves breaking against those rocks where the long-haired girl with no smile is cruising more and more furtive horizons.


Woman with dolls

I’ll open my heart like a flower in blossom and leave it open – cozy refuge for my favourite song when it gets too cold for it’ll teach me skills and together we’ll cross to the other side of winter with polar bear and seal two lonely women wearing bark for clothes to evoke the absent trees in our land. In winter I hunt, I sing, I am cold and I share my dreams of sunshine with the seals and the polar bear. I wait for spring with my heart wide open like a flower in blossom like the timid perfume in my doll’s hair. This winter I’ll learn how to make some more dolls out of my clothes warm dolls will keep me company during the long nights awaiting us. Just imagine the joy of being together – a tapestry of colour and mixture – making up stories of perfection until you can’t see the difference between the heavily dressed women and the dolls in my arctic picture.

73 Poems

Sickness in the Language I was nowhere in my own dream only this garden I knew well because I’ve run along its deep alley by the Gothic castle every night I fell sick the waves of the dream were spinning my body in circles around the colourful stems I was growing old in strokes like the tower clock the drop of time couldn’t be wiped off my face with the soft sleeve it stayed there as I cried with one eye to impress my parents overseas. In reality I didn’t try to look for that garden for they might have all deserted the castle haunted by me and it always came a moment when my fever got better when I kept silent in Romanian and it felt as though I were dreamt about by someone else a butterfly or a bee.


Beyond the Hills

(based on Cristi Mungiu’s idea) Spinning in the crinoline dress Like a woman dervish Until the world around fades Until I faint slowly but confidently to forget What just has happened To awake memory free Free In a different part of the world Since this big city is not like yours, Walter, Here everybody recognizes you Your old friends will bump into you In the busiest stations And I’m spinning in the tight dress Next thing I know I’m clad in black serge fabric covered from head to toe In a cold mountain Where a Romanian monastery Scares the entire globe With an exorcization story Gone wrong I am crucified on an improvised table Praying for everybody else Except for myself And will soon become a “fait divers”. People with good intentions are worried about me They all guessed my sin It’s my love for a woman

75 Poems

That brought me back here And this woman is running away from hers What other ending could there be? Although you don’t want to know what the ending was The spinning came to an end In the Romanian mountains Beyond the frozen hills Behind the sun My love was to take her habit off Never return to those hills again She was to remember me As her veiled nun. In that monastery room we shared I arrived with a cold I asked her to massage me With rubbing alcohol And so did she Her shy fingers palpating my skin That afternoon Were worth all that was going to happen to me. I knew I was dying in real life but I was hoping That he would set me free In his movie He would redeem me.

Poems 76

Poems

ROXANA CAZAN

OTHERWORDLY. A CANCER POEM1 I. Like some sort of rare cactus flower That blooms only once every century I’ve gotten you, as small as a pea, Hoisted in a pod of flesh. Like a buoy in the dusk waters of the Black Sea, You surface painfully, Then you retreat in the low crimps of tissue, You flow uninhibited On a string of pearly genes, Like geese wasting feathers in flight. You churn your life inside me Regardless of whether I sleep, Or read a book, Or meet a friend, You swell, you breathe, you bring me Down, you churn, swing, teeter… You, patron of my body, You, nursing child, Fickle under fingertips. II. My great-aunt Vivian

77 Poems

Could lift three bales of hay in her fork Balanced on her rock-shoulder. She raised lambs in a village In the forests of the Carpathians. The days she felt you through her peasant blouse, She went home, took all her gold – A pendant from her mother, Her fallen dental crown – And sewed it in the hem of an orange pillowcase. I was fifteen when she told me The pillowcase was mine After she wasn’t anymore. III. My mother’s breasts are love I search for home nestled in her arms, My forehead in the nook of her head and shoulder. Even when she’s not here, There’s a whole world of her under my eyelids. We promised her it would all be fine, That we’d turn out nice people. IV. Before bed, I feel you. I search to see if you decided to stay. I fit you carefully In the angle between body and bed, My breast below the waterline of covers. I rest my head on an orange pillow And I talk to you. I talk to you. I feel otherworldly.


POEM WITH BIRDS

In the morning, I watch them pecking On the porch, Tinkering with Black sunflower seeds, With millet and hemp, Their chirps rising slowly like soap bubbles. How unpredictable their flight, The flimsy the wing beat, Like your heart Grown tired of its rhythm. When you unclasp your gown, You sit on your White-washed bed Before the large window Opening towards Ruffled foliage. And the silvers of the sunset fall So abruptly on your skin, And the salty rays prick Your eyes to tears. Inside your chest, the heart sits Wounded behind the thread Of scar that runs along your body Like scaffolding. I touch the scar the way You take in cupped palms a fallen bird And feel how warmth and worry waste Along your skin. We found a baby wren once

79 Poems

In the yard. You Lifted it up firmly. We fed it and loved it, Watched it sleep from our rocking chairs. But the bird couldn’t stand To see our pity. Soon your hands will fall Heavy upon your lap, Your glance will crisp up In the distance And in the morning I won’t be able to see the sight of birds.

IN THE WAITING ROOM In the waiting room of the General Hospital In Sibiu, Romania, People whisper, chuckle. A woman with a huge belly, Another woman with a bruised jaw, Both in their twenties, Wear flower-printed robes And lug baskets of fresh fruit. From Cardiology, old men come out For walks. They lean against the walls In the waiting room, Expecting tardy visitors. We sit on green wooden chairs, Eaten through and through by time And dust, and smell the bleach smeared across the floor. My mother holds her hand to her heart As if to keep it safely in the nest of her ribs.


She looks weakened, like after labor, Her face a softened pear. In the Intensive Care Unit, we watch dad Through a vertical slit in the door As thin as an eyelid. Half of his body houses wires, needles, Bandages. A skinny tube glows green Under his nose. A nurse checks numbers. We tremble with fear For the life splitting thin from death. We eavesdrop, We follow the soft wave His chest draws in the air With every sickly breath. I am old enough to have seen All this before. I’ve heard death. I’ve sung pain. I am shaken. A week later I board my flight to New York City. Mother waves at me as I pass Security Check. She looks old and thin Through the film of tears, Through the distance growing thicker, Through life and death gorging on heartache.

81 Poems

ON FEARING THAT THE GANGES MIGHT TWIST YOUR MIND. A POEM ABOUT INTER-CULTURAL DOUBTS

My Burmese cat sits, Unmovable beside the radio, where An Indian lady’s voice reads the weather news. I can’t hear, in any measured centimeters, Where you stand, On white steps walking into the Ganges. I am conditioned to read signs, And split in two you-love-me-you-love-me-not’s. I sleep crouched between assumptions And your handwritten letter of reassurance. They purr in my mind. I wouldn’t know If your thoughts are pinned to a hymn from the Upanishads, A faint memory of my hand, Or a red and orange scarf from Almora, By the river where the gods went To bathe and drink and love. Then the water, unfolds its velvet creases Over your body, perhaps making you forget. I know how you open up. So I blame my doubts, the woman in me, The noise I hear from my neighbors’ apartment Arguments over relatives, or the hanging moustache Of a Baba telling you about matching stars, Or that sun that peels clothes off shoulders. I make myself a cup of tea to snare high spirits. I have white legs.


I look at them plump and proper along the sheets. I am good enough.

After all, I have never seen that part of India, Where fishing boats garbed in trammel Let sighs slide off at night, where hands Touch fishing nets,

Or touch softly, Dyed fabrics for wedding sarees

Right before daybreak. They say new souls are split fractions of older ones, All divided among seven billion people. My concern is with your soul. So here I am, on the opposite side of the planet. I have no language to forget, To rid the doubt that hovers over my skin Like the air’s humidity in Bloomington, Indiana, At two o’clock in the afternoon. When I meet you, I will expect your words to melt, Wishful at the incidence of your smile.

ARM SURGERY IN BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA Lime-green and slender, The doctor bends over my head, A thin moustache finishing his upper lip. He says my name and rolls his Rs. He smiles and makes me drink A sour juice supposed to heal my throat.

83 Poems

Inside, my tongue unfolds the paper-cut pain, Blooming unpolished, like a bloody water lily. I want to speak but I can’t. I have a vague memory of tonsils like some fruit, Ripened red and picked. I’m not nine anymore, But I hold my bones together Like a sack knowing what it feels to be filled. In America bed-sheets are the same. After they wire my pulse, They ask me about my medical history, And although my mouth is free to speak, It cannot translate remembrance. When I wake up I can’t smell anything. A lime-green doctor mumbles something, Poking at my bare arm. A clear thread unfolds its spool Along my ulna, bifurcating at the elbow And brown as a turnip. I am to wash it with warm water and soap. In my bedroom mirror at home, I see a grown woman, Her body floating unfinished.

ONION I. This morning in Bloomington, Indiana, A morning as ample as a glass jar, The pot garbles,


And the steam sighs. I hold the knife, my fingers Sisters to the white onions, Their rings wearing their smiles thin, Coiled around one another Like whales within larger whales. I’m utterly lost to the roundness of a bulb, Skin dead with veins. There’s so much white to be sliced, Plump and heavy. I’m not hungry. I cook alone, But I can handle the knife like a warrior. II. At ten, I am chopping onions with grandma, In a village in Alba Iulia, Elbow to elbow, Tears melting down our cheeks. She teaches me how to make zacusca. We cook a potful of the delicious spread, And lay it hot in fogging jars Like eggs set to hatch. We fill the entire pantry With autumn-colored delight. When I cut my finger, grandma dresses it And tells me that cooking with someone You love is like walking on clouds. I don’t know what she means Because to me, onions are cruel. III. I received the call in the night And I imagined I could fly home To see her

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Settled still in her coffin, And I think that my memories Are like onions in their paper-thin cradle.

COMMUNIST HYMN

“Today, we raise the double-flaming beacon

To lighten up our communist pursuit

With happy hearts warmed by the sun of freedom

Our brave and glorious leader we salute.”

(Victor Tulbure)

My first-grade teacher has high cheek bones And doesn’t give up Until I’ve learnt the hymn by heart. I am expected to recite it Before all the parents huddled Together to pay homage To something nobody really understands. I have already repeated it a hundred Times with my mother. I tell her that I would rather play the piano. However, I don’t know how to play the piano. We do not have a piano at home, Or in school. My neighbor is a skinny girl called Roxana. I am Roxi and she is Roxa, so that people can tell us apart. She taught me how to play an imaginary piano. We perform sonatas and elegies Behind our apartment building, Sitting cross-legged on the pavement, And facing each other.


I don’t really understand all the words But I imagine they must mean something fantastic. Certainly, a double-flaming beacon is exactly What my teacher explained. She said “majestic.” To me all these words sound like music Dripping from the corners of fat pianos.

Notes: 1 An audio version of these poems in the author’s reading has been published by The Poets Weave, http://indianapublicmedia.org/poetsweave/roxana-cazan-fish/.

Contemporary Romanian Art 87

Contemporary Romanian Art in the United States1

DANA ALTMAN

Abstract The article discusses the recent international interest in contemporary Romanian art and its growth in market share, with a focus on the United States. The theme is followed thorough in numerous museum exhibitions, increased collector following, art fair presence, gallery representation and auction activity initially in Europe and the United States. The phenomenon is discussed both in the context of the larger international movement conducive to the contemporary art price bubble, and in that of the local socio-economic changes. My chief interest lies in the factors leading up to the entry of post 1989 Romanian art in the global arena as a manifestation of market forces in the field. The analysis follows its grass roots local emergence through non-profit institutions, individual artists, small publications, low budget galleries, as well as the lack of contribution (with few notable exceptions) of state institutions, while pointing out the national context of increasing deregulation of social support systems resulting in lack of focus on cultural manifestations. The conclusion is that the recent ascent of contemporary Romanian art (and coincidentally, the award winning contemporary Romanian cinematography) is a fortuitous convergence of various factors, among which, increased international mobility and sharing. At the same time, it is also the result of the evolution of various individual artists that pursued a form of art rooted in Romanian artistic tradition but with a focus on the symbolic figurative. The result is a personal semiotics of raising the mundane to extraordinary levels that reconfigured the anxiety of entering a new system into an unmistakable and lasting visual language. Keywords: Contemporary, art, visual, deregulation, auction, gallery, artist, figurative, symbolic, Romanian We live in the epoch of globalization: we are all interconnected through a network of fiber optic cables, which provide the opportunity for literally


anybody to become an overnight phenomenon. The cycles of consumption and production succeed each other at shorter intervals, and our gluttonous society needs something new and sensational every minute. It is a continuous elation of the last minute information, five minute celebrity, wars broadcast in live feed and life spent online, shared by millions of users who simply own a computer and have an internet connection.

