My favorite interview issued from the Romanian press this year is this disheartening, ultra-modern interview given by Chevron executive Tom Holst. Mr. Holst's job is to operate a professional scheme to undermine the post-communist transition to democracy in various states. If Holst has his way, Romania will soon enjoy the flush times of healthy shale fracking and rule by corporate oligarchy. Bah. Humbug. Read the expression on his face and you know how he feels about the truth.
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As Hungary continues its waltz with political anti-Semitism, Romanian citizens should demand a more thorough reckoning with their own history and the Shoah. According to an article in last month's issue of The Economist, many Romanians are still in the dark about their country's past.
The Holocaust wasn't part of Romania's school curriculum until 1998, and until 2004 many textbooks followed the communist line that the killings were something that happened somewhere else. In 2004 the state-backed Wiesel Commission issued a report on the Holocaust, leading to an official acknowledgement that killings and deportations took place on Romanian territory. Since 2005 secondary-school students have been able to take a special Holocaust course.
Yet no history faculty at Romanian universities offers a course on the Holocaust, notes Felicia Waldman, a professor at the University of Bucharest's Goldstein-Goren Hebrew Studies Centre. And so many history teachers graduate ill-equipped to teach the subject.
This is not for lack of historical records or information. In fact, the USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive offers an amazing, moving, and very distressing collection of stories. Over 5,264 interviewees relate their experiences in Romania before, during, and after World War II. In total, 3,893 interviewees were born in cities in Romania but emigrated, or did not return, after the war. The USC Shoah Foundation includes rare materials like the 146 interviews in Romania and 129 interviews in the Romanian language.
The Romanian collection can be subdivided into three groups:
The largest part of the Romanian collection includes the 1,803 interviewees who were born in the provinces of Crisana Maramures and Transylvania, an area that had been part of Austria-Hungary until 1918. The majority of the Jewish survivors, including men like Martin Aron, from these areas fell under Hungarian occupation in 1940. Most were deported to local ghettos and subsequently to Auschwitz in 1944. Others, usually male survivors, were sent to work in the forced labor companies of the Hungarian army.
1941-1942 Deportation of Romanian Jews to Transnistria
Some 1,357 interviewees were born in the Romanian interwar provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina, which were annexed by the Soviet Union in the summer of 1940. One year later, in summer 1941, the German and Romanian armies occupied the area and deported most of the Jewish population to Transnistria, the area of south-western Ukraine between the rivers Dniester and Bug that the Romanians occupied until 1944. There, they were kept in often appalling conditions in ghettos, camps, and colonies, and were subject to mass execution, forced labor, and disease. Some managed to avoid deportation and remained in the ghetto in Cernauti.
The 733 interviewees who were born in the Regat, the Old Kingdom area which remained Romania before, during, and after World War II, had very different wartime experiences. The Holocaust history of this region is less well known. While most Jews in the Regat mostly avoided the excesses of the Holocaust, they faced poor treatment at home. A small number of work camps (Cobadin, Craiova, Osmancea, Targu-Jiu) and ghettos (Ismail, Bacau) are discussed. In more than 100 testimonies, interviewees talk about their compulsory involvement in forced labor groups under the auspices of the Romanian army. The archive includes survivors of the Iasi pogrom, the largest massacre of Jews conducted on Romanian soil.
LEARN THE LESSONS:
"The Holocaust in Romania: Uncovering A Dark Chapter", a paper by Iulia Padeanu
"The Banality of History and Memory: Romanian Society and the Holocaust" by Laurence Wienbaum (Jewish Virtual Library)
"Murder of the Jews in Romania" (Yad Vashem)
Dan Sova comes to his senses (The Times of Israel)
"Legacies of a Traumatic Past in Romanian Jews' Artwork" by Dana Mihailescu
Wiesel Commission (Wikipedia)
Czernowitz-L Discussion Group with images, memories, and maps
The Shoah in Romania (romania revealed)
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Huntington predicted Hungary's successful transition to democratic pluralism
By now, it is received wisdom that Samuel P. Huntington's "clash of civilizations" theory did much to affect the analysis and understanding of postcommunist transitions in the East and Central European states. Unfortunately, Huntington's insightful explanations for the rise of religious extremism were not appropriately applied in the context of Hungary, one of those "Catholic" countries that Huntington believed would manage the transition from totalitarianism to democractic pluralism more successfully.
Conversely, Huntington expected Romania's transition to democracy to be much less successful. Economically, this has been accurate. But the difference between the Hungarian and Romanian economic transitions can be explained by the opening of the Hungarian economy prior to fall of communism as contrasted with Ceausescu's increased devotion to hardline economic communism during the same period. Put simply, Hungary had existing social and economic institutions to faciliate the transition to a mixed market economy. Romania had nothing of the sort.
Huntington's predictions, however, were not premised on economics but rather on the culture and "civilization" of these two countries. I think Huntington was wrong about Hungary. I venture to say he was dead wrong. It is becoming rather difficult the rising wrong of Mr. Huntington's thesis with respect to the transitions.
The continuing rise of the Hungarian right-wing extremists
As anyone who reads this blog knows, Hungarian right-wing nationalists have been framing the political and legislative agenda for over a decade now. Despite the lessons of the recent wars in the former Yugoslavia, extremism in Hungary continues to rise. (In fact, one could even make a case that it continues to rise as a result of the success of Milosevic and other extremists in gaining and keeping large territorial concessions through the use of extremist rhetoric and the so-called "defensive" terrorism against non-Serb populations.)
The recent elections of April 2013 revealed significant gains for Hungarian extremists on the ballot. Jobbik candidate Balázs Ander received 31 percent of the vote- three times more than the party received in 2010 national election.For the sake of "objectivity", I'll translate these electoral results according to the meaning attributed by the Hungarian nationalists themselves:
These results show that the national radical party has become the second most popular party not only in Eastern and Central Hungary, but also in some parts of the Transdanubian region as well and as such, it might become the main challenger of Fidesz in the 2014 national election.
Apart from contributing to the myth of Hungarian greatness by maintaining a running record of its star atheletes and guard dogs, Hungarian Ambiance, the blog cited above, also keeps Hungarian extremists informed about the status of the God-given struggle to reclaim the territory that would comprise a Greater Hungary.
Make no mistake- this is a movement that has been gaining steam and popular support rather rapidly. In April 2012, a member of parliament affiliated with Jobbik, the Movement for a Better Hungary, which The Economist describes as "a radical nationalist party", revived the blood libel that Jews murder Christian children in a parliamentary speech that made its way around the web. Jobbik's leader, Gabor Vona, has earned success based on a platform of patriotism and xenophobia ("preventing foreigners from contaminating Hungarian values").
Conservative prime minister Viktor Orban, affiliated with Fidesz, has both flamed and flirted with Hungarian nationalist fever, using it to maintain political support among the working classes, youth, and villages. Orban has done as much to promote this extremism as Milosevic did to promote Serbian extremism. Perhaps he thought Orban believed he could fan it and then keep it under control. Perhaps Orban has been sleeping through the last century.
Orban was quick to condemn the anti-Semitic violence and vandalism that followed April 2012's parliamentary nonsense. But he didn't address the larger problem of a right-wing extremism's rise. In fact, he left a number of legislative ventilation shafts for such extremism by emphasizing the role of local governments in adopting extremist-supported statutes.
In an interview with Die Presse, Orbán insisted on the separation of "political and historical debates". Orban's plank elevates democracy over tolerance and liberalism- if the people in Hungarian municipalities want to erect a statue of Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler, he would not stand in their way. And he will make sure that no laws exist which stand in their way either. So much for the democratic pluralism in Hungary these days.
The poetry of the Hungarian nationalist renaissance
One of the best articles I’ve read on the rise-rise-rising of the Hungarian right-wing was recently published on DK- ”Hungary experiences nationalism renaissance”. The article follows the historic rehabilitation of a Hungarian poet; it's hard to miss the meaning in the tea leaves. I'm going to quote Keno Versek's article in its entirety:
Nationalism is on the rise in Hungary. The works of a far-right poet are to be taught in schools, while his remains are to be buried in his hometown in neighboring Romania - against the will of the Romanian government.
Jozsef Nyiro was born in 1889 in Szekler Land, a Romanian region of Transylvania, which at the time was a part of Hungary. He was not only a simple "blood-and-soil" poet, but one of the leading cultural ideologues during the rule of Hungary's national socialist Arrow Cross Party from October 1944 to March 1945, when tens of thousands of Jews were massacred or sent on death marches.
Nyiro served in the Arrow Cross Party's parliament, and he remained faithful to Ferenc Szalasi's fascist regime up to the end of the World War Two. After 1945, he was hunted as a war criminal by both Hungary and Romania, but he was able to flee to Germany and then to Franco's Spain in 1950. Today, his works are compulsory reading for Hungarian school children.
The Romanian government recently banned a re-burial ceremony in his honor. According to Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta, the decision was issued in order to prevent the poet's grave from becoming a pilgrimage spot for far-right extremists.
In its place, an ecumenical service was held on Pentecost Sunday at the poet's birth place, attended by the Hungarian State Secretary for Culture Geza Scocs and Parliamentary President Laszlo Kover. The latter declared that the planned re-burial would take place sooner or later, even if was against the will of the "uncivilized, hysterical, paranoid, barbaric" Romanian government. He added that the people, "who had a son whose ashes were feared," would be "victorious."
