Gnome samples papanasi, a traditional Romanian food.
Whenever my Aunt Sanda visits, she and Bunica collaborate in the kitchen to create all sorts of Romanian foods that Bunica doesn't cook so much anymore. It's exciting because it reminds me of my childhood, when Romanian recipes were all my mother knew (she hadn't quite learned to cook American yet) and so tripe soup or tongue soup (the dreaded dishes) might pop up any night of the week.
Papanasi can also be eaten as entree without sugar.
A paper bird gifted to us by Bunicu hangs above the dining table.
I sit at the table and write beneath a strange bird.
It's hard for me to get away from the Romanian evocations in my writing- partly because the mist of childhood makes them feel like legends, fairy tales, impossible things once believed as backdrop for everything else around me. Sanda has been teaching the kids Romanian phrases and it's a reminder I should be doing the same- that I shouldn't abandon my first language. Or leave it to history.
I've been inspired so much by Romanian writers, currently including but not limited to Dimitri Tsepeneag, Mircea Cartarescu, and Norman Manea. I love how Manea describes writing in this excellent interview with Norman Manea in American Reader:
“You write in order to redeem yourself partially from the chaos which is around you, you’re trying to find something, meaning, somewhere. Or to invent one, if you don’t find it—and this is what produces art generally: this need of the individual to search for something which is beyond their reality, even if it is sometimes hidden within that reality.”
Portrait of Manea sourced from an interview with The Daily Beast.
He admits to writing for readers in a closed society:
"My language tried to be faithful to a closed society, rather than an open one. The language was coded, sometimes quite obscurely, and differed greatly from the language of newspapers or party slogans. The characters were usually marginalized—people who were foreigners in their own land."
In the same interview, Manea describes America as “the best hotel”. He shies away from claiming a favorite country:
“A hotel is where you come in, you have a place for which you pay, everything functions, nobody asks who you are or what you want. You have an ID, you give the ID, you come, you go, and that’s it. It’s a domicile and it’s a temporary one because we are temporary here on this Earth.”
There is so much to learn from Manea, who survived both the Nazis and the communists as a Jew and a human being. So much to learn from those who refuse to accept the unacceptable and write their way through the lies society asks them to tell.
And there is papanasi- the complicated substance and texture of a minority immigrant childhood- that one girl must describe to placate the dead.
PAPANASI RECIPES TO TRY AT HOME
Papanasi dessert recipe from Artsy Bites
Papanasi recipe from Cooking Without Limits
Papanasi recipe from Bettina's Traditional Romanian Foods blog