In this system, the international world of art adapted fast to this set of rules. The result is that a new type of art surfaces at periodic intervals in certain geographic areas, and it is considered to have growth potential. Sometimes it may be Chinese conceptual artists, at another time the world is speaking about the young British artists, and there are situations where simultaneous tendencies co-exist. Sometimes such previsions become reality: the artists become known to the general public, not only the niche of collectors and curators, their market share grows, they have blockbuster exhibitions in important museums, maybe even lend their name and their creativity for a merchandise line with some famous fashion house, gain lucrative public art contracts. At other times, the new flavor has no staying power after a few seasons and it is simply replaced by a different one; in that context, the market share decreases as fast and as abruptly as it has increased. In this whole equation, there is one constant though, namely that nothing has enjoyed a more meteoric rise in prices than contemporary art in recent years. As Baudrillard said, the market is a monster in permanent need of new material to satisfy its ever growing greed.

The entry in this fiercely competitive arena of contemporary art from post-1989 Romania was not a very abrupt phenomenon, even if it may look like that to the unaware observer; it was in fact a rather gradual process. The debut was modest, sometime in the 1990s, after the regime change had resulted in a more stable political situation. It started when a few Romanian galleries managed to be noticed on the international market by means of art fairs and a few artists they represented were invited by important curators to participate in various projects. A few collectors became interested and proved devoted enough to promote the artists they purchased in order to raise their prices; strangely enough for the ones who do not know the cultural atmosphere in Romania, they were mostly international collectors. This process happened without any significant

89 Contemporary Romanian Art

contribution of the official, state-sponsored institutions in Romania that preferred to support classical rather than contemporary art; the evolving phenomenon was ignored, undervalued and sometimes it almost seemed to be sabotaged. Romanian contemporary art developed instead with the support of non-profit cultural foundations, often on a shoestring budget, magazines published in small editions which promoted artists without an obvious cultural agenda, as well as artists who decided to speak for themselves. Romania never benefited from the existence of a person such as Charles Saatchi who understood both the financial and the cultural potential of a wise investment in contemporary art and who was committed long term to such an investment that provided spectacular results. Public relation stunts such as the 1999 Brooklyn Museum exhibition “Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection,” that represented a defining step towards global fame for artists such as Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Chris Ofili or Rachel Whiteread, never took place in Romania.

The reality on the ground is often different than it should have been and there are public cases of institutional abuse. It is in fact a paradox that post-1989 Romania did not evolve into an economic and social system close to the other EU member countries, but was rather torn between a tough system resembling the one proposed by the Chicago School of Economics and the attempt to perpetuate communist clientelism, with more or less explicit actors. The quick and dedicated privatizations, the attempt to deregulate the main systems of social support such as health and education, the sale or bankruptcy of state properties, as well as the craving for fast enrichment to the detriment of the state led to the progressive lack of focus on culture and education. In other words, most people were left to fend for themselves. In this context, preoccupation with contemporary art was obviously not a top priority. In spite of the fact that some artists still had sponsored studios, the opportunities became even more reduced in time.

Often the institutions that should have promoted contemporary art were in fact the ones driving the artists out. A widely known and in fact symptomatic cultural scandal is the 2010 eviction of the Archive of Contemporary Art from the Bucharest studio of Dan and Lia Perjovski by


the National University of Art Bucharest after two years spent without utilities. Two Romanian artists with international reputations found themselves evicted from the space that served as their studios and were also widely insulted on Romanian blogs, a space where they should have benefited from maximum support. The eviction was strongly supported by some and disapproved by many others. The archive ended up in Sibiu. The contribution of these artists to contemporary Romanian culture was not considered and neither was the fact that this archive is unique.

Another example is the notorious case of the exhibition at the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York City while Mr. Patapievici was at its helm. The exhibition, now known by the artifact that became the symbol of the issue, the pink pony, was in fact a created scandal where facts were distorted to fit the desired agenda, that of condemning contemporary art from the nationalist angle. The Romanian Cultural Institute, the only state-sponsored institution in the post-1989 period which had a coherent program of cultural management outside of Romanian borders during Mr. Patapievici’s management (including exhibitions, book publishing, film festivals and many other events) and which had numerous successes, ended up treated as guilty of extreme nationalism, a charge which was subsequently hysterically inflated in order to eliminate public figures who were not towing to the party line. The whole event represented a misguided retribution for its very accomplishments.

In this context the surprising moment has come when contemporary Romanian artists are in the spotlight. It is as much a surprise as the result of years of work in the background. In recent years, there were a number of exhibitions in important galleries and museums from the United States. A few names have become recognized by the American collectors, such Adrian Ghenie, exhibited by Haunch of Venison, David Nolan Gallery, NYC, and Pace Gallery; Marius Bercea at David Nolan Gallery NYC or Dan Perjovski at Lombard Fried NYC. Other exhibitions took place in museums, such as Dumitru Gorzo’s at the New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art, Adrian Ghenie at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver and the exhibition Six Lines of Flight. Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art at the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art,


which included Adrian Ghenie, Victor Man and Ciprian Mureşan. Dan Perjovski created an installation in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium of the new building of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. At the art fairs, the presence of Romanian artists has become an event collectors look forward to; galleries such as Plan B are a constant presence. The prices are on an ascending trend, and the artists’ work is already surfacing on the secondary art market. “Untitled” by Adrian Ghenie was auctioned at Phillips for $32,500 in May 2013 and “Fragile” was sold for $32,500 in September 2013, both in New York City. Success stories in Europe with strong US echoes were sales such as the auction at Sotheby’s London of the paintings “Dr. Mengele” by Adrian Ghenie for over £120,000 (estimated £30,000 to 40,000), “The King”, June 2013 (sold for £218,500, estimated £70,000 – 90,000). Tajan Paris auctioned “Pie Fight Interior 11”, estimated € 50,000-70,000, for €150,498.

What is the explanation of this phenomenon? Should it be only the need of the market to permanently find new material in order to enable self-regularization? In the epoch of fifteen minutes of fame heralded by Andy Warhol, time runs fast and novelty becomes old rapidly. After all, it is a phenomenon that repeats itself periodically in recent years. The explanation can be more nuanced: it is more likely that it is a fortuitous convergence of a series of factors. One of them is the gradual appearance of an independent system of galleries, non-profit institutions and cultural publications which function without preferences and without an ideological agenda and that have a program of artistic management which provides results. The publications were often printed with small grants and with tremendous financial efforts in Bucharest and other cities. The artists and the future art managers traveled, studied, and then returned to apply the lessons that could be adapted to the Romanian reality, and attempted to create a new system in the hope that in time it may actually generate a new reality. The appearance of this fragile system of support, which is absolutely necessary, coincided with the real integration of Romania in the system of cultural globalization, which allowed artists from this geographical area to export an object, not only ideas, and offered them the opportunity to be found both online and in person in the relatively opaque world of art.


The first acts of artistic sponsorship have also taken place, such as the exhibitions of the Mircea Pinte collection at the Museum of Art Cluj Napoca in collaboration with the Gallery Plan B. Such exhibitions, even though considered sometimes controversial because they are seen as instruments of the market for purely promotional purposes, are still events that strengthen the trust in certain artists and propose a cultural model: the collector who endorses a certain artist and implicitly raises the market value of his/her work by promoting it as part of an established collection. The prestige of the owner often reflects on the selection of artists, and such models are accepted at face value elsewhere; famous examples are the collections of Saatchi and Ahmed Ertegun.

Then auction houses have started to support artists. Modest in the beginning, this support became direct in 2008 when an exhibition was organized at Espace Tajan during FIAC Paris by Rodica Seward, the owner or the auction house Tajan. The Romanian-born business-woman and collector discovered contemporary Romanian art at the Armory Fair in New York City and supported it constantly since, with results that became obvious both in the United States and internationally. It all coincided with the preference of the world of collectors and curators in this period for the symbolic figurative style that characterizes contemporary Romanian artists. It is not accidental that the success of the Romanian visual artists became manifest more or less during the same period when the names of Romanian actors and directors started to become known in the United States, and Romanian cinema was awarded numerous international awards for movies that focused on themes from the same area of the mundane. This is the result of years of exploration, which resulted in finding a unique voice.

This symbolic figurative vein stems from experiences specific to the Romanian communist space and especially to the Ceauşescu years, when most of the artists currently gaining fame were teenagers and undergoing formative experiences. Even though some of the artists who are successful nowadays were too young for the communist experience to have affected them long term, the influences were of a different and perhaps more profound nature. The reason is that after the end of that era, the post-communist landscape and the results of the brutal implementation


of the market economy had consequences that were often destructive for the cultural paradigm due to the lack of both government funding and private interest in contemporary art, as well as the disintegration of civil society and other systems of support that had to be rediscovered. Besides the gray universe of ideology, there were influences that were less visible for outsiders but equally important: persons who were their mentors, another generation of artists that is being reevaluated in the context of an increased international interest. Just as Romanian cinema productions have appropriated these experiences and developed them by conferring them global relevance, visual art succeeded in going beyond the superficial layer of the communist experience to touch a vein of meanings with universal relevance. Frustration has been reshaped into a need to restructure the opaque areas, and what unites these artists working in a variety of media was discovered while this restructuring was underway: the need to understand the history and Romanian present not only by means of clichés, but by means of their personal reconstruction and deconstruction, a process that imbued them with universal value.

There is hardly any doubt that this favorable convergence of factors provided results. The issue remains their durability. Will the Romanian artists resist the huge and apparently insurmountable pressures of a commercial society which cannibalizes and regurgitates its subjects permanently in its search for novelty? The most probable answer is that they will, because there is something which is already part of history and cannot be overruled: contemporary Romanian art has developed a personal semiotics, images and motifs that integrate Romanian tradition with the imagery of global contemporary art and which has become recognizable and has managed to reconfigure the anxiety of entering a new system and of adapting to it in a visual language that is unmistakable.

Notes: 1 A Romanian version of this article appeared in Sinteza, a Romanian culture and strategic thinking review, in January 2014.

In Memoriam 94

In Memoriam

In Memoriam 95

Behind the Curtain of Clouds:

In Memoriam – Valeriu Paraschiv

SAM-CLAUDIA PARASCHIV

In an ideal world, a theater director like Valeriu Paraschiv would have been celebrated as a mad genius, a guru, and not in the least as a visionary rascal. When I first got a glimpse of him, behind a curtain of clouds, I saw this young man, with his body like Zeus, revealing his good looks in front of the lens of the camera, about to be immortalized on film. I knew that I’d have to rush to catch up with him, to provoke him to the duel of life.

Thanks to my mother, I was introduced to movie theaters in Bucharest when I was three years old, nourished by films’ offerings of every filmmaker’s mirror of its soul. Luckily, I came to understand foreign films on my own, because my mother, not wanting to disturb anybody in the audience, never translated or explained them to me. Our neighbors and friends of my mother were quite amused when I told them of my wish of becoming an actress when I grew up. It was about the same time that, in 1963, Val graduated from the IATC – The Drama School and married his first wife, Itta Virginia Marcu, an actress and colleague from the same class. After graduation, they were both hired at the Dramatic Theatre in Brașov. While Valeriu Paraschiv and his first wife were actors in a professional theater acting in plays on a real stage with a real audience, I had my own private “theater” in my parents’ courtyard, I was free to direct and interpret any roles I wished, and the fairy tales of Petre Ispirescu and Hans Christian Andersen became my house biggest hits. I had barely turned five when I cast and directed the children in the neighborhood in diverse characters’ roles: demonstrating that all characters are important no matter what roles were performed, princesses, princes charming, dragons, witches, step-mothers, and Cinderella’s step-sisters; all roles were important in my courtyard theater. We improvised the props, the kitchen brooms were disguised as swords, and family


clothing became our costumes, which their parents didn't appreciate that much. I was performing the roles of a theater and film director and actor in front of a non-existing audience, but with an unlimited child’s imagination. In 1967, school started, and I had to shut my theater down. It was then that Valeriu Paraschiv became recently divorced, and moved, as a professional actor, to Radu Stanca Theatre in Sibiu, where he met his second wife, Gabriela Cocora. My second grade regular teacher encouraged me and supported my storytelling gifts. In 1969, I took acting classes with a professional actress (I do not remember her name) who told me that even if I had talent and I passed the entrance exam at IATC, I would still suffer for the rest of my life being cast in children’s roles because I was so petite. That stopped me from going to the “Palace of Pioneers” in Bucharest to sign up for vocational acting classes. In 1973, I started preparing for the only high school in the country with a specialty in Cinematography, while Valeriu Paraschiv enrolled in the same institute he had graduated from, the IATC, this time to study Theatre Directing. He graduated with the highest grade, receiving his unique governmental job allocation at The Nottara Theatre in Bucharest, in 1977.