Szocs has since admitted, in online Hungarian publication index.hu, that the urn containing the fascist poet's ashes had been smuggled into Romania. He said that despite the conspiratorial operation, "nothing illegal had happened," but that he no longer knew the ashes' location.
The planned re-burial of Nyiro's remains is part of Hungary's recent nationalist renaissance, successfully driven by the country's far-right, and it now boasts the whole-hearted support of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his conservative nationalist Fidesz party.
I should add that Orban has always supported and encouraged this "nationalist renaissance". It should also be noted that the revitalization of fascist "heroes" is only a symptom of the drastic anti-Semitism currently warming Hungarian streets. Earlier this month, the The World Jewish Congress announced that it will hold its annual assembly in Budapest in May to show solidarity with Hungary’s Jews, who it says are facing “exceptionally strong and aggressive anti-Semitic voices."
Orban is re-assessing relations with those neighboring countries that still have significant Hungarian minorities: Slovakia, Serbia, and Romania. After two decades of working to re-establish friendly relations while still attempting to gain better rights for minorities, Fidesz is now following a new revisionist policy. At least for now, the party is unlikely to risk the taboo of renegotiating borders - or revising the 1920 Treaty of Trianon where Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory - but it is significant that Fidesz, more than any other post-communist Hungarian government, is emphasizing the unity of all Hungarian people in the region.
Hungarians everywhere are being reminded of their "holy duty" to their nation - either through the "Day of National Solidarity" on June 4, meant to commemorate the "tragedy of Trianon," or through the new constitution - which came into force at the start of the year - or in the controversial media law.
At the same time, Orban is intervening in domestic politics in Slovakia and Romania by supporting the Hungarian minorities there - often by helping them to re-found parties. In some instances, like the aborted burial of Nyiro, Fidesz politicians indulge in more or less open electioneering in their neighboring country.
Romaniais holding municipal elections on June 10, when the Romanian-based Hungarian minority party MPP hopes to overtake the more moderate Democratic Union of Hungarians (RMDSZ). For many years, the centrist RMDSZ was the only political representation of Romania's Hungarian minority. It even took part in several government coalitions between 1996 and 2010.
In 2011, activists from the Hungarian National Council of Transylvania, under the leadership of MEP László Tőkés, helped establish the MPP party as a rival to the existing ethnic Hungarian political organizations, which were deemed too moderate for Orban's go-get-'em taste. Apparently, moderation is not desirable when representing ethnic minorities in a geographic location.
Parallel to this political revisionism, Hungary is also in the process of rehabilitating Miklos Horthy, who governed the country from 1920 to 1944 with an authoritarian, ultra-conservative clerical regime. Horthy, a notorious anti-Semite, was responsible for the deportation of over 400,000 Hungarian Jews in the spring and summer of 1944 - they were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. Now new plaques and statues are to be unveiled in his honor.
But the success of this new nationalist, revisionist line remains in doubt. Hungary has become isolated in the EU, where the country is considered a destabilizing force in central and southeastern Europe. On top of that, Orban and his party may have permanently weakened the representatives of Hungarian minorities in those neighboring countries.
For example, Prime Minister Orban recently funded the establishment and construction of a Hungarian college inside the borders of western Ukraine. When asked why he was willing to allocate such a gargantuan amount of money to this project, Orban explained that "state borders separating Transcarpathian Hungarians from the European Union are becoming less and less relevant". To whom, I wonder?
The Hungarian Coalition Party (MKP), supported by Fidesz, failed to enter the Slovakian parliament in a recent election there. As a consequence, the Hungarian community's political representation in Slovakia sank from 14 percent to 9 percent.
The Hungarian minority in Romania faces an even bigger disaster in November's parliamentary election. Around 400,000 Hungarians have left Transylvania in the past two decades. As a consequence, the community's political representation could diminish to the minimum of mandatory delegates that every minority in Romania is entitled to.
Not only that, but no fewer than three Hungarian parties are standing in the election, and the number of Hungarian votes will barely be enough to allow one of them to clear the 5 percent hurdle necessary to enter parliament.
But perhaps, viewed cynically, this is precisely Orban's plan - to encourage as many disenfranchised and disappointed Hungarians to return to Hungary as possible. That would secure Orban's party a stable and long-term voter base. It would also ease Hungary's chronic demographic problems, without relying on the immigration of non-Hungarians.
"Nation-building" has no regards for the rule of law
With the politics of nationalism comes the politics of "other"-based exclusion. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal featured an article on the "looming" legal segregation of Roma in Hungarian schools. Everyone knows that it's hard to teach extremist nationalism in a classroom including ethnic minorities. Solution? How about separate education for those minorities, many of whom also might be said to tarnish the sanctity and purity of Hungarian values.
And the good news just keeps coming. Last week, controversy erupted over accusations that the Hungarian government flouted Romanian campaign finance law by using state-owned companies and institutions to finance political parties serving Romania's Hungarian minority. These laws prohibit the foreign funding of domestic political parties.
Transindex, a Hungarian news portal, published its findings that "state-controlled Hungarian institutions such as MVM Hungarian Electricity, the Hungarian Development Bank, and Hungarian National Asset Management Inc. channeled roughly EUR 1 million to newly-established civil society groups whose founders and staff members are either close associates or political candidates of the Hungarian People’s Party of Transylvania. It will be interesting to see how this plays out before the Romanian elections in June.
As for Jobbik, Fidesz, and Orban, it's time for US scholars and activists to start asking questions about the ugly, shamless extremism which has gained prominence in Hungary. Let's face it- Huntington was right about some things (albeit, only a very few) yet very wrong about this thing. His cultural analysis should not be the frame of reference for intelligent Europe-watchers. I'll save the juicy details on ties the Hungarian terrorist network for another day this week...
Please pardon me if I can't muster any tiny violins for Orban and his crew. And forgive me if I can't find it in my "heart of hearts" to forgive the apologists who believe that wishing it wasn't the case actually has any effect on the verity of what is, in fact, the case. Hungarian nationalism is not going away- it's been too well-seeded, tended, and cultivated for decades now. The time for wishful thinking is long past.
MORE ON THE RISE OF HUNGARIAN NATIONALISM AND ITS EFFECTS:
"Hungarian terrorists enjoy vacations in Bolivia" (Romania Revealed)
April 2013 Open Letter to Europe's Citizens (Hungarian Ambiance)
Miklos Horthy (Yad Vashem)
Miklos Horthy, Jr. (Wikipedia)
"Does Hungary have a new hero?" (The Economist)
"Government still after red stars" (Budapest Times)
"Biggest march of living held in Budapest" (Ynet News)
Christian Democrats oppose place names honoring dicatators and racists (Politics.hu)
"Jobbik's anti-Roma crusade" (Press Europ)
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LISTEN
J.G. Ballard's book, The Drowned World (1962)
Leon Trotsky's speech, "10th Anniversary of the Leftist Opposition" (1938)
Charles Bukowski's poem, "The Colored Birds" (1968)
John Cage's song, "Song derived from the journal of Henry David Thoreau" (1976)
LOOK
READ
Jean Renoir's "How Do You Say I Love You?" (1966)
The Braille Trail
SIT ON WINDOWSILL
Christopher Butterfield's piece, "Music for Klein and Beuys" (then)
PRETEND
Alice B. Toklas' "Recipe for Hashish fudge" (1963)
LISTEN
Vaclav Havel's play, "The Memorandum" (1966)
John Cage's speech, "Art is Either A Complaint or Do Something Else" (1989)
Jean Cocteau's poem, "No Man's Land" (1929)
Claude Closky's piece, "Thumbs Up Thumbs Down" (1998)
LOOK
DANCE
Henry Cowell's piano piece, "The Anger Dance" (1963)
LISTEN
Robert Desnos' "Description of a Dream" (1938)
Robert Creeley's poem, "Anger" (1975)
LISTEN
e.e. cummings' poem, "that melancholy" (some day)
FORGET
Buckminster Fuller's "Critical Path" (1982)
LISTEN AT VOLUME OF A WHISPER
Susan Gardner and Henry Rollins have "A Modern Dialogue" (1984)
LISTEN AT FULL VOLUME WITH BASS MAXED OUT
Antonin Artaud's "Post Scriptum" (1940something)
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"Inspired by Romanian folklore, this card represents Dragobete's kiss, a symbolic Romanian figure, equivalent of Valentine's Day, celebrated at the end of February. The tradition requires young, unmarried girls and boys to gather flowers and play/sing/dance altogether in a brightly lit glade, while members of their families cheer and applaude; at a certain point, the hoe-down stops and the girls run away, hiding and screaming, while the boys are trying to find them; each single girl then sneaks out and picks with a light stroke of her bouquet the innattentive young man she finds attractive and kisses him; the boys do the same, until a sharp cry ends the game and the groups melt away, with the girls running home and hiding the love-bouquets, hoping to get married. The ritual of kissing the one you liked in that day's celebration was called Dragobete's engagement, a childish, yet significant gesture, made in the name of pure love. That is why, in Romania, it is often said 'Dragobetele sărută fetele!' (Dragobetele kisses the girls!), as a love celebration for that time of year, at the arrival of spring."
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Bednarik's Self-portrait (1919)
The painter Ignat Bednarik (1882-1963), worked in almost every genre: portrait, landscape, still life, genre scenes, composition. He tried different techniques - oil-painting, water-colour, pastel, ink-drawing - before finally devoting himself purely to water-colour. He was also interested in decorative art, design, interior decoration and book illustration. In his lifetime, he produced more than 3000 works of art.