Valeriu Paraschiv’s first staged play was The Return of the Prodigal Son by Alexandr Vampilov, with Horațiu Mălăele playing the leading part. With only one day before it was scheduled to open, the Russian Embassy protested the existence on stage of a red stove, a symbol of the communist society treated with unacceptable derision, which they considered too obvious. For the next month his rehearsals were closely supervised by two armed Securitate agents, with the expectation that he change everything in the original staging. Immediately, Val changed everything, with no apparent element left from the incriminated staging concept, then for the next month he rebuilt it right back, the only difference in the final result was that the stove became green. Such was his genius that he was able to perform this magic trick right under the watchful eyes of the censors. As for myself, in 1979, after my Baccalaureate exam, I did not get in the acting course at the IATC and got myself some metaphorical bruises that were instantly cured by getting hired at the Buftea Film Studio Bucharest, as a script-girl. In 1980, I went back to IATC to try my luck with Film Directing. I passed the

97 In Memoriam

eliminatory, aptitude test, but, in the end, lost to four other candidates. My passion for film and screenwriting endured, however and in December 1981, my eyes were attracted with a cosmic force towards Valeriu Paraschiv, who was rehearsing the role of “Nenada” – “The Black Prince,” sitting on the royal throne on the Buftea studio’s set, in the film Comoara (The Treasure), directed by Iulian Mihu. It was love at first sight, on my very first day of shooting of a film that was in its second week of filming. The original script-girl was either fired or she had to deliver her child (should I care why? Not!)

We finished the shooting at the studio, and then we had a short break for New Year’s holidays, but I did not feel like celebrating. My heart was filled with a new, unknown sentiment, one which I was afraid to acknowledge. On January 1st before returning home to Bucharest, Valeriu Paraschiv resigned from the Nottara Theatre while I removed my winter boots to feel the snow on the empty beach, to hear the cry of the lonely and desperate seagull and to write a poem. Across time it relates to an image glued to my brain: my husband looking at me and at our son Emmanuel Paraskiv, who graduated from NYFA, Los Angeles with an MFA in Film Directing (when only 24) trying to fulfill his destiny, carrying the Olympian Torch passed from his Father. Twenty-eight years later the same level of intensity defined my destiny when Valeriu Paraschiv slipped from my arms on that cruel night, which I imagined as the only way the goddesses of heavenly theater could take him away from me. I know that he is now peeking from behind the clouds, the same place where I was before being born.

I’m listening to Ravel’s “Bolero,” with Celibidache as conductor, and I write: Val Paraschiv was a Molière of the Romanian Theater, a Sergiu Celibidache of the theatrical musical scene, a René Magritte of the surreal decor of the set, a “David” sculpted by divine hands, the most loved and admired man by goddesses in the sky and by other humans on earth who had the privilege of meeting him. I constantly re-live the astonishing moments of being near Val until his last moment before his fall into the pious dream. On the eve of that night a snow fell from the sky, reaching the rooftops, embracing him into an innocent eternity. Val Paraschiv lives on, a master in the universe of an undying art.

In Memoriam 98

Sunset

SAM-CLAUDIA PARASCHIV

sunset

you, night, bed, sleep, acrobat, composer, astronaut. you fire, rain, silence pilot, doctor, firefighter, you poet, actor, director, homeless, wind, tears. we accidentally meet the night, corridor, bathroom, pillow. we involuntarily see the day, elevator, glasses, kissing hands, we quietly separate the dusty pages of an unbearable existence. i hear the recalcitrant emptiness it is me, disturbing the planets. i see the shadows of a terrified mind, it is me, breaking the sacred intimacy. i hold in my palms, the insignificant me, touching with timidity your radiance.

SCP 2008

In Memoriam 99

Hands-On: On Stage with Val Paraschiv

VALENTIN TEODOSIU

The first book I wrote was A Clown for Eternity, and Val read it immediately. In fact, the story ends with Val. He had succeeded in having the wall between classrooms pulled down. This drove the Dean (who was also my acting professor) insane. He complained “crazy Paraschiv wants to destroy my Institute, wants to break the wall between classrooms to present the third act in Hamlet.” Val’s Hamlet was a stroke of genius. I recall this so vividly. On the stage were the examination board, comprising the directing and the acting trainers: Dem Rădulescu, dubbed ‘Bibanu’1, Octavian Cotescu, Sanda Manu, Marin Moraru, Amza Pellea, Mircea Drăgan, and the theatre criticism professors. I was standing on the opposite side of the stage with my colleagues, actress Mirela Gorea, who played Gertude, the queen, the courtiers and Hamlet.

In action, Val was astonishing, profound, and nothing was accidental in what he did. If anyone suggested improvements he never said no. He accepted suggestions with a great deal of receptiveness. I was in my second year of acting and I was performing a Claudius different from anything anyone had done before. For some reason, in the age, Claudius was portrayed on stage in a somewhat bland, ‘conformistic’ light. My Claudius played tricks. He was a drunkard and a womanizer. The public was enjoying this interpretation. Val had envisaged the scene where Claudius was praying as one featuring a Claudius wasted from all the heavy drinking, kneeling before an icon, trying to pray to God unsuccessfully. I was in pain, either my knee or my back hurt badly when I knelt down. When I finally finished the prayer I was to burp straight into the examiners’ faces. My part was phenomenal, the way Val had conceived of it. The board started applauding frenetically, which was highly irregular, it rarely happened during exams. It was all thanks to Val’s astounding interpretative angle and vision. Val sought perfection in


every theatrical act and would not settle for anything less than exquisite. He taught me how to bring the work to completion, how to internalize and refine a part until everything about it was round and fully cohesive. It was true professionalism. Val’s accomplished theatrical vision was of course due to the fact that he was an actor himself, and a very talented one at that. A lot of directors of genius have great insight but less method and practical, actual manual skills. Val was extremely methodical and systematic. He would always prepare himself thoroughly before rehearsals. When we got up on the stage he had his directorial notebook. Every movement of the actors was carefully written down. He knew from the beginning exactly how the complete show was to unfold, how it would all round up in the end. He very rarely deviated from his notes unless an actor came up with a proposal for the scene that proved better than his, in which case he would generously adopt the proposal. He did his own sets and costumes, sometimes with his own hands (he had a real cult for handiwork), because the ones made in theatre workshops never met his exacting specifications. His was both the sparkle and a literally ‘hands-on’ approach.

In life as on stage or on the set, Val was a team-player, he had a generous soul. I remember how once, when I fell some 13 feet during a shooting, he was the only one to come to my rescue. Everybody else had run away scared, ready to give up on me, thinking I was dead. Val slapped me once or twice to wake me up. He realized I had fainted and told me not to stand up abruptly, else I risked getting dizzy and passing out again. He was right of course. He was extremely well-read and knowledgeable, a walking encyclopedia. As well as being a brilliant stage director, Val could truly act, and so he did, creating memorable parts in film. He will especially be remembered for one in particular, that of the treacherous, conniving Moțoc in an adaptation of Costache Negruzzi’s historical novella, Alexandru Lăpușneanu, a role well worth an Academy Award, had Romanian productions at the time been out there, in the international circuit of values. As a director, his Peer Gynt, staged at Casandra Studio Theatre in 1977 (which opened just before the earthquake on March 4th, or maybe immediately after, I do not recall exactly), has remained a landmark in the field. I remember distinctly people were afraid to go to

101 In Memoriam

the theater anymore, for fear there would be aftershocks or another major quake; there was a general sense of apprehension in the air toward indoor spaces. Still many people came to see the performance, at least faithful theatre goers did, and they left the theatre mesmerized. One time, many years after the Peer Gynt show had closed, a gentleman stopped me in the street to tell me that he had seen me in Peer Gynt at Casandra. Seven years had passed and he began to recite my monologue. The man knew it by heart, because he had liked it so much. Val had the rare gift of breathing an unforgettable life into a show which would then live on long in the memory of audiences. Maestro, I cannot stress enough how much you will be missed.

With all my gratitude, Valentin Teodosiu.

Notes: 1 Romanian for ‘freshwater, predatory fish’. Rădulescu got his nickname in high-school when he practiced professional boxing.

In Memoriam 102

A Tribute to Nicoleta Maria Răileanu (1957-2014); Teacher, Scholar, Friend

It is fitting that a tribute to Nicoleta Răileanu, a teacher, scholar, and friend to many, should appear in this issue of American, British, and

Canadian Studies, devoted as it is to American Studies and the Romanian Diaspora. Nicoleta was in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Sibiu from 1991 to 2002, as an instructor and an assistant professor. She was a research librarian at Sibiu’s Astra Library from 1984-1991 and a teacher of English and French in secondary and junior high schools in Romania before that. Sadly, Nicoleta died from a brain tumor in February 2014. Her life and work represent the diaspora celebrated in this volume, and I am honored to have been invited to remember her.

Nicoleta was assigned to be my “handler” when I spent a month at the University of Sibiu (now Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu) in April 1995. So effective was she in this role that on my return to the U.S. I asked the University of Missouri political scientist whose grant had supported my visit to also sponsor a visit by Nicoleta to my university. By inviting Nicoleta to stay with my family and me in our home, we were able to extend her visit from four weeks to six weeks, and the six weeks grew to encompass the entire 1996 spring term.

By the end of that semester, Nicoleta’s new colleagues in Missouri had convinced her that, after taking the summer back home to regroup, she needed to return, with her husband Mihail (aka Bebe) and their twin daughters Casandra and Ileana, to study for a Ph.D. in the University of Missouri’s English department. And therein begins – continues, actually – the themes of Nicoleta’s life that made her a notable contributor to the Romanian-American global environment. She brought with her from Romania substantial learning; she shared that knowledge with many students and colleagues over the years that followed; and she became a friend to many, in the U.S. and later in Canada.

When Nicoleta came into the University of Missouri’s doctoral program, she had already completed a degree in English and French (in

103 In Memoriam

1980) from the University of Cluj, along with the equivalent of a U.S. master’s degree through graduate coursework (1994-1999) at Lucian Blaga, and she had extensive training and experience in translation, library science, and teaching. Nonetheless, our institutional bureaucracy put significant roadblocks in her way: petty administrators, both within our English Department and beyond, wanted more documents, more proof, more this, more that to certify that she was capable of teaching our students. Some on our departmental admissions committee questioned the ability of a Romanian to teach the English composition course required of our first-year students (it is the responsibility of all doctoral students in English to teach these courses). In an exasperated response, one admissions committee member wrote:

We’d be damn fools not to admit this student. She is better prepared, better read, more professional and has more potential for impact in the field than anyone who I’ve seen come through here. And there’s no doubt that her degree from [our school] can only help us tremendously in the international community. Her writing is wonderful, her research is outstanding. We must admit her. [emphasis in original; signed by M. Bernard-Donals]

Once admitted, Nicoleta of course excelled. She taught not only our

English composition classes, but also World Literature and Romanian as a foreign language; tutored students in our Writing Center; presented scholarly papers at national conferences; attended many professional development seminars; and maintained her home life with junior-high-schoolers Casandra and Ileana who were making their way in an alien culture and husband Bebe who found his own estimable professional credentials largely ignored by diehard ethnocentrists—all while completing her doctoral degree in just three years. No doctoral student in our department has ever done it faster.

Having figured out Nicoleta’s scholarly talents, the English Department awarded her a highly competitive dissertation-writing fellowship. The Campus Writing Program, which I directed and understood all along, prevailed on her to write a feature story for our newsletter. In “A Tale of Two Universities: the Intersection of Sharing


New Ideas,” Nicoleta reflected on her experiences at the University of Missouri. Proving to be a perspicacious observer of cultural differences, after attending a faculty writing workshop she noted: “It was hard for me to believe that so many people would spend so much time and energy to improve the writing competence of their students. In Romania, writing well is basically the students’ concern” (The Writery, March 1996). And,

Our system values more theoretical, prescriptive approaches, which we consider more rigorous…which perhaps reflects a lack of confidence in our own capacity to make the right decision. It is difficult to suddenly replace authority with democracy, and maintain an equilibrium between imagination, personal opinion, creativity, sensibility, judgment, common sense, reason and intelligence.

Still, she concludes, “we all share the same desire for continuous improvement of our work for the benefit of our students, the same openness to each other and the world.”

Nicoleta’s dissertation on contemporary American writer Anne Rice broke new ground by showing Rice to be more than just a popular writer spinning sensual best-selling vampire stories. Placing Queen of the Damned (1989) and Pandora (1998) in the historical tradition of female-authored Gothic novels, Nicoleta’s analysis demonstrates Rice’s original contributions to the traditional Gothic conventions, including a transformation of traditional myths. “The Social and Psychological Relevance of Anne Rice’s Queen of the Damned and Pandora in the Context of Gothic Tradition” (Răileanu, 1998) establishes Rice’s work as serious, complex, and deserving of further study.

After completing her doctoral dissertation, Nicoleta returned to her academic life at Lucian Blaga, where she held the second lowest academic position in her department – but where she was also one of only two faculty members (and the only woman) who had earned a Ph.D. Eager to propose new courses based on her recent study of feminist theory and literature, she sought moral support from her American colleagues back in Missouri while simultaneously working hard to maintain “diplomatically correct” behavior so as not to “upset” the academic authorities (email, 5 January 1999). Three months later, when her official diploma reached Sibiu, she emailed to say how happy and proud she was. “At an informal

105 In Memoriam

departmental meeting,” she writes, “I had the opportunity to tell everybody that I received the diploma and invited them to celebrate it with champagne. Some of my colleagues…didn’t even touch it and visibly grew pale, leaving immediately” (email, 31 March 1999). Unlike some of Nicoleta’s more resistant male colleagues, Rector Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop, who had enthusiastically endorsed her study at Missouri, congratulated her on her accomplishment, even suggesting that degree was superior to one she might have earned there.

Around that same time, Romania witnessed a free fall of the national currency (in three days, the living standard decreased by 50%) and military operations started in Yugoslavia, with bombs falling as close as 50 miles from the border. “It’s hard to believe that all this is happening at the end of the 20th century,” she related (email, 31 March 1999). Later, recognizing the precarious political and economic situation and the uncertainty of a prosperous future for Casandra and Ileana in their homeland, Nicoleta and Bebe made the difficult decision to emigrate to Canada, settling in Toronto, which hosts a thriving Romanian population. Canada’s willingness to accept Romanian immigrants, and the U.S.’s unwillingness to do so, is to my country’s shame. We lost the opportunity to welcome an extraordinary family whose qualities would have added immeasurable benefit to our culture.

Our loss was Canada’s gain. Nicoleta held several academic positions in Canada, the most recent at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, not far from the Niagara-on-the-Lake bed-and-breakfast she helped Bebe establish. Among other courses, she particularly appreciated teaching cross-cultural classes wherein she advocated for students understanding of others’ languages, literature, values, and beliefs. Nicoleta and I continued our conversations about pedagogical methodologies to improve student learning. As recently as last October, when my husband and I visited Nicoleta and Bebe and their daughters in Canada, she was focused on the future of Brock University. “How can the university be brought more into alignment with other research universities?” she wanted to know. “How can Brock’s faculty become more oriented toward the scholarship in their fields, join and contribute to the intellectual conversations ongoing in academe?” Brock’s


administrators had been encouraging faculty to think along these lines, and Nicoleta wanted to strategize about how she could help make this happen. I was impressed with her willingness to engage with this long-term goal, even as I knew she would likely not see the goal come to fruition. That’s the kind of future-oriented, optimistic thinker and educator Nicoleta was.

She was a keen observer of politics, of higher education, of culture. Open to new ideas, reflective about what she was seeing, and frank about her observations, Nicoleta never stopped studying and never stopped learning. With her family’s support, she advanced the Romanian-American global diaspora with intelligence, style, grace, perseverance, and grit. Nicoleta leaves a lasting legacy that should inspire women in Romania, Canada, and the U.S., indeed wherever women face obstacles in reaching their goals.

MARTHA A. TOWNSEND

University of Missouri

In Memoriam 107

Vol. 2, No. 3 March 1996

The Writery Publication of the Campus Writing Program University of Missouri, Columbia

A Tale of Two Universities:

the Intersection of Sharing New Ideas

By Nicoleta Răileanu

This is my first visit to the United States. Since most people in Europe and Eastern Europe dream of visiting America at least once in their lifetimes, I’m extremely happy that this opportunity occured. My image of Columbia was built from pieces that I put together from my colleagues’ previous visits to MU, from brochures, and from MU faculty coming to Sibiu. I have now gained a larger perspective and incorporated my own observations, impressions, and attitudes that I hope are not too much biased by my subjectivity. Although I tried to be prepared for what I anticipated my American experience would be like, it is too difficult to foresee everything; the linguistic, cultural and technological barriers are sometimes disconcerting.

Ever since I arrived, I have been trying to keep my eyes open to everything that was happening on the campus. I have been keenly observing life at MU, ready to share mutually beneficial experiences with faculty and staff members. I have had many opportunities to do so.

On the very first day of my arrival I attended the Fall Faculty Workshop, organized by the Campus Writing Program. Looking back, I realize the event was very intriguing to the participants because of the novelty of what was being discussed there. It was hard for me to believe that so many people would spend so much time and energy to improve the


writing competence of their students. In Romania, writing well is basically the students’ concern. Romanian faculty take for granted that once students pass a very demanding and competitive entrance examination, they know all the techniques and standards of writing well. That is not true, and with every written assignment we are more aware that they do not know how to write. I don’t think any one of us has ever considered the possibility of developing a distinct program meant to improve writing across the curriculum. Since our university in Sibiu is now developing and is very receptive to new ideas, changes and enhancements, I am sure it will be willing to consider initiating such a program. This could be, and I very much want it to be, one of the outcomes of my stay here.

Having taken part in most of the activities organized by the Campus Writing Program, having talked to the staff members and tutors and myself having been a tutor for two Writing Intensive courses made me realize how important this kind of program is in the preparation of students for their future careers. I particularly like the informal meetings between the program staff members and faculty who teach Writing Intensive courses (the monthly “brown bag” lunch discussions). The topics go far beyond merely improving writing and touch upon a large variety of other factors in the students’ development (cultural background, age, social psychology). Having seen it working for more than one semester, I have gathered a great deal of information about how this program functions. When Marty Townsend, Director of the Program, visited our university last spring and told us about the program, I don’t think we fully understood what she meant. We didn’t ask for many details, not because we weren’t interested, but to conceal our ignorance of fundamental concepts. The writing across the curriculum is very new to Romanian faculty. Now I’m able to support the setting up of a similar program at the University of Sibiu. There are many ideas that could be applied at our university which I will submit to the administration when I return.

I am also very much impressed by the special attention that international students get here. The International Center is concerned with providing new exchange and learning opportunities for students and faculty from all over the world to come to MU and improve their

109 In Memoriam

educations. I have taken part in a diversity of academic, cultural, and recreational activities. The students from the University of Sibiu who are spending the year here have adapted perfectly to the new kind of life and academic requirements. All have very high grades and many new friends. Students’ social lives here are extremely active and varied. At MU, I’ve noticed the existence of many organizations involved with professional and social issues. We, in Romania, are somehow reluctant to embrace organizations and collective work because of our communist heritage. Some cannot get beyond the implications and bad connotations the communist heritage had for us until very recently. Hopefully, we will soon be able to overcome our inhibitions and realize the very positive aspects of a collective enterprise. I’m sure the young and “uncontaminated” next generation will be able to do that.

As a teacher of English, my interest was piqued by the English Department in Tate Hall. I am very grateful to the professors who encouraged me to sit in on their classes and who spent much of their time talking with me, discussing syllabi, lending me books and helping me get an idea about how they lead their students through the labyrinth of English literature and language. We teach English at the University of Sibiu, but our training and goals are different from the ones I see here. We are more concerned with language acquisition and its strict functioning and use, things so natural to native speakers. Nevertheless, there are also similarities in terms of concerns and material taught. Certain methods concerning new fields and angles of exploration in literature can be applied at our university in Sibiu as well. I’ m thinking specifically of a Women’s Studies course that would help fill a void of courses never before taught in Sibiu. The students in our college are mostly women; I’m positive such an initiative would be welcome.

From my experience here, I notice a preference for more practically-oriented approaches in all fields. Our system values more theoretical, prescriptive approaches, which we consider more rigorous. This is a cultural difference which perhaps reflects a lack of confidence in our own capacity to make the right decision. It is difficult to suddenly replace the authority with democracy, and maintain an equilibrium between imagination, personal opinion, creativity, sensibility, judgment,


common sense, reason and intelligence. In my country, people are generally afraid of change. Romanians feel threatened and insecure if we do not relate to a stable reference point granting validity to our system of values. The professor remains the authority because of his or her experience and not many are willing to give up that position. I notice that faculty members here are very generous in encouraging their students to present and support opinions that are sometimes very original, saying that if one original idea out of many proves to be good, this is an enormous gain. It encourages creativity and diversity without which not even the cyber-society can do.

Speaking of technology, this was perhaps the most difficult barrier for me to pass. Once I freed myself from preconceived idiosyncrasies, I began to love working on computers. I also learned how computers are immensely helpful in teaching language and literature. I attended some workshops on computers as teaching aids and I am very convinced of their efficiency. Unfortunately, our students cannot yet benefit from these aids because equipment is still very expensive. Education is free for citizens in Romania, but it is financially dependent on the government which has other priorities.

MU also has priorities. I understand that low funding for the library has been a controversial topic for this research university, but from my perspective, everyone here is very lucky to have at their disposal these rich collections of books and periodicals. I remember having spent days in the library after arriving here, simply walking and looking around, getting lost among endless shelves, astounded at the multitude of choices for different subjects. Also new to me was that I could pick out any book I wanted. Big libraries in Romania do not have free access; there is always a librarian bringing the books to you. This system prevents the reader from seeing what other books the library possesses, crucial to investigation, thus limiting access. It was very difficult to discipline myself and resist the temptation to look at books other than those that were close to the call number that I initially needed.

There are many more things to say about my experience here, about the wonderful people I met, about different academic events that I took part in, about life-long travel projects that came true, about the richness

111 In Memoriam

and density of every single day at MU. There are some differences between our universities that came to my mind. In terms of similarities, I think we all share the same desire for continuous improvement of our work for the benefit of our students, the same openness to each other and to the world.

Reviews 112

Reviews

Reviews 113

Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U.P., 2012. £19.95 cloth). Pp. 350. ISBN 9780691114170. At a time when the professional reader of literature regards with concern the disappearance of books that seems to be accompanying the proliferation of texts, Leah Price’s new study serves as a reminder that the distinction between text and book was, if possible, even more rife in Victorian times than it is in the 21st century. A contribution to the field of book history, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain aims to be, by the author’s own admission, a sequel to Ernst Robert Curtius’s seminal 1953 work, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages,1 particularly to the chapter titled “The Book as Symbol,” whose technological, legal and literary concerns it takes as its starting points (11). It is also a prequel, one might add, to Janice Radway’s equally influential anthropological study of the reading habits of American housewives during the Cold War era. Price proposes, on the one hand, to offer a corrective to the “historical myth” that describes textuality as “the source of interiority, authenticity and selfhood” (16) and, on the other, to recover fictional and non-fictional accounts of the various uses to which books were put by categories less frequently associated with reading and more typically represented as handling or circulating books, such as children, women, servants, but also publishers, book merchants, managers of circulating libraries, missionaries and non-European people.