Today, his works can be seen in collections and museums both in Romania and abroad: the Romanian National Gallery of Art, Military Museum, and National History Museum, the Bucharest City Museum of History and Art, the library of the Romanian Academy, the Brukenthal Museum in Sibiu; also in the Albertina Collection in Vienna and in private collections in Europe, America and the Middle East.
From 1898, Bednarik studied at the Bucharest School of Fine Arts under the sculptor and water-colourist, Ion Georgescu. In 1901, he went to Vienna where he occasionally attended classes at the Academy of Fine Arts. His real teachers, however, were the masterpieces in the collections of the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Albertina.
In 1909, he married Elena Alexandrina Barabas, also a graduate of the Bucharest School of Fine Arts. Together they left for Munich to study at the Royal School of Applied Art. Munich at that time was a dynamic, international, cultural centre, brimming with new ideas, in particular the influence of the Jugendstil aesthetic.
The Bednariks made their debut in 1910, in Paris, at the Salon d'automne held in the Grand Palais. They returned to Bucharest in the same year. Ignat Bednarik exhibited for the first time in Romania in 1913 at the 'Artistic Association'; he subsequently took part in official salons and opened his first individual exhibition in Bucharest in 1915.
His works of the period bring the influence of European symbolism to Romania at the same time as Alexandru Macedonski was exploring similar ideas in poetry. The longing for evasion, a favourite concern of symbolists, shows itself in a variety of ways in his work. A symbolic interpretation of reality, seen through the world of myths, is found in works like Saved, while the interdependence of heaven and earth is explored in When the gods came down to earth and a demythologising of fiction is attempted in End of the legend (all 1915). The need for escape, the longing for the absolute and the desire to recreate reality in an ideal dimension can also be seen in Towards glory (1915), The Spirit Triumphs (1916), Excelsior, The Paths of Life (1922) and Aeternum Vale!.
The escape into the world of legends and ancient ballads (for example, Master Manole ) demonstrates Bednarik's debt to Romanian folk-tales, seen particularly well in his charming series of illustrations for The Tales of the Romanians by Petre Ispirescu (1925-26).
Toward the Styx River
Notes of nostalgia and reverie also permeate his portrait-compositions Ioana (1920), The Letter (1921) and Portrait of Mrs. M. Tomescu (1923), while his treatment of philosophical subjects, such as Towards the Styx (1916), The Enigma of Life (1919),Chimera , or To Be or Not To Be (1922), is imbued with an air of symbolic mystery.
Another kind of symbolic escape is found in the realm of fine sensations, of correspondances. The theme of music often appears in Bednarik's work, for example Young girl playing the violin (1915), At the piano and Playing the violin (both 1922). Often music is associated with flowers which decorate the interior where the music is being produced; at times they are so faintly sketched on the canvas as to be almost invisible (another symbolist trait). Flowers are often present in portraits of children (Mother's birthday) and almost always in paintings of female figures (a favourite association of Art Nouveau artists), for example in Portrait of the artist's wife (1919), Portrait of a young girl (1925), or Portrait of Miss J.P. (1924).
They are also seen in his interiors with nudes painted in 1921. The flower symbolism is enhanced by the choice of the blossom which accompanies the female figure. Mastering the delicate transparency of water-colour, Bednarik surrounds his sitters sometimes with lilies, but more often with roses or peonies. In his next period, from 1919 to 1928, the still life with flowers became one of his favourite subjects.
The novelty of his work lies in its symbolist conception as well as the atmosphere of deep philosophical contemplation, transposed through water-colour, which imbues his painting with such distinctive individuality.
The horrors of the First World War brought an abrupt halt to these heady, coloured, symbolist atmospheres. As a member of the War Team of Artists and Sculptors set up in Iasi by Queen Marie, Bednarik employed all his graphic skill in vigorous depictions of conflict and hardship .
Between 1915 and 1927, Bednarik held eight individual water-colour exhibitions in Bucharest and, in 1928, one in New York; every one of these was well received by the press.
Bednarik also executed a series of works which created a fresco of typical scenes from Romanian daily life. Towards 1947, partially recovering his sight after a period of almost total blindness, he painted a number of canvases depicting Characters from old Bucharest, or scenes from the heroic past of the Romanian people (The Execution of Gheorghe Doja - 1954). In 1956 a retrospective of the work of Ignat Bednarik was organised in Bucharest by the Union of Artists.
The dry facts read like a timeline for those without time. It goes without saying that Ignat's illustrations for Queen Marie's collections of fairy tales earned him due respect within the quarters who could afford to purchase art. Bednarik's daughter, Beatrice, still lives in Bucuresti and can be contacted.
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Images and imaginings from our trip to Romania last October. I am the girl who can't choose whether to keep walking or stop and admire the absurdity of it all.
The lucky American girls are not hairy
and the men they dance on polka-dots
but I can't speak about you anymore--
your confessions of ignorance
declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
you have the new face, the coming face.
I did not know until you walked away
you had the perfect ass.
The killers in high places say their prayers out loud
for me and me alone.
I want your skin to fall off
my skin
for something to happen
the wounded forms appear
it don't matter how you worship
as long as you're down on your knees.
It is my greed that you love
and other forms of discipline.
This is the work of the highest pretension.
Take its broken waist in your hand.
Keep me
hard
in some hallways
where love's never been.
You were famous
your heart was a legend.
Are you happy now
that no one wants to undress you
and the remote
lost somewhere in the bed?
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Translated from Romanian by Matthew Zapruder and Radu Ioanid with an introduction by Andrei Codrescu, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems brings Jebeleanu to a broader English-speaking audience not a moment too late.
Appearing in English for the first time, Eugen Jebeleanu’s lyric testimonies to life under the Ceausescu government are profoundly unsentimental, yet deeply moving expressions of collective and personal guilt. Trapped between his clear understanding of the government’s corruption and brutality, and his own dilemmas as a public figure and reluctant favourite of Ceausescu, the poet found an outlet for his disillusionment in the spare, allegorical poems of his later life. Pensive and emotional, Jebeleanu’s final collection provides an enlightening, searing, and necessary record of life under totalitarian conditions. Both Andrei Codrescu’s introduction and the translator’s preface provide context for this politically and artistically significant book.
Born in 1911, Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu published twelve collections of poems, received numerous European literary awards, and was nominated by the Romanian Academy for the Nobel Prize. His poems about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima presented a profound cultural critique of modern warfare.
By the time of his death in 1991, Jebeleanu had transformed from a young, committed communist to a bitter and unsparing critic of the Ceausescu regime. You can read a few of his translated poems at Slope. Secret Weapon was his final collection.
LATE GALLOP
An opaque brim of shadow
hung on my forehead.
Come on, I told myself,
you are a jockey
in the sky
of your late life.
You can still be useful,
even if you can no longer hold out
against the nurse with shiny steel teeth.
And I started to gallop,
between weeds, between forests, between
happy fawns with such tender, humid snouts,
between brilliant, fiery statues, until
I heard a voice whimper
It hurts, everything hurts.
And everything was hurting.
And I entered a cave without end.
And only the far-off snout of a deer
signaled me. And this is all.
Follow the bread crumb trail through an enchanted forest.
Jebeleanu (Wikipedia)
"The Saddest" (Poets.org)
"Secret Weapon" (Galatea Resurrects #18)
Tismeneanu on Jebeleanu (Revista 22)
"A Quiet Protest" by Priscilla Becker (New York Sun)
Jason Stumpf vivisects translation, Zapruder, and Jebleanu (Harp & Altar)
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I spent a little time today enjoying The Transylvanian Joem, a blog by a young Peace Corps volunteer who visited Romania a few years ago and appreciated its whimsical, particular wonders. Below, you'll find his blog entry about mushroom hunting and gnomes in Romania.
Garden gnomes, Gura Humorului, Romania
The sun had only been up an hour, so the shadows were still long and cold as the tiny car bounced along the snaking, dirt road. Speaking Romanian is hard in the early morning, so I tried to stick to specific questions–ones which Doru could answer at length while I sat quietly and listened. As we reached Cheile Jiețului, however, my child-like wonder withered my will to sustain conversation. Cheile Jiețului is a gateway (one of many) into the fairytale kingdom that is Romania’s wild places– so I shut up and stared out the window at the tortuously slow symphony of fall color on all sides of me–each note represented a different moment of passing, and every note was a symbol of the suddenly suspended transience of time.
Doru and I were going mushroom hunting, which seemed an apt way to spend a Sunday afternoon in the land of fairy tales. We crossed into the next county, Vâlcea, over a long mountain pass and came to a crossroad where scores of other mushroom hunters had set up temporary camps made of wood, plastic, and nylon. Doru told me that these mushroom hunters were after a different type of mushroom than we were–a kind that is exported to other countries throughout Europe. North of the crossroad, the road heads toward Sibiu, one of the more well known cities in Romania. Ahead it goes to Râmnicu Vâlcea, and behind us back to Petroșani and the Jiu Valley I call home. The last time I was here was over a year ago, and since then a large portion of this road has been widened, grated, and paved. Doru told me this is part of an attempt to establish the area as a center for eco-tourism, and to make it more accessible. It reminded me of all the other ways that Romania has been progressing around me since I arrived 16 months ago.
We parked alongside a river with a crossing–a long, fallen pine tree. Doru poured two small glasses of strong, dark wine and we toasted. “For courage,” Doru laughed before we cleared our glasses in a few, long gulps. Doru pulled on a pair of rubber galoshes, and told me that he was going to wade the river. I had on hiking boots, so my route would be to ‘slowly’ cross by using the tree. I climbed onto it and carefully began to step my way across. Now, as a person who is chronically clumsy, I figured the odds were at least 50% that I’d slip and fall into the water. True to my nature, 2/3 across the river I stepped onto a patch of rotting bark which disintegrated under my foot and threw my balance downward. I suddenly found myself suspended in the air, heading for a bad fall and a cold bath.