An introductory chapter is dedicated to the challenges of book history and to Price’s own methodology. As the book historian turns her attention from the circumstances of book production to those of consumption, she finds that reading is an activity which leaves remarkably few physical traces, while other uses that are made of books are much more evident in time; a book whose pages were never cut is in this sense more eloquent than one which has evidently been read but does not contain the reader’s notes. The history of reading therefore tends to be an account of textual interpretation rather than a history of the book as


object. Price tracks a tradition of downplaying the corporeality of books that goes well beyond the literary criticism of the 20th century and originates in a discourse of self-validation that foregrounds their role in fostering morality and intellection, even as it associates them, literally or metaphorically, with the bodies of animals from which they were made or with food, whether for thought or for the spirit, or foregoing food in order to save money for books.

Conversely, Price undertakes to “study books without privileging reading” (20). Such an enterprise may seem paradoxical, as much of the evidence she relies on is textual and therefore accessible to her through reading in the most literal sense. The interest of Price’s study resides in the fact that it is precisely textual evidence that reveals that reading, whether literalised or metaphorised, is only one of the gendered, class-specific uses of books and newspapers which were acknowledged by the Victorians. What Price proposes is therefore to avoid what has become, under the impact of literary theory, the dominant sense of reading, namely critical interpretation, and with it, much of the poststructuralist jargon. She takes instead a cultural materialism-inflected approach to print that historicises its various uses along the accustomed lines of gender, class, age, level of literacy, ideological allegiance etc. in order to investigate the multiple functions and meanings with which books were invested in the 19th century.

The dissociation of textuality from the materiality of books is productive of a series of informative oppositions which the author organises into two sections, titled “Selfish Fictions” and “Bookish Transactions,” respectively. These oppositions correspond to differences in genres, classes of audience, and models of literacy. More specifically, they reveal how reading practices, preferred genres and narrative modes become markers and determinants of the socio-political and sectarian identities of the readers. It also emerges that these imbrications of reading and identity are represented differently in various genres, such that comedies of manners such as Trollope’s Parliamentary novels tend to have the husband hiding behind a newspaper while the wife pretends to be reading a novel, whereas the bildungsroman, a “more Manichean subgenre,”

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projects the contrast between word and object at once onto a moral axis (a love for tattered pages signifies virtue; for morocco albums, vulgarity), a formal hierarchy (protagonists use the book as a mental prompt, minor characters as a manual prop), and a social structure (one of the many fantasies that the bildungsroman fulfills is that the reader’s inner resources can overcome economic constraints). (73)

To the gendering of genres illustrated in Trollope’s novels, the bildungsroman counterpoises the “absorbent book” but also the “weaponized book” (72, 73) which tend to differentiate characters in terms of age. Despite the frequency of these figurations of books as objects, however, both types of novels assume that “the encounter with a book [accounts] for the development of a self” (107). It-narratives, on the other hand, take the book-object itself as their protagonist, turning its ‘biography’ into a moralising tale.

To distinguish between the textuality and materiality of printed matter is, moreover, to note the difference between Benedict Anderson’s narrative of newspapers bringing readers together and imparting a sense of simultaneity of purpose, of belonging to an “imagined community,” and the Victorian reader’s fear that they had been soiled or contaminated by the hands of other readers, or the practice of holding the newspaper at such an angle as to avoid communication with people one had to share a space with. In other words, books and newspapers separate people as often as they unite them, and these relations are not restricted to author and reader, the community of a certain book’s readers, or to reader and his audience – i.e., those who share a text; rather, they may juxtapose reader and non-reader, buyer and supplier, or even members of the same household.

As with all things Victorian, the most productive of these oppositions remains the one between the private and the public spheres. In Price’s words, “Within a culture where book is to text as outside to inside, secular middle-class fictions and Evangelical tracts alike make the relation between those terms a surrogate for the relation of the material world to the inner life – whether that inner life belongs to their characters or to their readers” (16). The Enlightenment assumption that reading is constitutive of subjectivity, however, became imperilled as the Victorians invented institutions that distributed printed matter freely: “Where the


secular press trusted print to lift individuals out of their social origin, the niche marketing pioneered by Evangelical publishers and commercial advertisers alike vested it instead with the power to mark age, gender, and class” (139). Not only does this surfeit of print become a burden for people who have no use for it, but, Price rightly comments, by “disjoining owning from choosing” (139) it reinforces a certain positioning of the recipient. Thus, “[w]here American slave narratives made literacy both symbol of, and means to, freedom, contemporaneous British tracts make receiving books a sign of servants’ dependence” (184). Price cites contemporary expressions of concern over the unwarranted uses that might be made of such free bibles and tracts – from worshipping the book rather than the god that is revealed in it to selling the book for profit. This concern engendered interrogations of the ethics of current phenomena such as, on the one hand, the unprecedented diversification of reading matter in terms of genre, content, style, but also production/ distribution costs, and, on the other, the attempt to align the identity of the characters with the identity of the readers and use books for social engineering purposes. By expressing such misgivings, it emerges, the Victorians foreshadowed and enabled some of the lines of enquiry that shaped 20th-century critical thinking about the disruptive and destabilising potential of everyday practices.

Price’s book is erudite and rich in details and anecdotes, compelling and eminently readable. It puts reading practices into perspective by drawing on a vast and varied range of textual data, from iconic novels such as David Copperfield, Jane Eyre or The Mill on the Floss, to it-narratives, Punch illustrations and their captions, life writing and religious tracts. As the author herself acknowledges, this cumulative method ultimately illustrates Natalie Davis’s statement according to which the book is “not merely a source for ideas ... but a carrier of relationships” (qtd. in Price 260). Representations of activities involving printed matter, like the expression of attitudes towards its various forms and genres, serve to recuperate a sense of the context of the discrepancies between the discourse of reading and the practice of reading in Victorian Britain.

ANA-KARINA SCHNEIDER Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu

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Note: 1 Recently re-issued, also by Princeton U.P. (2013), with a new introduction by Colin Burrow.

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Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, Ronald Rychlak, Disinformation:

Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining

Freedom, Attacking Religion, and Promoting Terrorism

(Washington, D.C.: WND Books, 2013. $14.95 hardcover). Pp. viii+428 ISBN 978-1-936-48860-5. Stan Moore, Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the

West (USA, WND Films, 2013, 160 mins).

What is history? What is historical truth? What can we hope to understand about political realities? Is there a gap between real historical facts and historical narratives about the past? These may be pressing questions for those who, after reading a book or watching a documentary, are left defenseless and perplexed and that is exactly the situation in which we may find ourselves after a close reading of both the book co-authored by Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, Disinformation: Former Spy Chief Reveals Secret Strategies for Undermining Freedom, Attacking

Religion, and Promoting Terrorism (WND Books, 2013) and the complementary two-disc documentary directed and written by Stan Moore, Disinformation: The Secret Strategy to Destroy the West (WND Films, 2013). Both the book and the filmic script take on the same topic (i.e., disinformation), which I would deem – following the authors’ recommendations – as the catalyst for the understanding and interpretation of past, recent, present and future history. The present review will provide further reflections on the very controversial and hallucinating concept of disinformation, considering the narrative of the two-hour documentary film, since it addresses the subject matter in a more eloquent, emotionally appealing and representationally illustrative manner in comparison with the book.

The documentary approach purports to answer all the above-formulated questions by postulating stupefying alternatives to what we know and usually recognize as “official truth.” The subsequent message is to “move beyond” superficial facts and “amusing” information: one interviewed character explains that “to amuse” is equivalent to “without

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thinking”, since the privative “a” is attached to “muse” (i.e., to think). So the key for understanding what really happens is to think and this means to resist seduction, not be enchanted by mainstream historical narratives, to break the codes of political actions. Where should we start? What is the surface of things and what are the deep structures? Confronted with conspiratorial events, to think is tantamount to a systematic revision of history or to an epistemic reconstruction of scientific history by working with veracious and explanatory counterfactuals.

This is what Ion Mihai Pacepa, one of the most notorious figures of political dissidence and the emblematic character who defected to the United States in the twentieth century, proposed as a solution to escaping what he called “the Marxist curse.” In retrospective, one might appreciate that the entire life and political career of the Romanian dissident has been spent in an attempt to systematically demystify the spell of communism in some exorcising works, including his famous 1987 book Red Horizons and its 1990 sequel dedicated to the denunciation of Ceausescu’s dictatorial regime and subsequent counterpoint approaches to the “legacy of Kremlin” (1993) or the assassination of the American president Kennedy (2007). However, in 2013 Pacepa and Rychlak (a university law professor) published a comprehensive book in which they postulated an all-encompassing and revisionist theoretical hypothesis of international politics called “disinformation.” During the documentary Pacepa is but one of the characters – his voice in the background (associated with only the shadow of his face because of his still undercover status in the United States) standing for the guiding thread of the narrative flow, arguing for a radical reinterpretation of world history especially after 1945. Researchers, ex-activists, former US political officials, journalists joined Pacepa’s efforts to draw attention to the systematic distortions that have infected human minds with the malefic instruments of disinformation.

Accordingly, disinformation becomes both the conceptual structure and the methodological lens through which the post-war ideological warfare between Soviet communism and United States capitalism is unveiled. Conceptually, as the documentary reveals, disinformation consists of a set of strategic means, actions and plans conceived in order to “deceive the West” (Pacepa); procedurally, it means lying, stealing,


killing, misleading, distorting; methodologically, disinformation starts from disseminating false information through any propagandistic means possible by a legitimate and credible source. Each of these methodological components is extensively detailed: one of the most subtle tactics of building falsehood is the process of “framing” (i.e., deliberately changing the past of a person, place or historical context). The most efficient propagandistic means for spreading disinformation are widely read newspapers (The New Republic, Newsweek), colleges and universities through which leftist professors disseminate Marxist ideology and communist propaganda (one of the most notorious cases being that of Howard Zinn’s monumental history book A People’s History of the United States), prestigious international organizations usually funded by the FSB (such as the World Peace Council), trained activists, spies and terrorists (Jeremiah Wright – the spiritual advisor of Barack Obama, Lee Harvey Oswald – trained by the KGB in the strategy of disinformation, or John Kerry – the promoter of anti-war messages in the Vietnam era are just a few examples) and Hollywood movies (film director Oliver Stone being the master of disinformation strategy, while films such as Bowling

for Columbine, Full Metal Jacket, Syriana and the more recent The Company You Keep are targeted as efficient means of distorting young people’s minds).

There are two fundamental goals of disinformation strategy explicitly stated by Ion Mihai Pacepa: 1) “to counteract American efforts to stop communist expansion”; and 2) “to create doubt around the world about American power, judgment and credibility”. Historically, the disinformation strategy has its roots in Russia, both as religious disinformation (used by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century) and political disinformation (invented by Prince Potemkin in the 18th century). But the master of disinformation strategy, who refined its modalities, was the Chairman of Soviet KGB, Yuri Andropov; his legacy has been pervasive in all the activities of the KGB (later renamed FSB) and is still the leading force of the Russian Federation’s foreign policy.

Empowered by such a complex approach of “disinformation strategy”, the two-part documentary (“The Age of Totalitarians” and “Terrorism and Disinformation in the Modern World”) examines, through

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quite plausible and persuasive instantiations, the historical development of this strategy, from its large-scale employment during the Cold War period to present-day political realities. I will select some relevant and interesting examples.

From the very beginning, the strategy of communist disinformation contains the explicit aim of subverting religion: the religious education that Pacepa received in his childhood was perverted during his youth by the teachings of the Communist Manifesto preaching the substitution of God with man and decreeing the totalitarian state as the liberator. During his first night after defecting to the United States, Pacepa’s confession about praying after so many years signified a return to normalcy and to the perennial values of human life. In the first part of the documentary, the Liberation Theology movement which is depicted as a Soviet invention is still active in the United States as an organization spreading a certain kind of secular morality to the detriment of the traditional values of Christianity. According to this new morality, Pacepa reminds us of Nikita Khrushchev, who insisted that stealing from capitalism was a moral duty of communists. The so-called cultural wars of the 1960s represented a disguised disinformation strategy functioning as a kind of spiritual rebirth. The subtext of the leftist movements of the 1960s called for a second American revolution. Accordingly, the political message of the 1960s reversed the traditional values that animated the founding fathers at the end of the 18th century, symbolizing the “downstream of culture”. At the end of the documentary’s second part, Pacepa calls for a return to the American traditions of “patriotism, honesty and fairness” as true solutions to combat the false Marxist idealism.

The disinformation strategy took various facets during the 20th century Soviet communism; it started with the promotion of clandestine translations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, disseminated in the Middle East in order to fuel anti-American and antisemitic hatred. But the technique of disinformation was taken to extremes by the Soviet leader of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, during Khrushchev’s dictatorship. Andropov designed the disinformation strategy as total ideological warfare: during a meeting in Moscow, he explicitly told Pacepa about his detailed plans to definitively discredit the United States and its traditional ally, Israel. One


might notice that the Soviets’ doctrine of systematic disinformation competed with the doctrine of containment formulated in the United States. Professional politicians put to work insidious mechanisms of subversion, manipulation and general confusion and that was the very meaning of the ideological conflict. Pacepa warns us that the recent political turmoil in the Middle East represents the ongoing process of disinformation envisaged by Andropov.

Especially during the second part of the documentary, all the interviewed figures suggest that the war on terrorism campaign initiated by president Bush in 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, is also a part of this all-encompassing disinformation strategy orchestrated by the Russians to infect the American society. According to the suggestion, the real enemy of the United States is not the Muslim world, but the Russian Federation, which trained and indoctrinated people and organizations from the Middle East, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. This oversimplification of a very complex global political reality is supported by rather oblique arguments: the famous statement “The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy” or the interpretations of the Obama administration’s ideological orientation as “adjusted communism” (Daniel Horowitz) are present avatars of the disinformation strategy. In order to make the disinformation strategy effective, the communists and their followers learned Antonio Gramsci’s lesson, which associated radical transformations with the “long march” to conquer the institutions.

One special focus of the documentary is the negative role of the universities and the entire educational system in the United States, which decisively contributed to disinformation. Prestigious intellectuals and underground professors spreading Marxist teachings disguised as liberal values succeeded in perverting the minds of young generations. One illustration of this is professor Larry Aronson, the mentor of one of the young terrorists who were responsible for the Boston marathon bombings in 2013.

Having considered some of the important pieces composing the complicated puzzle that is the disinformation strategy as told by Pacepa and his ideological supporters, one crucial question remains: what is historical truth? If integral and unequivocal historical knowledge is

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utopian, can we at least hope for rigorous research aiming at dismantling partisan interpretations? Wandering through the maze of perverted stories and distorted information one might easily lose critical judgment and the power to discern between right and wrong.

Another documentary, The Power of Nightmares (BBC, 2004), proposes a different perspective by associating the rigid neo-conservative ideology with the fundamentalist doctrine of Islamism, using the same narrative procedure of unveiling the truth behind a conspiratorial strategy. A possible solution to overcoming historical falsifications and pursuing scientific objectivity in history would be – in the context of the considerations above – a thorough examination of communism and communist regimes. A “lucid trial” of communism in the same way the trial of Nazism was conducted might contribute to the demystification of communist and post-communist propaganda. The Black Book of

Communism, published for the first time in France in 1997, did not have the impact and the symbolic force that the Nuremberg trials had immediately after World War II. On the other hand, the end of the Cold War in 1989 led many people to believe that negotiating with communists was possible and the transition to democratic regimes could become an effective reality. In some Eastern European countries, the syntagm “communism with a human face” became an alternative for all those who feared free competition and capitalist economy. There are still many nostalgic citizens in the ex-Soviet satellites who give credit to controversial ex-communist figures. Until this trial of communism is carried out, such uncertainties and revisionist histories will never cease to cause perplexity and generate doubts.

GABRIEL C. GHERASIM Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca

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Andrei Codrescu, Bibliodeath: My Archives, With Life in Footnotes (ANTIBOOKCLUB, 2012. $25 paperback). Pp. 147. ISBN 978-0-9838683-3-0.

We often spoke our verses louder to cover the earth shaking grunts of the First Secretary of Sibiu’s Communist Party a floor above us when he made love to his secretary on Baron von Brukenthal’s desk. At present, I don’t yet feel fully posthuman.

Andrei Codrescu

The first epigraph above, while delightful in its own right, is not just gratuitous ribaldry. It sheds light on three principal narrative threads in Andrei Codrescu’s new book, Bibliodeath: 1) the challenge and seduction of poetry; 2) the changing significance of the archive in the post-Gutenberg universe; and 3) 1 & 2’s intersections with this Romanian-American’s life in Romania and America. I hope to make all of this clear soon enough.

The book itself is rather unique. It comes in a package resembling a DVD jacket with a detail from Albrecht Durer’s Apocalypse showing St. John devouring the Book (1498) and there is as much space given to footnotes as to the “main text” of Codrescu’s densely poetic and playful prose. The footnotes are just as often sidebars. And there are no chapters, the book consists of one long essay, really, a meditation on the book and the archive in the Digital Age. Codrescu’s ruminations were probably triggered by his recent retirement from teaching at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and the depositing of his own personal archives (books, chapbooks, notebooks, letters, papers, lectures, reviews, scribblings) with LSU’s Hill Memorial Library and the Slavic Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Andrei Codrescu grew up under communism as a kid of “unhealthy origins” (i.e. Jewish) in the Transylvanian city of Sibiu, attended the highly-regarded Gheorghe Lazar Lyceum, his high school, in the city center, frequented the city’s venerable Astra Library with its old

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manuscripts, as well as patronizing a low-life bar called the Golden Barrel, and attended the weekly Wednesday night gatherings of the Sibiu Writer’s Workshop beginning at age 14. His memory of the characters who frequented the suffocatingly provincial and thoroughly surveilled “poetry Wednesdays” is very sharp – the jeweler who collected books, the portly doctor, the “bookish old maid who wept at the slightest hint of sentiment,” the judges who sat under framed lithographs of the Fathers of Communism, the Workshop Chairman who took the minutes and delivered them “one floor up to the office of a bald man with a rheumy eye who was the city’s ‘ideological instructor’ and censor.” Codrescu, like many of his intellectual contemporaries in the communist world, took away from this experience the awesome (and awful) significance those in authority assigned to the written word. (A perverse kind of nostalgia can be the product of this experience among those writers who feel “seduced and abandoned” by today’s heedless neo-liberalism.) In a characteristic Codrescu formulation, he reminisces, “I remember Sibiu fondly as the locus of my unhappy childhood.”

Codrescu and his mother immigrated to the United States in 1966 when he was 19. He spoke no English (German, Hungarian, Romanian and French were no strangers to him) but he had already been converted to the “religion of poetry” and had taken to heart the advice given to him by Romanian poet Nichita Stanescu, “English is the future’s lingua franca.” Also, he confesses, “I wanted to be ‘between the covers,’ in books and in the flesh.” (This affirms what Codrescu once told me personally, “I learned English at a break-neck speed because there were a few things I wanted to communicate immediately to girls.”)

Codrescu’s literary activity in the United States started in 1970. His experiences in America began in Detroit, then New York, San Francisco, Baltimore and eventually to Baton Rouge and New Orleans. He now lives in the Ozarks near Buffalo River National Park. His career in the United States has been one of poet, professor, novelist, cultural critic, political commentator, editor of the highly regarded Dada, Surrealist and American Beat-inspired Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas (1983-1996 in paper, and afterwards online), the subject of at least two documentary films that come to mind, and as a popular commentator on National Public


Radio’s news program, “All Things Considered,” where he perfected a kind of “prose poem” or “radio essay,” an “audio column” for an audience of eventually around 13 million listeners.

Codrescu’s literary influences constitute a remarkable mélange of Romanian (European) and American sources. I like his description of his early “poetic totems” in Romania: “The books I read often provided me with equipment, as if I was preparing to climb Everest: Rilke donated the wings, Arghezi, a carving knife, Blaga, a sheepskin, Eliade a filigree, Cioran a sinister chuckle, Tzara a hat made from a newspaper, and Nina Cassian handed me a seahorse on a window-sill while it snowed in the mountains.” {R.I.P. Nina Cassian, 1924-2014.} In Bibliodeath, it is a bit dizzying to read about his boyhood “poetic totems” intermingling with his new America sources of inspiration – to see Bob Dylan and Nichita Stanescu, Mircea Eliade and Allen Ginsberg, Tristan Tzara and Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and Ted Berrigan share the same page. Interestingly though, Codrescu chafes at the question of his identity when it is posed to him, as it inevitably is, upon return visits to Romania,

My spiritual real estate is vast and nonspecific…the simple-minded impulse to ask that question is unconsciously resentful, it rests on the belief that leaving one’s home without the hope of return represents an irremediable loss…. This is pure schlock… Nonetheless, natives (with the help of the state) built a catapult of guilt from their oedipal imaging of exiles’ “longing” for the mother-language and their “betrayal” of the fatherland. The nation-state used this guilt as a unit of currency. It also mined the frontiers, just to make sure.

Codrescu does not feel nostalgic about Romania, or lost as an “exile” relegated to the incomplete status of a “hyphenated American.” That, simply, is not his cup of tea. The patriotism he has for Romania is not a manipulated one, he is quick to tell you, and it has been far more productive than it would have been had he stayed in the land of his birth.

The second identifiable vein of thought in Bibliodeath, after the autobiographical, focuses on the “dematerialization of the archive” in the Digital Age. Codrescu is a pragmatic thinker and he realizes that this replacement of the physical archive of boxes and paper by “e-era archives” is virtually (sorry!) inevitable. He even joking refers to

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Buckminster Fuller’s (at the time “wacky”) claim that human beings are uniquely fitted to “evolve” to be at the service of machines. Still, as he puts it, “I don’t yet feel fully posthuman.” He is not prepared to go quietly into the night of the e-archival repository. Codrescu is attached to what Jacques Derrida might call the “metaphysics of presence,” to the Human Stain, to a body with organs, and he rejects the utopian claims for living in the light, the transparency promised by the “clean, well-lighted place” of the electronic archive:

Digital libraries [archives too] (the clouds) will be more malleable, easier to use, more responsive to researchers, but always and only digital…The handling of the material touched by a poet will be out of reach for the sensualist researcher who likes to palpate, sniff and count strikethroughs.

Codrescu continues in this vein with scholarly and poetic wit and charm. Much of his argument about the archives today reminds one of the critiques of “postmodernism” leveled by Jean Baudrillard’s playful analysis of simulacra. This is Codrescu:

In the absence of the human stain the studious internaut will be equipped with projections that float forever in digital symmetry. Material dirt, that is to say non-digital dirt, will be a secret currency, the “gold” that guarantees the ongoing existence of human beings. The digital drains the body from the text, that is to say it deprives the text of its gravity by stealing its dirt, the sweat, tears, sperm, blood, gooey sentiment, found junk, folk carving, craving for sugar; it replaces the gravity of random traces with information reduced to (perfect) code.

And this is Baudrillard’s famous critique of Michel Foucault’s influential theory of power:

Power [according to Foucault, which is also reflected in his flawless writing] has no vacuum, no phantasm, no backfiring, but a fluid objectivity…. [It] is the irreversible principle of organization because it fabricates the real (always more and more of the real), effecting a quadrature, nomenclature, and dictature without appeal; nowhere does it cancel itself out, become entangled in itself, or mingle with death.1

The archive as body (of work) with organs – i.e. not a digital “body without organs” – presents itself in a Codrescu footnote that makes one


cringe and is worthy of Antonin Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty. Codrescu reminds us that the writer Richard Brautigan, “blew his brains out, literally blew his mind. What you might not be aware of is that he blew his brains out all over the pages of his last manuscript. I’ve handled them, archived them…” Now one needn’t be this graphic to make the point that the “postmodern archive” in all of its “fluid objectivity” leaves much of the process of literature out of literature and the process is one of the reasons one traditionally has turned to a writer’s archive for enlightenment. Codrescu remembers his first encounter with medieval manuscripts at Astra Library in Sibiu as a schoolboy; he writes of the delight he experienced (illicitly) touching (with Susan Sontag) a copy of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophie Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published 5 July 1687 and hand-notated by Newton himself; insists that Thomas Jefferson’s digital archives will never capture the “artifactuality of his library itself” – his “original cataloguing system…and the unique circular construction of his bookcases”; and that “one might label a virtual exposition of Holocaust objects “horror,” but nothing will approximate the loneliness of the scholar touching a pair of reading glasses found at Auschwitz, except the Unarchive of the (flesh) person who once wore them.”2

Codrescu has further dark – decidedly dystopian – thoughts about digital archives, thoughts more explicitly political in nature: “One of my darker thoughts about the new technologies of storage and production is that they are designed to contain the record of the past (under the guise of preserving it) in order to destroy it.” (I have to grant the common sense appeal of this kind of paranoia – I still retain the paper receipts from all my ATM/bankomat transactions until I, for no reason, eventually toss them in the trash.) And Codrescu extends his concerns to Facebook and social networking:

This new, interconnected social “I” at work, producing octopus-like protuberances that connect with the octoprotuberances of others, is an “I” even falser than the good old hubristic “I”…. A non-conforming “self” could simply not exist in a social network, because there is nothing here to not conform to. Everything a social “I” transmits over the network is a plea for agreement with another octoprotuberance.