However, being chronically clumsy has its benefits: that is to say, I’ve ‘adapted’ to my handicap–I’m really good at falling down. Instinctively, I kicked my right leg over my body and rolled my trajectory so that I was facing downwards. I planted my right foot ankle deep into the water, which sucked, but I was able to catch myself on the log with both hands and raise my left leg over the river.
“Joem!” Doru yelled, as he quickly sloshed his way upriver. “Are you alright?! Did you hit yourself?!” Doru gave me his shoulder and helped me across to the far bank.
I assured Doru that I had indeed caught myself, and that I was fine. “You scared me…” Doru said. “I have to be responsible for you,” and I knew he was right–my 7 Romanian mothers would scold Doru to death if I broke an arm or leg while I was in the woods with him.
Doru seemed relieved, and passed me two large, woven, plastic sacks from the supermarket. “Last fall I filled two bags,” Doru. “We’ll see how we do.”
He scampered over to a cinnamon colored mushroom craning itself out of the supple earth. “These are what we’re after,” Doru told me, as he plucked off the mushroom’s ‘tail’ and passed the ‘head’ to me to examine. I took mental notes: brownish and sort of spotty– check. Doru took the low ground, and I went higher. The hill was on a steep, north-facing grade, and the trees were dense. It had also rained lightly the evening before, so all roots were slick and the dirt was spongy. Each step I either sunk four inches into wet moss and pine needles or slid down a half meter over wet branches. Doru and I would leave our bags in a spot and sort of zig zag around, grabbing mushrooms, popping off their stems, and putting the caps carefully into our sacks.
Under a pine tree, in a place that felt noticeably more magical than the rest, I found two large mushrooms that weren’t like what Doru had shown me. These two were a deep brown, and their heads came to distinct peaks. These were the sort of mushrooms you’d expect to find in a magic forest, safeguarded by over-protective gnomes. I carefully plucked the caps from the stems and bagged them. I heard Doru call my name–so I scampered across the hill so that he could keep me in his sight and wouldn’t need to worry about me.
I instantly became aware that I had a problem–I felt like I was grabbing about four different types of mushroom. Some seemed more reddish than what Doru had shown me. Others had distinct, almost black ‘nipples,’ at their crests. Others seemed right, but were grey and rosy colored underneath. I took my half-full bag to Doru and asked him to inspect what I had collected.
Doru dumped the bag onto the earth and began picking through them. “No. No. These aren’t good,’ he murmured and I watched as he tossed away 2/3 of what I had found. “Look,” Doru said, handing me another ‘good’ mushroom to study. The mushrooms I really wanted weren’t brown and spotty– they were latte colored with the occasional light fleck of cream on top. And, underneath, they were a luminescent white that seemed so pure and soft that it almost sang lullabies.
I also showed Doru the two gnome mushrooms. “Oh these–these are good,” Doru said as he carefully took the two caps from me. “These are what the other mushroom hunters come after– you should have left the tails on them, but you didn’t know. We’ll try and sell them later for beer,” Doru said and smiled at me before putting them in a separate plastic bag.
Doru and I moved on, and I now felt more comfortable recognizing the kind of head we were after. They start deep inside the ground, and grow upwards strong and solid. Hence, they’re usually hidden under swathes of moss and dirt, or on the dim sides of uprooted trees. The young ones have domes, perfectly designed for pushing past the soil into the open air. Older ones flatten out, and become wide, concave cups that catch rain. Because of the precipitation, the older ones are susceptible to mold and rot, growing fuzzy white beards and losing that glowing white sheen– trading it for a faded color like grave water. They are easy to uproot, tail and head together, and the two are separated with a quick, strong pinch at the neck.
As my bag filled, I felt a strange sense of guilt. I almost felt as if Doru and I were pillaging the forest–tramping through to take what we wanted and leaving headless mushroom stalks in our wake. I wanted to take only half of what I found–to leave the rest for other collecters that might wander by tomorrow or the day after. I stopped for a moment to think, my heavy breathing a constantly slowing soundtrack for the forest. But I was soon able to reconcile those guilty thoughts and continue on (see italicized portion below).
When Doru and I wandered out of the forest about three hours later, he had two heavy bags, both 2/3 full. I was excited with my own contribution: a 2/3 full sack, and a second that was a little over 1/4 full. Doru waded across the river with all four bags, while I slowly inched across the bridge again. This time, as odds would predict, I made it across without falling down.
Doru laid out a spread of canned meat, bread, sliced vegetables, salty sheep cheese, and a beer for me. We ate hungrily, occasionally breaking apart our bites by talking about wildlife conservation, or how warm the recent winters have been in Romania. Doru and I ate hearty, and after the whole beer and another short glass of wine I had a small buzz. So Doru and I packed the mushrooms into the car, and began the trip home.
Back at the crossroads, we stopped briefly so that Doru could sell the two gnome mushrooms I found along with two others that he had come upon. There was a group of hard-looking men hanging out around an electronic scale and a pickup truck piled with wooden crates–these were the mushroom gangsters. The crates were for gnome mushrooms that the men would buy from other mushroom hunters working at the crossroads camp. The mushroom Don was a squat man, and he held a wad of bills totaling a few thousand RON. A young crony in the pickup truck weighed our four mushrooms– they were 600 grams altogether. Although they usually sell for 25 RON per kilogram, the don gave us a 10 RON note. Doru didn’t argue–so we got in the car and left.
In the car, Doru told me that the man was ‘making fun of us,’ but that he didn’t want to argue. I told him it was fine–we had enough money for two beers, and that was alright with me. On the ride home, we blasted out of the fairytale gate and time suddenly latched onto us, hyperactive and anxious to make up for the three hours we lost away from it. There was sun, and countless packs of people grilling along this part of the Jiu river. I suddenly realized how sleepy I had become, and so I told Doru we’d have to save our beer money for another time.
“That’s fine Joem,” he smiled at me, and dropped me off at home. “I’ll clean the mushrooms and give you some,” and I told him that would be beautiful, but that I didn’t want many. I said that I would rather go to his house so that we could eat them together, and spend our beer money. Doru told me “this goes without saying.”
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A photo of Toaso holding a sniper rifle with a high-precision telescopic sight (published in Cochabamba newspaper Opinión).
So this young gentleman is not your average yuppie spawn. His name is Elöd Tóasó, and he was captured in an antiterror operation on April 16, 2009 in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. According to police authorities, Toaso was the "communications link" of an international mercenary terror cell dismantled by the police, and was tasked with spying and telephone tapping.
It seems the Hungarian ambassador made his best efforts to protect Toaso, but his past makes such protection difficult. Tóasó received military training in Bucharest, along with the Irishman, Michael Dwyer, who influenced Toaso to become a mercenary. The ever-brilliant and insightful Milfuegos, to whom I owe the honor of this discovery, tells the story better in his own words (note that this occurred in 2009):
The photo above was taken in the middle of last December in the Hotel Buganvillas, one of the most exclusive in Santa Cruz, where the armed group stayed for more than two months at cost to a third party, whom Rózsa Flores described in an interview in Budapest last September as "the Bolivian financiers" and providers of the weapons.
According to the management of the five-star hotel, the terrorist group booked in the Buganvillas under false identities. Tóasó, who was taken captive in the raid two weeks ago along with Jorge Tadik, a Bolivian ex-military man trained in Bolivia but with Hungarian roots, even convinced the ambassador of his own country that he was just an innocent adventurer, in spite of the evidence shown by a video of the conspirators making assassination plans.
"This man, to me, is far from being a terrorist. Young, 29 years old, who made mistakes, and I believe they invited him to come here offering to pay him this and that, but he didn't know what lay in store...I believe that this man had no money, because the financial crisis has hit Hungary hard too. We're very badly off, so this stems from the fact that our people have no money. He was young, and looking for adventure, and accepted something I don't think he thought through," said the Hungarian diplomat, trying to intervene on behalf of his countryman.
In Hungary, Tóasó was known to have belonged to the so-called "Szeklers", who consider themselves to be direct descendants of pure Hungarians... Along with Arpad Magyarosi, Tóasó joined the far-right paramilitary "Szekler Legion", which went to war in Croatia for separatist causes in the 1990s.
Of course, the Szekler Legion's website has disappeared, like the rabid right-wing nationalism which drives it, I'm sure. And Toaso's fans are continuing their letter-writing campaign to win freedom for the man who promises to reunite Greater Hungary. Irredentist sentiments alone should not land one in prison, but Toaso's defenders are the sort of people who believe a sentiment must be backed by violent action and Toaso is the sort of man who lives for nothing less.
Let's explore the life of Elod Toaso a little further. What happened on that day in 2009? What narratives color the palette? According to Hungarian Ambiance, who is working hard to free the Toaso:
In April 2009, Előd Tóásó survived a commando attack in the Las Americas hotel in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, together with Croatian Mario Tadic. In the assault Hungarian nationals Eduardo Rózsa Flores and Árpád Magyarosi, as well as Irish national Michael Dwyer have been killed.
Word on the street is that Toaso was in Bolivia with fellow separatists for the purpose of training a separatist army- the sort of group that is defined as a "terrorist organization" according to international law. Let's meet Toasa's fellow day trippers.
A recent photo of Eduardo Rozsa-Flores.
Eduardo Roszsa-Flores, whose life has been fascinating enough to include everything from working for the secret police in Hungary to joining Opus Dei to becoming a hero in the Croatian war of independence, was killed in the April 2009 raid. In 2003, he converted to Islam, claiming to be the spokesman for the Independent Iraqi Government, but then disappeared from the war-torn scene only to reappear in the strange circles of the Hungarian far-right.
Two days after his death, Hungarian Spectrum discovered that his friends and comrades in Jobbik were feeling heart palpitations. The Jobbik website posted an official statement: "With deep sorrow we report that our friend and fellow editor, Eduardo Rózsa-Flores, passed away. He died for his country." Other, more recently-expressed sentiments from the greater Hungarians who manage the Jobbik website include:
If you are unfamiliar with Jobbik, then it is probably because you live somewhere in America and specialize in knowing small details of reality TV characters and Newt Gingrich's "wives". Wipe the trivia from your head and learn about Jobbik straight from the horse's mouth in this description of Party Chairman Gabor Vona:
The Jobbik chairman was born into a staunchly anti-Communist farming family in rural Hungary. He was accepted to read History at the prestigious ELTE University in Budapest, where he eventually qualified in his trade of school history teacher.
Though involvement in the University’s Catholic society was his main social pursuit while there, a chance encounter in the refectory led to him being invited to a gathering of Christian conservative students, concerned about the welfare of the Hungarian nation. This gathering led to the formation of a society that was the precursor of the Movement for a Better Hungary, or Jobbik. He was elected party chairman in 2006 at the age of 28. Since that time, it is no exaggeration to say that he has become the defining figure of Hungarian politics. Given that almost all political parties in Hungary now concern themselves with agenda, that he has brought into the public sphere.
Strangely enough, Chairman Vona's anti-communism and heartfelt Christianity do not assure me of much except that he is a demagogue well-versed in pandering to angry conservatives. Enough time dallying with political fascism in Europe. Let's get back to the action- back to freedom fighter Rozsa-Flores.
Bolivian authorities believe he was "the leader of a terrorist group which intended to assassinate Bolivian president Evo Morales". What led them to this belief? The aforementioned video is a good place to start.
Five days after Rozsa-Flores was killed, the Hungarian Television broadcast an interview recorded in September 2008 by Hungarian journalist András Kepes prior to his last trip to Bolivia. Kepes was instructed not to release the interview until given further notice. In the interview, Rózsa-Flores claimed that a Bolivian national requested him to return to Bolivia and help establish a milita for the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz, in response to perceived central government abuses. He said local politicians wanted to establish the militia, and that he was chosen to create it based upon his Croatian military experience. Rozsa-Flores maintained the militia's primary role was to offer self-defense in the event of aggression by either central government or native "Indian" paramilitary forces.
Did Toaso, Rozsa-Flores, and Magyarosi go to Bolivia to pose with guns in a fancy hotel? Is there any truth to the rumor that Rozsa wanted to kill opposition leader Ruben Costas to create chaos in the country? Maybe we need to learn a little more about the rest of this fun-loving gang. Árpád Magyarosi who was also killed in the April raid was well-acquainted with Előd Tóásó. Both were Transylvanian Hungarians who attended high school in the same small-town of Sovata (Szováta) in Romania. After finishing high school both moved to Hungary.
A photo of Arpad Magyarosi engaged in nonviolent protest?
Hungarian Spectrum takes it from here:
Magyarosi sounds like a real loser: he kept changing high schools and tried several colleges as well. He had musical ambitions with only scant talent. He organized several rock groups that all failed. And as we can see from this photo, Magyarosi's interests weren't confined to music. The other Transylvanian, Előd Tóásó, was another drifter who never managed to finish any of the colleges he attended. He too was interested in the military and attended the Miklós Zrínyi Military Academy for a while. He speaks Romanian, English, and Spanish in addition to Hungarian. Both men joined a group, founded in 2002, that purported to promote rock climbing, the Székely Légió (Legion Siculus). In 2006 the group became front page news in Hungarian papers because Ziua, a Bucharest daily, claimed that the Legion was a paramilitary organization planning attacks on Romania in order to establish an autonomous Hungarian (Szekler) area in the middle of Transylvania. The Romanian paper claimed that there were thousands enrolled in the Legion. The leaders of the Legion protested: it is an innocent organization that gives advice to young men and women interested in rock climbing. However, the Legion's internet website talked about survivor trips where the members carried heavy backpacks (20 kg) in addition to "weapons." They were schooled in marksmanship and the ability to detect mines. These don't sound like innocent rock climbing activities.
Magyarosi may not have been able to get a rock band going, but he managed to attract the attention of the Knights of Malta. According to this popular website for Hungarian diaspora, poor Magyarosi was "executed":
Karoly Nagy Andras, Foreign Minister of the Sovereign Order Of Saint John Knights of Malta, Federation of the Autonomous Priores, said that the Order would take the Magyarosi case to the court of human rights.
Where should we go now? Let's take a little detour, a small sojourn with his friends and buddies, those folks who are fighting for his release and standing in his defense. According to Hungarian Spectrum:
Some of the mercenaries in the Bolivian group still at large are Hungarians: Tibor Révész (founder of the Székely Légió), Gábor Dudog, Dániel Gáspár and Lajos Tamás. Perhaps with some help from Bolivia, the Hungarians could find out more about their own extremists, for example, the Arrows of the Hungarians.
The European Committee Human Rights Hungarians Central Europe exists to protect the rights of Hungarian minorities in Europe. It also maintains that the picture below shows the Carpathian basin, "which was known as Hungary until 1921. The people of the Carpathian basin are divided by borders that do not match the ethnical and/or language borders."
That's all fine and depressing, you might be thinking, but what happened? How did these guys get money? Who financed their little Bolivian vacation? According to this article:
On March 17th, former Santa Cruz civic leader Branko Marinkovic’s longtime personal assistant and right-hand man for 14 years Juan Judelka confirmed that Marinkovic was financing a group called “La Torre” that is accused of terrorist conspiracy. Judelka declared under oath before prosecutor Marcelo Soza in La Paz that Marinkovic had on several occasions given him money in closed envelopes to deliver to Hungarian-Croatian-Bolivian Eduardo Rozsa Flores who was shot by police in a raid on the Las Americas hotel in Santa Cruz on April 16th, 2009. The Bolivian government accuses the deceased Rozsa Flores of being an international mercenary paid by Santa Cruz leaders to assassinate President Morales.
Judelka said, “If I did not testify earlier it was because of pressure by Mr. Marinkovic’s lawyer, but in my testimony I said that I effectively carried money from Branko to the La Torre (accused terrorist cell led by Rozsa Flores), after that Mr. Orlando Justiniano asked me to take this money to a Mr. “Germán” who was really Rozsa Flores.” The Bolivian government is accusing the Santa Cruz state government of organizing the La Torre group during the governorship of Rubén Costas. The government accuses the Santa Cruz leaders of diverting some of the $40 million dollars they collected to finance Santa Cruz autonomy to hiring foreign mercenaries like Rozsa Flores to form a terrorist militia. Judelka added, “I do not know how much money was in the envelopes I took (to Rozsa Flores) and I don’t know if it was in Bolivianos or Dollars.”
Branko Marinkovic and his lovely wife circa 2004.
Branko Marinkovic.... such a Bolivian name for a man clever enough to pay a kid to write a favorable wikipedia entry about him. Sarcasm aside, Branko is a Croatian by origin, which connects a few dots and allows us to stipulate a Croation connection for this lovely group of gentlemen. More interesting facts about Branko:
And I haven't even started to peel the onion that is Branko. The tragic ending to this story is one in which Branko is living in the US, possibly even with political asylum, because the diplomatic relations bewteen the US and Bolivia are strained. If Branko has found a safe haven here, I am disgusted and disappointed. He should seek asylum in Croatia or in a country that can afford the presence of overt and violent racism. Honestly, the US is too fragile right now. Anti-immigration sentiment is at a peak. I'm concerned that a successful, smooth-talking car salesman like Branko could sell more than cars to disillusioned Americans.
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Suddenly I found my file, too, under the name of Cristina. Three volumes, 914 pages. It was allegedly opened on 8 March, 1983 – although it contains documents from earlier years. The reason given for opening the file: "Tendentious distortions of realities in the country, particularly in the village environment" in my book "Nadirs". Textual analysis by spies corroborate this. And the fact that I belong to a "circle of German-language poets", which is "renowned for its hostile works".
The file is a botched job by the SRI on behalf of the old Securitate. For ten years they had all the time in the world to "work" on it. You could not call this cooking the books, the file has simply been emptied of all substance.
(Excerpted from a great interview at sign and sight)
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Albeit, a circumnavigating one but filled with promise nonetheless.
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He thought winning made the world a better place and the snow slightly sparklier.
She thought healing people was the ultimate challenge for a broken heart. Being beautiful didn't hurt.
Even the sunglasses couldn't hide them from each other.
They celebrated their discoveries.
They agreed on being the best and the strange enchantment of American dreams. When her mother died, there wasn't much to moor them.
They held hands and ran fast, far, leaving a baby behind as a souvenir.
The baby grew like a weed, thriving in the in-between places, the soft wedges called steps.
They called her "Bunfla" and named her after a ghost.
Running requires leaving the ghosts behind and agreeing to be haunted.
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Alice and Remus allowed me to catch a few photos of them in October- the Morcovii portraits, a tribute to grafitti, orange hair, and love in all its modalities.