In the factories of “social networks,” which look like the idealized

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kibbutzim of yesteryear, we are voluntary workers. The owners of these factories mine us for advertising. They keep us under constant surveillance mainly for their profit, but they perform double-duty by providing the state with data for policing…. The Internet State is a Police State that uses a stylish pleasure-inducing device to take stock of our digits, instead of a thumb-screw.

Whatever one makes of these observations, influential sociologists are making similar arguments about societies of “liquid surveillance,” where “deepening dependency is disguised as and redubbed the progress of autonomy.”3 The gist of Codrescu’s critique of the utopia of the digital archive and the Digital Age lies in his understanding of the challenge and seduction of poetry, the third vein of thought running through the pages of Bibliodeath.

All of these ruminations in this delightfully provocative and sometimes downright profound book stir from a place called poetry. Codrescu has deep suspicions about utopias and (I don’t have the time to explicate) even dreams and imagination. After all, he grew up in the “Golden Age” of “compulsory optimism” which was Ceaușescu’s communist Romania. So when Andrei Codrescu arrived in the United States and learned the English language at the same time he took to American poetry and immersed himself in the American Dream – while we may safely say that his politics were/are liberal Left – he resisted the charms of the “fortune cookie revolutions of J.P. Sartre and Guy Debord, whose analyses were in no way wrong, but whose prescriptions, in my view, lacked poetry.”

Poetry for Codrescu is embodied (he cites Robert Creeley, “the body is the plan,” and Tristan Tzara, “All thought is formed in the mouth”4) and in many ways, dystopian. Poetry “pokes holes” in perfect narratives, in idealized memories, like the hole in the December, 1989 Romanian flag that had the communist insignia cut out of it.5 It has the Human Stain (and certainly not at the expense of the erotic), it has negative spaces, gaps, surprises, the ludic, the secondary, it resurrects what is forgotten (the Archives of Amnesia), dispersed, absent (these, too, have archives). This is poetry’s challenge and seduction as one might seek and find it in the Codrescu Archive. The Romanian poet and philosopher, Lucian Blaga, would call it the luciferic.6 Codrescu writes, “Poetry is a


collaboration between the demon who possesses the poet and the intelligence that studies it.”

“The human traces are not just at odds with the digital utopia, they are actively fighting it. The traces don’t make (good) sense, even after they have been carefully catalogued, chronicled, preserved. What happened is mostly without happy endings.” Even the “happy endings” of the First Secretary of the Sibiu branch of the Communist Party, which may have contributed to the amplitude of Andrei Codrescu’s young poetic voice at the Sibiu Writers’ Workshop, did not have a Happy Ending.

WILLIAM STEARNS

Independent Scholar

Notes: 1 Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 9-10,40. 2 C.K. Williams evokes a similar, but differently nuanced argument, in his poem, “After Auschwitz” in Repairs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 8-10. 3 Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance (Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press 2013), 112. 4 Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2009), 11. 5 Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return (New York: William Morrow and Company 1991). 6 Virgil Nemoianu, A Theory of the Secondary: Literature, Progress and Reaction (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press 1989).

Reviews 131

Angela E. Stent. The Limits of Partnership: U.S. – Russia Relations

in the Twenty-First Century. (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014. £24.95 cloth). Pp. 355. ISBN 978-0-691-15297-4. Looking at the literature of the Cold War prior to 9/11, one cannot help noting it replicates in part the binarism characterising the phenomenon itself. Binary concepts of course are structurally embedded in the Cold war matrix, firmly fixed in its discourse, forming an integral part of the Cold War rhetoric. Clear-cut categories such as: socialism/ capitalism, totalitarian/liberal, the East/West divide, the ’with us or against us’, and ’state’ versus ’people’ idioms resulted in powerful and productive dominants of an almost memetic value. Engulfed in the analysis of its ideological models and geopolitics, the Cold War studies of the pre-9/11era had less attention to pay to the cultural determinants at work on the two sides of the Iron Curtain.

For a considerable while, in the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, cold war and cold-war style conflicts appeared obsolete, and the very idea of historic recurrence, of history repeating itself, ’as tragedy or farce’, a thing of the past. By virtue of the new divisive consciousness that it engendered, 9/11 uncompromisingly exposed the received ideas informing black-and-white, dichotomic thinking. The easy dualism underpinning the cultural logic of the Cold War was sharply thrown into relief in the context of post-9/11cultural paradigms, and with it the ‘grand narratives’ constitutive of Cold War cultures. Thus in the ‘post-identity’ era ushered in by 9/11, scholarship in the field started to respond to the increasing need to rethink Cold War cultures in history, beyond the ideological and the doctrinaire, in terms of the complexities involved in their relative formations.

Part of this new, cross-cultural body of work, Angela E. Stent’s book is an effort to factor in the historical continuities and cultural filiations in the Cold War legacy, with a view to unpacking the challenges and cliches in contemporary US-Russia relations. It is an attempt to


examine Russian-American cooperation in transnational context by tapping into deep-seated, indeed attavistic, aspects of culture memory. To do so, Stent takes a diachronic approach tracing the major events in US-Russian relations and comprising a political rationale of what she calls a ”still difficult indeed antagonistic relationship” (3). Stent looks at ’the trials and tribulations’ of this relationship from George W. Bush to the Obama administration, identifying the various ’resets’ of US-Russian affairs since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. The study sheds meaningful light on significant aspects of transatlantic kinship and Western confluences and seeks to define the core values of Russian cultural identity against the backdrop of the relationship between the US and western European states. Although secondary in scope, the exploration of the nature of the divide is one of utmost relevance to an analogous treatment of global cleavage in light of the various departures from the Cold War rift accounting for the polarisation phenomenon and the new world elites twenty years on. Stent addresses NATO’s pivotal role in negotiating between democracy and autocracy and the ’neuralgic issues’ at the White House and Kremlin after the demise of the USSR.

Central to Stent’s enquiry is disconnecting Russia and Soviet communism, two conceptual entities often collapsed in Western mentality and imagination. Stent calls attention to the need to think former USSR beyond categories such as communism, internationalism, nationalism, placing special emphasis on policy-making and the part played by’Bushism’ and ’Putinism’ in the shaping of U.S. and Russian diplomatic relations. Russian sensibility thus becomes one of the scholar’s chief concerns, particularly regarding Russia’s place in Europe:

Where does Russia belong? As the largest country on earth, two thirds of which is geographically in Asia, Russia views itself as both a European and an Asian country. Yet culturally Russians are Europeans. Whereas Russian leaders have been attracted to Europe as an economic model and since Peter the Great have sought to emulate Western technological achievements, they have generallty been antagonistic toward the West’s political system. The values associated with the European Enlightenment –individual rights, rule of law, due process, property rights – have been espoused only by small groups of the liberal intelligentsia, be it in tsarist, Soviet, or post-Soviet times. This ambivalence about Western values has had a major impact on Russia’s relations with European and Euro-Atlantic

133 Reviews

structures. Russia’s place in Europe became one of the most neuralgic issues in Moscow’s ties with the West. (36)

Whereas not exactly the justification of Russia’s expansionist attitudes one may seek in the aftermath of the Euromaidan movement, the ’battle for Ukraine’ and the ’Crimean operation’, Stent’s sharp and comprehensive overview of US-Russian cooperation post-Cold War provides value judgements that help foreground Eurasian dominance power in global times, amid the Snowden affair, and local and global wars:

U.S. – Russian relations can be understood only in the context of both countries striving to come to terms with the legacy of the Cold War and its aftermath. The United States considered the collapse of the USSR a victory for Western interests and democratic values. But that is not how it was seen by much of the Soviet population. It was difficult for them to accept that the USSR had expired because of its own internal weaknesses. Mikhail Gorbachev had come to power vowing to make the USSR a stronger, more effective global actor, not to preside over its demise. But the economic reforms he introduced were too little, too late, and he was hit hard by the falling price of oil, the USSR’s major export commodity, and a neo-Stalinist economic system that was unreformable because the Communist Party feared losing political control. What ultimately doomed Gorbachev’s experiment at greater political openness and economic restructuring (glasnost and perestroika as they were known in Russia) was the failure to sustain economic growth and solvency along with the inability to deal with what the Bolsheviks had called the ”nationalities question.” His attempt to create a federal state that would have devolved real power to the USSR’s constituent ethnically based national republics, and which was at the same time acceptable to his more hard-line opponents, failed. (3)

A descriptive and integrative type of work, The Limits of Partnership contributes to a renewed understanding of the legacy of the Cold war, of the cultural mechanisms underlying its practices, the ebb and flow, the meanderings and limitations of ideology, viewed in transnational perspective. Stent’s is without doubt a particularly apt and timely undertaking,one whose pertinence is fully probed by the crisis in Ukraine that sparked a proliferation of discourse on the "new Cold War." This is


certainly a cogent political analysis of the postcommunist architecture in Europe as it profiles itself at this juncture in the twenty-first century. Angela Stent is Director of the Centre for Eurasian, Russian and East

European Studies at Georgetown University and Russian affairs adviser under President Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

ADRIANA NEAGU

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca


Notes on Contributors Dana ALTMAN is a Romanian expatriate scholar and art critic living in New York. She is the author of two books on visual art and poetry as well as of numerous critical articles that appeared in publications such as Artphoto, Arta, Observator Cultural, ArtHoc, Tribuna, Sinteza. A graduate of Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, she earned her BA in Romanian and English Philology in 1990 and went on to study Literary Theory at Exeter College, Oxford. She holds a doctoral degree in general linguistics from Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca with a dissertation on text theory and semantics about the poet Ion Vinea. She is the director of a well-established contemporary art gallery in New York City. E-mail: [email protected] An Assistant Professor of English at Saint Francis University, Pennsylvania, Roxana L. CAZAN teaches courses in world literature, postcolonial literature, immigration and diaspora studies. Her most recent scholarly project problematizes the paradigm of motherhood in the United States by investigating Romanian-American literary and cultural representations framed both by the Cold War culture and by the geopolitical, epistemological, and cultural project of ethnic and gendered formation in the U.S. Her poems appeared in journals such as Sojourn, The Portland Review, The Madison Review, Harpur Palate, and Barnwood International Poetry Journal, as well as in journals abroad. In her verse, she draws on various languages that she speaks – Romanian, Spanish, French, and Arabic – both to portray her identity as an immigrant woman and to highlight that the process of naturalization in a multicultural society straddles conflicts and collaborations. She is also a published translator for whom sound across a linguistic spectrum is crucial in rendering the author’s idiosyncrasies of style. Her translation of Matei Vișniec’s “Teeth” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Sojourn Journal. E-mail: [email protected] Gabriel C. GHERASIM has taught in the American Studies programme of Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, since 2009. He holds a PhD in philosophy, an MA in cultural studies and a BA in political science. His fields of research include transatlantic political ideologies, the philosophy of pragmatism and analytic philosophy, political discourses and systems. He is currently working on a book on the analytics and pragmatics of American political doctrines and ideologies. He is a member of the Romanian Association of American Studies and executive editor of the Romanian