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PEASANT LOVE SONGS
by George Cosbuc, translated by Maurice Aisen
I.
He
In the garden of my sweetheart
Sing two birds beautifully,
And the sun proudly shines,
And my darling sits and dreams.
Near the garden of my sweetheart
Runs a river clear and crystal
Where my darling sits and weeps.
She
When you are here, little man,
I dress all the time like a bride,
Wearing flowers and pearls
So you will like them.
Since you have gone away, little man,
The red belt and the tulip have vanished—
It is so sad.
Green leaf of the citron:
My little man has gone to the army;
He is gone and does not write to me,
Neither on the leaves, nor on the river,
Nor on the wings of the wind.
II.
Bad, O mother, is fever,
But far, far worse is love.
For fever you can eat and drink,
But for love there is naught but pain.
From fever my mother can cure me,
But love is far from her care;
From fever the priest can pray me,
But not from the evil of love.
All of us learn this evil,
As did I a year from last spring.
The longing is slowly killing me—
Yes, love is an evil thing.
III.
If you did not love me, little man,
God shall curse you for it.
You should marry nine times,
And you should have nine boys.
You should have a girl too—
She shall bring you water in prison,
Because when you left me
You broke my heart and my love.
IV.
Little man, tell me, is it true?
Be honest and tell me, please—
Do you love me or not?
If you like me only a little,
Take any road that you wish,
But never the one that leads to my house.
Cristian Bassa photographs the making of Doamna Care Plange.
V.
Goodbye, darling, good luck!
Remain beautiful as a violet
In a glass on the table.
VI.
Beautiful girl with blonde hair,
When I see you I begin to lean
Like the leaves in the acacia
When the wind is blowing through them.
Like the leaves of the oak tree I lean
When the breeze is blowing through them.
VII.
I had a beautiful neighbor,
And a path to her garden;
But she went and got married
And said not a word to me.
I would have taken her myself!
If she had married three villages away,
It wouldn’t have hurt me so.
But she married a man down our street,
The third door from my mother’s home!
When I am in, I hear her voice;
When I go out, I see her face:
It makes my heart burn like fire.
You can find a PDF version of this poem online at the archives of Poetry magazine. Aisen wrote translated this poem as part of his "Roumainian Poems" series by Romanian poet George Cosbuc.
Drawing by Tonitza.
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From the inside cover of an abecedar.
From the inside of a story book- it looks awfully competitive for "communism".
An ode to "The Party" and its metaphysical gifts.
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Requiem in a Classical Style
For those who died in Bucharest, December 1989
by Magda Carneci
1.
With a drop of blood, innocent bright liquid,
could a putrid, slumbering sea of marrow be purified?
Could only one body, mine, inscribed crosswise upon you,
cure your sickness, o homeland?
And a thousand bodies, young boys, young girls,
thrown into the starry vault of your mouth, your greedy belly,
your bloated memory, could they satisfy your hunger?
Let me be the solitary seed for a redemptive and young matter,
Let me become the flowering field for an unknown, invincible plant,
Would that we were myriad of unconsumed pyres to light your darkness?
Could a shower of love, a downpour, save a land?
A cataract, a flood, a billowing sea of blood?
Could your corpse be reanimated by a sea of blood?
3.
Should I be the one to defy you, to accuse, to curse,
the first to cast the stone at your face, in reproach and hatred?
Should I be the one to crucify you one more time-
you, so often cut and wounded, stoned, nailed up, disfigured?
Should I set fire to your ever multiplied, ever burning pyre?
to this famished destiny that devours you, should I add a blasphemy,
Never to be satisfied with hunting you, through all eternity?
If I do not burn together with you, then it would be in vain
for the tormented light of your body to illuminate the dark.
If I do not crucify myself with you, mocked and martyred within you,
then your endless sacrifice would be in vain.
If I do not love you, then it is myself I do not love.
Alienated and festering, I would vanish into the corrupt world.
If we do not love each other, who or what could bring this sad land
back from the dead, this blood, these bitter words?
6.
Come once more, vast suffering woman, unconsoled,
follow in the wake of your martyrs, young girls, young boys,
those who have not yet become weary, who have not fallen asleep,
who have not run away, and who will never forget anything.
Come, o homeland, before your dead and your living,
to bathe yourself in the clean dust of their feet,
to purify yourself in their endless suffering.
You will be created anew. In each of us. You will be forgiven once more.
Reborn. A virgin. How many times? Again and again.
Ocean of old marrow, chaotic magma, greedy ravenous mud
spread everywhere, through hamlets and recesses, fields and towns,
You will engulf us, you will again swallow us into you-
luminous tide of blood, loving lava of fire,
your powerful current will wash us into the final delta of our silence:
where out of eternity
new worlds
new worlds
unborn children
and your Ideal Form
dreamed once again
are forged
for all Eternity.
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Grafitti somewhere on a wall in Bucuresti, October 2011.
Deconstruction is not a theory that simply applies, deconstruction is, I consider deconstruction, what happens, is what happens.
So, you don`t have to, let`s say, rhetorically and dangerously speak of deconstruction when something is destroyed.......
The fact that in some of the works there is no frame, does not mean there is no frame: there is a frame that is not simply circumscribing the work, but which is constituted by the very form so that, we know where to remove the work.
It wouldn`t be any work of art without a frame, especially where there is a market. If you want to identify a work of art and put it on a wall in a gallery or to sell it on the market, you have to have a frame.
There would be no field of art, no history of art, no discourse on art, and no market without a frame.
And then there are artists that attempt to remove, to destroy or to deconstruct if you want, to question the very existence, the very effect of the frame, but then, they have to disappear as artists producing works of art.
The idea of art cannot be, let`s say, constituted or dealth with without some frame.
Excerpted from "Deconstruction Is What Happens: An Open Discussion with Jacques Derrida"
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Chris Corthout's photo of a young lady on the streets of Bucharest.
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Jean Negulesco (or Ion Negulescu, but not to be confused with Ion Negulescu) was born in 1900 in Craiova in southern Romania. In Paris, as a young man he was a friend of Constantin Brancusi and other members of the artsy crowd in Montparnasse and Montmartre. In fact, his artistic career did not begin in cinema. According to the stellar deep space daguerrotype:
Because once you've directed films in Hollywood all other claims to posterity become secondary, Romanian-born Jean Negulesco is best known for his work as a screenwriter, production designer & director, even though he first came to America in 1929 for an exhibition of his paintings. Before giving himself over to the business of show, he was first & foremost a painter & designer. His marker sketches bear a striking resemblance to those of Cocteau and, of course, Picasso from the same period, but like most artists who are trained as designers, he was able to astutely mimic almost any modernist style.
Though he began his career in Paris as a painter and scenic designer, taught by his fellow Romanian Brancusi and friendly with Modigliani, the Parisian market did not absorb his work. When he left for the United States to exhibit his work in New York, he was asked to prepare some drawings for the rape scene in The Story of Temple Drake (1933), based on William Faulkner's harrowing book, Sanctuary.
Negulesco found that he had to depict the scene in discreet visual terms so that it could be passed by the censor. The producer of the film, Benjamin Glazer, liked the result so much that he made Negulesco his assistant, enabling him to gain experience in almost all aspects of movie-making. His work as second-unit director at Paramount and then at Universal brought him to the attention of Gordon Illingworth, producer of short subjects at Warner Bros, who put him in charge of those with pretensions to art. The rest is history.
A sample of Negulesco's drawing.
Director and Painter Jean Negulesco ponders his sketches of Claudette Colbert, star of his Three Came Home (1950).
In 1927, he moved to the United States and began his movie career as a sketch artist for Paramount Pictures, where he designed the opening montage for the musical Tonight We Sing. In 1944, he directed his first successful movie, The Mask of Dimitrios, based on a story by Eric Ambler.
Among his successful movies were The Conspirators (1944), Three Strangers (1946), Johnny Belinda, with Jane Wyman (1948), The Mudlark (1950), How to marry a millionaire, starring Marilyn Monroe, Titanic (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), Daddy Long Legs, with Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron (1956).
Negulesco was famous for his directing style, represented by images taken from unusual angles and the use of shadows and silhouettes. He was the first to use the cinemascope technique in movies like How to marry a millionaire or Daddy Long Legs. He made the first movie about an aircraft accident and the first one about the tragedy of war prisoners during World War II.
In 1948, he directed Johnny Belinda, a drama about the rape of a deaf-mute girl and the scandal triggered by her resulting pregnancy. The movie was a success; Negulesco was nominated for an Academy Award for best director (he lost to John Huston), and Jane Wyman won the Oscar for best actor.
Negulesco worked with Hollywood’s biggest stars including Fred Astaire, Lauren Bacall, Betty Grable, Marilyn Monroe, Richard Burton, Lana Turner, Irene Dunne, and Sophia Lauren.
His 1954 movie Three Coins in a Fountain won two Academy Awards for cinematography and for the title song and was nominated for an Oscar for best picture. In 1955, Negulesco received a BAFTA Award for Best Film for How to Marry a Millionaire. His 1959 movie, The Best of Everything, was on Entertainment Weekly’s “Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time” list. In 1970s, he retired from film making and moved to Spain.
Perhaps he painted this during his time in Spain...
In 1985, he published his autobiography entitled Things I Did and Things I Think I Did. Negulesco died in Marbella, Spain in 1993 at the age of 93 leaving behind 72 movies. He is remembered as a key contributor to the film noir genre.