Journal of American Studies. Email: [email protected] Raluca MOLDOVAN is a lecturer in history, holding a doctoral degree in the representation of the Holocaust in cinema, published in 2012 by Lambert Academic Publishing under the title Reel Trauma. The Representation of the Holocaust on Film. She has been teaching in the American Studies programme at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, since 2004; her courses include American History, American Film and American Popular Culture. Her research areas include history of cinema, US history, immigration history. She is currently working on a book examining the relationship between history and cinema. She has authored numerous articles on American Studies topics in Romanian and foreign academic journals. She is a member of the Romanian Association for American Studies and the Association for the Study of Nationalities (Columbia University, New York). Email: [email protected] Adriana NEAGU is Associate Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, the Department of Applied Modern Langueges. She is the author of Sublimating the Postmodern Discourse: toward a Post-Postmodern Fiction in the Writings of Paul Auster and Peter Ackroyd (2001), In the Future Perfect: the Rise and Fall of Postmodernism (2001), and of numerous critical and cultural theory articles. Dr Neagu has been the recipient of several pre- and postdoctoral research awards. Previous academic affiliations include an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Edinburgh and visiting positions at Oxford University, University of Bergen, University of East Anglia, and University of London. Her teaching areas are diverse, combining literary-linguistic and cultural studies disciplines. Her main specialism is in modernist and postmodernist discourse, global theory, the poetics of translation and conference interpreting pedagogy. Dr Neagu has been Advisory Editor and, since 2004, Editor-in-Chief of American, British and Canadian Studies, the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. E-mail: [email protected] Fevronia NOVAC is a poet and essayist. Born in 1969 in Bucharest, Fevronia has lived in the United States, Canada, and France. She earned a doctorate in French literature from the University of Ottawa (Canada) in 2002 with a thesis on the critical reception of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s work. She has published poems and research articles in Romania, Canada, the United States, and France. Her volumes of poetry are: Barbie, Mafalda, Fevi (Cartea Romaneasca, 1997), Marie (Paralela 45, 2007), Ophelia Is Wearing Perfume (Nova International Press, 2008), and In Dior’s Court (under review at Vinea Press). She is featured in the collective volume Fictiuni (Bucharest: Litera

137 American, British and Canadian Studies

Press, 1992) and in the anthology UNIVERSITAS. Once Upon a Time, a Literary Circle. Bucharest: Ed M.N.L.R., 2008. Her most recent book is The Bear Is Not Dancing. Essays on the Culture of the First Nations of North America. Tiparg, 2011. Email: [email protected]. Sam-Claudia PARASCHIV, also known as Claudia Paraskiv earned an MA in Radio, Television and Film from Northwestern University, Evanston and has been teaching film classes as an Adjunct Faculty Member at both Columbia College, Chicago (the Department of Film/Video) and at Truman College, Chicago (the Art, Humanities, and Foreign Languages Department) since 1997, and 2002. She has 11 years of professional script writing experience and has worked on more than 25 feature-length films at the Buftea Cinematographic Studio in Bucharest, Romania. Her passion for writing poems and feature-length scripts intertwined with shooting short films and gave a strong impetus to her writing, which materialised in the novel The Seagull and The Sea, in print in both Romanian and English, a novel due out in Bucharest and the United States. Email: [email protected] Ana-Karina SCHNEIDER is Associate Professor at Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, holding a PhD in critical theory and Faulkner studies from Lucian Blaga University (2005), and a Diploma in American Studies from Smith College, MA, USA (2004). She has published a book titled Critical Perspectives in the Late Twentieth Century. William Faulkner: A Case Study (Lucian Blaga UP, 2006), as well as textbooks and study guides for classroom use. She has also published an assortment of articles on William Faulkner’s critical reception, English prose fiction, literary translation, stereotypes and reading practices, and English Studies in the Romanian higher education. Dr Schneider has been Manuscript and Review Editor of American, British and Canadian Studies since 1999 and is Secretary of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. Email: [email protected] William STEARNS (Ph.D University of Wisconsin 1991) is a political theorist who specializes in the uses and abuses of political language and the social construction of reality through symbols. He has taught at the University of Montana, St. John’s University/ College of St. Benedict (Minnesota), the University of Michigan, the University of Bucharest, Prescott College (Arizona), and at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He co-edited and introduced Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992) and has contributed to the journals Theory & Event, The Romanian Review of Political Sciences and International Relations, American, British and Canadian Studies, Higher Education in


Europe, Hermeneutica fenomenului literar and other publications. He lives in Missoula, Montana and Sibiu, Romania. Email: [email protected] Ioan ŞERBAN is a poet, playwright and screenwriter, born in Sibiu, Romania. For the past 30 years he has lived in New York, writing and also nurturing young writers and artists towards fulfilling their careers. He is currently collaborating on several projects with actors, members of Actors Studio in New York, to create a unique theater to film exploration of Chekhov’s plays, as an ideal tool of introducing actors and non-actors alike to the Lee Strasberg Method of Acting. As a writer he had meaningful collaborations with noted artists in the theater and film industry, although he feels that one of the biggest influence upon his way of life is exercised by the writings and lectures of Alan Watts, and for that, he is ready to renounce any writing title, and be called, simply, a spiritual ophthalmologist. Email: [email protected] Valentin TEODOSIU is one of Romania’s foremost theatre, film and television actors of the 1990s. He received his Bachelor of Arts from the Romanian Institute of Theatre and Film in 1978, where he studied under Professors Petre Vasilescu and Cornel Vendel. He made a scintillating debut on stage at Nottara Theatre in Bucharest, in 1977, playing the leading part in an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt (Director Val Paraschiv). A versatile and prolific dramatic artist, Valentin Teodosiu was cast in numerous stage performances, among them: the Thief of Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare, the Roman soldier of Coriolanus by William Shakespeare, Svidrigailov of The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoyevski, Pyotr of The Forest by Ostrovsky, Pastor Williams of As You Like It by William Shakespeare. As of 2002, he has been affiliated with the Comedy Theatre in Bucharest, starring in roles such as Clinic by Adrian Lustig, Boris Semionovici Gus-Remontnîi of Zoika’s Apartment by Mihail Bulgakov. As well as theatre and film, he did a considerable range of television and radio shows, voiceovers in TV and radio commercials. In latter years, Valentin Teodosiu has focused on mainstream film parts, starring, alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme in film productions such as Umilința (Director Cătălin Apostol) and Assassination Games (Director Ernie Barbarsh), both released in 2011. Valentin Teodosiu is the author of A Clown for Eternity, an autobiographical volume published by Fundația Pro Publishing House in 2006. Email: [email protected] Mircea M TOMUŞ is Professor of English and Composition at Kirkwood Community College. He holds a BA in English and French from Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca and a PhD in medieval studies (Anglo-Saxon


and Old French) from the University of Iowa with a thesis on Chronotropes: The Sense of Time in Old English and Old French Poetry. He is the author of numerous translations from Romanian classics, among them: Lucian Blaga, Nicolae Labiș, Vasile Voiculescu, Mihail Sadoveanu. His research interests include the poetry of Clément Marot, chansons de geste, gnomic poetry, Anglo-Saxon charms and riddles, and literature of the fantastic. Between 1985 and 1991, Mircea M. Tomuș taught at the University of Iowa, the Rhetoric Department and The Departments of English and French. From 1991 to the present day he has been affiliated with the English Department of Kirkwood Community College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Email: [email protected] Martha (Marty) TOWNSEND is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where she specializes in Rhetoric and Composition with a focus on writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines. Her U.S. Information Agency grant-sponsored trip to Sibiu was the first of many international experiences she has been privileged to have, in what has become an effort to share writing-based educational theory and practice around the globe. She is the recipient of the University of Missouri’s 2014 Provost’s Award for Leadership in International Education. Nicoleta Răileanu and her family are central to Marty’s belief that personal relationships are at the heart of meaningful international education. Email: [email protected]


Call for Papers ABC Studies, the Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, is now accepting submissions for its December 2014 issue, an open-theme edition featuring our usual selection of critical-creative multidisciplinary work. We invite contributions in the form of articles, essays, interviews, book reviews, conference presentations and project outlines that seek to take Anglophone studies to a new level of enquiry across disciplinary boundaries. American, British and Canadian Studies appears biannually in June and December. It is a peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore the intersections of culture, technology and the human sciences in the age of electronic information. It publishes work by scholars of any nationality on Anglophone Studies, Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Social and Political Science, Anthropology, Area Studies, Multimedia and Digital Arts and related subjects. Articles addressing influential crosscurrents in current academic thinking are particularly welcomed. ABC Studies also publishes book reviews and review essays, interviews, work-in-progress, conference reports, research projects outlines, notes and comments, and, annually, a list of theses on topics related to Anglophone Studies completed at Romanian Universities. To maintain an ongoing dialogue with our readers, we alternate commissioned themed issues, where papers are actively commissioned by the special issue editor, with issues featuring unsolicited submissions that address themes of immediate interest to us. Decisions on articles submitted are normally made within two months. Calls for papers inviting submissions to the non-commissioned issues are announced via the journal’s web pages and in the journal itself. Our primary goal is to bring together in trans-cultural dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in current thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote groundbreaking research across conventional boundaries. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. To respond to the increasing demands of ‘acceleration’ in the twenty-first century, an electronic edition of the journal is now being


made available, offering full access to subscribers, and free access to the tables of contents, abstracts and reviews to non-subscribers. Articles published in ABC Studies are abstracted and indexed on the journal’s website. Detailed guidelines for submission are given on the journal’s website http://abcjournal.ulbsibiu.ro/. Contributions can include: articles, in-depth interviews with both established and emerging thinkers and writers, notes on groundbreaking research, and reviews of recently published fiction and critical works. Tables of contents and sample full text articles can be viewed without a subscription and our search feature is publicly available. Guidelines for Contributors ABC Studies seeks quality submissions of work in the entire spectrum of the humanities. The review process is blind: articles are sent out to subject specialists for reviewing anonymously and we leave it up to the reviewers to choose whether or not to reveal themselves to you. You are strongly encouraged to submit exciting and broad-ranging original articles that have not been published elsewhere, nor are currently under review in any other refereed journal. We regret we are unable to accept multiple submissions. You may submit papers that have been presented in conferences only if the papers have been thoroughly revised or extended to engage a theme that fits the ABC Studies profile. A chief objective of the journal is to minimise the time for paper processing and to expedite printing; therefore, electronic submission of papers in final form is strongly recommended. Please email your contribution to [email protected] before the closing date. Alternatively, manuscripts should be sent in triplicate to the Editorial Office as hard copy and on CD Rom. Submit three copies of your double-spaced, single-sided manuscript, along with the originals of illustrations, drawings, and tables. The first page of the manuscript should carry the title, names of authors, institutional affiliations, a brief but detailed 200-word abstract, and ten key words/concepts. The normal word-limit for articles is 7500 words including notes. Please include a brief 200-word biography for our Notes on Contributors along with contact information. For detailed instructions for preparing your contribution and a sense of format, topics of interest to us and targeted audience, you may wish to consult the journal’s previous issues and style files at http://abcjournal.ulbsibiu.ro. Only articles styled in compliance with the latest (7th) edition of the MLA Handbook and our Submission Guidelines posted on the journal websites will be considered. Please


email us if you have any queries. Questions about content should be directed to [email protected]. Deadlines for Submissions: ABC Studies is published biannually in December and June. The deadlines for submission of contributions are September 15 for the winter edition (expected publication: December 15) and March 15 for the summer edition (expected publication: June 15). Special Issues Suggestions for special issues are welcome. To propose a special issue, a two-page proposal should be submitted to Adriana Neagu, Advisory Editor, containing the following information: title; purpose; scope; a list of prospective contributors; time-table (submission and review deadlines, intended publication date); and guest editor’s address, phone, fax, and e-mail address. Once approved, the guest editor will be fully responsible for the special issue and should follow the normal review procedure of this journal. Simple proposals of theme(s) without guest-editing commitment are also welcome and will be given due consideration. Please attach these to your contributions and email to [email protected].


Call for Membership The Academic Anglophone Society of Romania invites new memberships from scholars of English of various specialisms. AASR was set up in 1997 to function as a specialist interest group for Romanian academics involved in English Studies. Since then, the Society has organised several major international conferences, has published the American, British and Canadian Studies Journal quarterly and biannually, and initiated a series of long-term multidisciplinary projects. The primary mission of the Society is to promote excellence in the discipline through shape-changing research and networking. Newsletters providing information of worldwide events in the field as well as relevant new publications are available to AASR members as well as on the Society’s Facebook page. Scholars need not be Romanian nationals or working in Romania to be eligible for full membership. Overseas members share all the benefits of Romanian members. For terms and conditions, membership fees, and further particulars on how to become an affiliate member, please contact Dr Ana-Karina Schneider, AASR Secretary, at [email protected] or [email protected].

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