More to explore:
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This photo was taken from a Maria Tanase photoset on flickr.
You can listen to her spectacular voice in Lume, Lume above. She is almost sacred to me.
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Photographer David Ellicson spent time in Timisoara for a few days documenting the critical work of Generatie Tanara for their American partner Not For Sale. Both nonprofits help Romanian victims of human trafficking. Generate Tanara runs a home in Timisoara where women can stay as long as they need to in a loving and supportive environment.
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Around 100 Csango people, members of a Hungarian ethnographic group living mostly in Moldavia, Romania, swore their oaths of allegiance to become Hungarian citizens in the Buda castle on Tuesday, as part of the celebrations commemorating the 163rd anniversary of the 1848-49 revolution and war of independence from Habsburg rule.
First district Mayor Tamas Gabor Nagy, of the ruling Fidesz-Christian Democratic alliance, said this was a historic moment for the Csango Hungarians. By taking up Hungarian citizenship, their century-long exclusion comes to an end, he added.
After the nearly 100 Csango people took their oaths, a Csango cultural festival started in the castle quarter.
[Source.]
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An old Cyrillic inscription displays reverence for Basarb dynasty ruling in Wallachia.
A little essay on the Cioran Centennial (I'll reserve a post for this next week).
In 2008, the first foreign language edition of the New York Times Book Review was launched in Romania. Of course, Americans who did not know about Romania's vibrant literary scene were surprised. In a condescending way. I wonder how effectively the Review is competing with the amazing Cultural Observer, which I would like to see on the newsstands in the USA.
The decline in Romanian billionaires.
Why didn't we hear more about Romania winning the 2010 World Cup in handball? Is ping pong next on the table?
Questions over property rights in the Danube Delta.
[Photo credit goes to abejorro's flickerstream for depicting the Czech village of Svata Helena in Romania.]
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An unflattering picture of Romanian politics emerges from this article in The Economist. An excerpt:
IT LOOKED like April Fool's Day. On Tuesday lawmakers from Romania's ruling Democratic Liberal Party (PDL), including ministers, voted to slash VAT on food and eliminate income tax on pensions worth less than €500. It seemed an odd thing to do, given that the government had raised VAT to its current level only a few months earlier, as part of a deal with the IMF.
Oops. It was an "error", said the finance minister. The MPs had actually thought they were voting to scrap the two proposals. The PDL is now hoping that the president will not sign the bill into law, and is fast-tracking a new draft to "correct" the mistake. The government may also adopt an "emergency ordinance" to fix the problem.
But this latest blunder fits into a weary tradition of dysfunctional policy-making in Romania, where laws often appear to be drafted minutes before parliamentary votes with little thought to long-term strategy or financial impact.
A review of the Romanian government's structures drafted by the World Bank and seen by The Economist speaks of a "prevalence of ad-hoc decision making" and slams the "frequent use" of emergency ordinances that override approved parliamentary laws. Despite plans announced five years ago to measure results against plans, nothing of the sort has taken place, the document reads. There is also no prioritising of policies and "laws are commonly approved without adequate funding."
The review issues a series of recommendations on how to improve national decision-making. Such proposals are nothing new, says Alina Mungiu-Pippidi from the Hertie School of governance in Berlin.
"In the last decade, Romania received a lot of advice, technical assistance and funding to improve its policy formulation and implementation capacity", she says. "Romania's quality of governance might not have induced the 2009-2010 crisis, but it does seem increasingly that it contributed to its severity and duration."
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From the very beginning the term industrial archaeology was applied to the physical remains of the Industrial Revolution, although there was, and continues to be, a recognition that the industrial archaeology of the manufacturing process applies as much to neolithic stone axe quarries as to steam engine production. The early decades of the discipline were spent arguing as to which of these two intellectual strands would predominate. However, the decline of many of the classic 18th and 19th century industries in mid-20th century, and the growing recognition of the historic value of textile mills, iron works, and transport networks, led to a general acceptance that industrial archaeology meant the archaeology of the industrial revolution. (Source: Association for Industrial Archaeology)
Arheologie Industriala - Industrial Archaeology, the rusty remnants of communism.
Industrial Archaeology in Banatul Montan
The Virtual Museum of Industrial Archaeology
The International Committee for the Conservation of Industrial Heritage
"The role of industrial archaeology in conservation: The Resita area of the Romanian Carpathians", Nicolae Hillinger, Martin Olaru and David Turnock (GEO Journal Volume 55, Numbers 2-4, 607-630)
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So maybe a helicopter crash is a little louder than a whisper. But the continuing whispers proved intriguing enough that I've taken to reading the Armenian exiles' newspaper articles to learn more about Romanian military alliances.
Romania, which after the end of the Cold War “changed sides” and joined NATO in recent years, has become one of the staunchest supporters of the United States in the alliance and enjoys very good political ties with Israel. Romania earlier this year made it clear that it actively wanted to join a U.S.-led collective missile defense system to counter potential missile threats from Iran.
The Israeli-Romanian military cooperation inadvertently became public when an Israeli heavy-lift military helicopter crashed in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains area in late July. Several Israeli soldiers were killed in the incident.
The helicopter, which probably crashed due to bad weather conditions, was a U.S.-made CH-53 Sea Stallion, called the Yasour by the Israelis. “One might wonder why an Israeli helicopter was in Romania in the first place. The answer is that every long-range Israeli Air Force operation today, wherever it may take place in the world, including in Israel, takes into consideration ‘third-sphere threats’ like Iran, which are far from Israel,” the Jerusalem Post, a top Israeli newspaper, said in an analysis published just after the July 26 accident.
“The Yasour helicopters in Romania this week, for example, flew nonstop from Israel and received midair refueling over Greece, something they do not get to do every day. That is why these training exercises are so important,” the Jerusalem Post said. “Israeli airspace is limited and flying in places like Romania, with lots of open spaces, also gives Israeli pilots the ability to train in new and unfamiliar terrain, especially mountainous areas similar to those in Lebanon.”
The Jerusalem Post also offered the explanations provided by Israeli officials at a memorial event:
Nehushtan said that Israeli airspace was relatively narrow, and expressed gratitude to those countries that opened their skies to Israeli planes. He was particularly appreciative of Romania, which had not only opened its skies, but also enabled Israeli air crews to undergo training exercises in Romanian airspace for several years. These exercises contributed to an ever-developing friendship between the two countries, added the IAF chief, and he noted the grief expressed by the Romanians following the crash.
A "friendship with benefits", as one might say here in the States.
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Mugur Isarescu, the governor of the National Bank of Romania, has been quite vocal in his views lately. His vociferousness, on several occasions, is worthy of quotation:
"The Central Bank has to control market liquidity depending on the instruments at its disposal, playing a vital role in this sense. Technically speaking all those that keep commenting BNR actions based on exchange rate evolution alone are making a mistake. The National Bank is doing a good job; it manages to maintain the macro-level balance through liquidity control. The exchange rate is almost an obsession for Romanians and the mass-media is more or less doing its job but the public debate remains superficial." [Source]
Victor Lupu warned us earlier this year about the possibility of Isarescu's warnings being more than just political small-talk. If Isarescu's warnings turn out to be on target, then Lupu's warnings follow suit. I enjoy Victor Lupu's column- he is a sharp thinker at a time when sharpness has been reserved for fashion.
"I do not believe that after the ongoing agreement is over Romania will still need another financial agreement with the IMF, because the IMF funding is for consolidating international reserves and boosting credibility abroad." {Source]
“Currently we are still in recession. But mixing up the recession with the crisis causes much trouble. Many of the above-mentioned solutions for getting out of the crisis make us go deeper into the crisis. We want to impart the public opinion this major idea: if we want to get out of the crisis by doing everything that was made in previous years and what made us encounter this difficulty means that we have learnt nothing. The solutions that have been suggested seem good in the short run. The trap of populism is threatening us, it is almost prevalent in the present-day public discourse and is exactly the road to hell equipped with good intentions.” [Source]
He's right about the road to hell.
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Valentin Mandache on adobe townhouses in southeastern Romania.
The Fiterman family takes a corner in the healthcare market.
H & M comes to Romania. I predict droves.
A flooded street in Braila and a conspicuous lack of press for Danube floods this year. Pars de cours?
Miss World Romania 2010 can't muster up a flattering dress?
The Interior Minister is getting antsy about "unauthorized protests".
Romanian folk art and folk treasures travel to San Diego.
“Romania is safer than the majority of European countries. A foreigner can easily live in Bucharest or any other city, without problems. Many criminals “work” abroad, because they find it easier to do their activities there and more profitable too. Plus, with all the good and bad things that it might have, Romanian police maintains a feeling of safety for people. I feel very comfortable living in Bucharest”. Sounding a tad defensive there, Ilia?
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The latest Romania Oil & Gas Report from BMI forecasts that the country will account for 3.79% of Central and Eastern European (CEE) regional oil demand by 2014, while providing just 0.53% of supply. What a pity. You'd think Romania had enough oil to be self-sufficient. I wonder what regulatory or political stumbling blocks are preventing this oil from being drilled.
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Dana's photos of a rainy day in the Maramures mountains also deserve your attention. And nostalgia.
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The last time I spoke to Bobita, this past June, was pleasant. He agreed to answer questions for an interview to be published on this website. Things were going well. He preferred not to be called "Bobita" anymore-- Virgil wore better. He seemed at the top of his world.
The last time I saw Bobita, I was at the bottom of mine. And he was still Bobita.
I was in Europe, savoring the days lived from a backpack. After spending a summer in Krakow, my cousin whisked me back to Romania on a long, beautiful, broken train ride. Once in Bucuresti, there was little to stop me from exploring the dark alleyways and haunted crannies of Romanian life. It was the early 2000s; every moment milked for its vitality and generosity.
Speaking to my aunt in Bucuresti yesterday, our Skye connection fuzzed by storms, she told me that "Busnadms" (covered by storm fuzz) had taken his own life. I knew before she repeated it that she was talking about Bobita. There were no more angels in the room, the light wove its own texture.
My worst disease is the fact that I am still alive.
So read the note found by his mother in the room with empty pill bottles and a body empty of Bobita. Family and friends knew he was depressed, but everyone hoped the medicines would work. In a blog conversation early this summer, Bobita told Mugur that he couldn't sleep and he "didn't see a sense to life anymore", though he admitted that he would like to "escape to a hospital where he could read and write". Even as Bobita's taste for life diminished, his desire to put his words on paper did not.
Mugur Grosu suggests this may have been Bobita's last poem. My translation, of course, has that heartless aftertaste that translations tend to spread like a virus, but I wanted to share it. Somehow. To convey the place he left as he saw it-- heavy, tiresome, and thick with dread.
sufletul meu se odihneşte My soul is resting
văd un copac înalt strălucitor I see a tall, sparkling tree
înfăşurat în toate culorile Wrapped in a rainbow of colors
apoi o fântână mică Then a small fountain
din care se ridică From which there rises
odată cu fiecare trecere puternică a vântului With every powerful passing of the wind
un bulgăraş de apă A tiny lump of water
cerul s-a desfăcut The sky has opened
dintr-odată mai e atît de puţin Suddenly there is so little
până mă voi trezi Before my waking
şi iarăşi voi ieşi de sub pleoape And again I will emerge from underneath eyelids
ca să mă îndur pe mine Only to endure myself
printre măştile realu Among the masks of the real.
Before I finally got around to sending those interview questions, Bobita (or Virgil) finally renounced his masks. May his soul find the sleep he sought. His touch will be missed.
A link tribute to Bobita plus a video in which he reads in May 2009 at the Writer's Union meeting:
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At the time, the field of "Soviet Studies" still focused on analysis of formal government institutions under communist regimes, including the COMECON. Content analysis of party documents was all the rage. Professor Ghita ameliorated the study of communist regimes by introducing the test posed by opposition and its role in the evaluation and popular legitimacy of a political regime.
Certainly his association with Radio Free Europe played a role in his interest in the social phenomenon of political dissidence. In fact, Radio Free Europe would have been a pointless endeavor without the assumption that popular legitimacy remained critical to a communist regime's long-term hold on political power.
In fact, Ionescu believed that popular movements, as opposed to internal government reform, would eventually bring an end to the communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
More links, information, and works influenced by Professor Ghita Ionescu:
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Out of Harm's Way in Romania, originally uploaded by UNHCR.
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From Romania to Austria
Celan's parents were killed in the Holocaust; he escaped death by working in a Nazi labor camp. When he realized that the communists were going to take power in Romania, surrealist poet, translator, lecturer, and essayist Paul Celan fled Romania for Austria. There he fell into German literary circles and began a love affair with Ingeborg Bachmann.
Love Gets Lukewarm
The affair was neither sordid nor spacious enough to last. Though Celan chased ghosts, fancies, and implausibles around Nazi-wasted Europe, his love life never met the aesthetically-jaunty standards of surrealism. In fact, it seems he was quite the realist, knowing Bachmann's feelings dwarfed his own. How Bachmann reconciled her love for Celan with her philosophical crush on Martin Heidegger remains baffling.
Ina Hartwig writes about the newly-published correspondence between Celan and his short-time lover:
"Glorious news" the 21-year old Ingeborg Bachmann writes in a letter to her parents, the "surrealist poet" Paul Celan has fallen in love with her. It is May 1948, Vienna. The 27-year-old Celan, whose parents, Leo and Friederike Antschel, died in a German concentration camp in Ukraine, had fled just a few months earlier from Bucharest, via Budapest, to Vienna. Bachmann, the daughter of a teacher and a former member of the Nazi party, is writing her PhD on Heidegger. Celan, of all people, will write in a letter to Bachmann several years later, that Heidegger's choking on his own mistakes is more agreeable to him than the solid Federal German conscience of someone like Heinrich Böll.
The correspondence opens with Celan's poem "In Egypt", which he sends to his beloved, with the dedication "to one who is painfully precise", on her 22nd birthday. It contains a motif, so tantalising and uncomfortable, that it foreshadows the conflicts to come: "Adorn the stranger beside you most beautifully./ Adorn her with the pain for Ruth, for Mirjam and Noemie". This motif of "adorning pain" - the pain of the Jewesses adorns the Gentile - is close to the bone, and yet it constitutes something akin to the constitution of the love between the Austrian philosophy student, who stands before a precipitous career as a poet, and the stateless Jew from Czernowitz in Galicia, whose most famous poem "Deathfugue" has already attracted attention in literary circles.
Like Hannah Arendt, Bachmann's early intellectual milieu revolved around the existential writings of Martin Heidegger. Later, she would abandon Heidegger's existentialism for Ludwig Wittgenstein's analytic, language-centered philosophy. In the interim, however, she would love a man which her intellect was trained to scorn. Though this book has not yet been translated for English or Romanian audiences, I'm holding out hope.
The last letters in the book were written by Celan's widow to Bachmann following Celan's suicide in 1970. Bachmann, herself, died under mysterious circumstances, suicide-speculating circumstances. Their love passed away before their bodies.
For the Hungry
"Celan" is actually an anagram of the Romanian spelling of his surname, Ancel. For more about Celan, Bachmann, and their tryst:
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Hissing snakes withdrew into underground forests:
Europe was a game
A cross
We carried in our scales.
Some speculate
That Europe is not dead
It still trades
And has recently raised
The price of uranium.
Its warships increase
In sophistication, and an angel
>From across the seas
Watches over her
As over an innocent, still unspoilt child.
Long ago
Someone said that Europe was a bloodbath
And even the stars,
Gazing at her tremulously,
Burn off
And grind into metal-gray dust.
Cannon-eyed metal wreaths rose
In her place.
As dargsmen, what would you know?
You have learned
To kiss and fondle the silicon.
I was told
Europe was a princess
And she became enamoured
Of a golden calf
She had met at a ball
(Just as a wave clings
To an oar)
And she wore her bridal gown
Hemmed about the restiveness of planets.
And everyone came to woo her
Offering her giant mother-of-pearls
Which later opened up
Like coffins.
She was sad, as if permeated
By the sorrow of autumn.
She was angry with Hitler, who wanted
To kidnap and conceal her under a rock
Of aversion.
She was Othello's disconsolate
Spouse; but one stormy night
She met a man who was to tell
All her misfortunes:
"Look, your gown is undone,
I think you're courting great danger;
Listen, don't try to make out
You're still a virginal bride;
Stop overacting - after all,
You're not a harlot
But a woman of prodigious elegance;
For you kings went barmy;
For you they die every day.
Stop deflecting
Or you may lose the moon
From the chignon of your hair."
There was a time
When Brahms saw her too. And Brancusi;
He loved her speechlessly
Offering her a Table of Silence
And sculpting her body
Into the raptures of the Endless Column.
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"Dancing Bear and Musicians", taken by Lee Miller (Romania, 1938).
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+ An ancestor's assistant named Romania.
+ The Italian ambassador is "forging new links between Romania and Italy".
+ Meanwhile, four young Romanians are arrested in Italy for robbery.
+ President Basescu says he supports Israel and Palestine as "separate states".
+ Over 3,000 Romanian Catholics protest the government's treatment in Bucharest.
+ Foreign currencies prove a profitable investment for the first half of 2009.
+ Mark Gitenstein is confirmed as the US ambassador to Romania.
+ Dr. James F. McGrath marvels over the rumor mills in Romania, while I marvel at his suggestions that Romania is a tribal society most akin to what one might find in North Africa. Granted, some Romanians put their stock in unusual and even silly beliefs, but more than half of Americans believed W. Bush bombed Iraq to save us from weapons of mass destruction. For even more silly, ridiculous American beliefs, take a little visit to the Fox News website.
+ CEOWorld has all the details on Nabucco, and the demise of Russia's energy monopoly.
+ Romania's car park renewal program, Rabla, offers opportunities for leasing and buying.
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A panorama view of Mogosoaia Palace hovers around you.
The Romanian Ultras movement adds fire.
Victorelli takes a road trip to Sibiu.
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Ion Nuica, Romania's consul to the Republic of Moldova, resigned Monday, July 13, after a few Romanian Web sites posted a video clip showing him having sex with an unidentified woman. The film starts with the Romanian national anthem and the Romanian flag on screen. The words “This is how the Romanians want to have us, the way the Romanian consul Ion Nuica had an employee of the Consulate. Watch and gather if you want”. Then a photograph of Nuica is shown, followed by the sex scene. Here is a link to the video posted on ProTV, a Romanian private TV channel (warning: graphic scenes).
The Romanian Foreign Ministry's spokesman Alin Serbanescu confirmed Ion Nuica has resigned, according to Romanian Mediafax news agency. Serbanescu also said that Nuica was summoned to Bucharest last week from Moldova for other reasons that are not related to this sex scandal.
Nuica resigned on Monday, only hours after the Romanian Curentul daily online displayed photos and a very graphic video showing Nuica having sex with a woman believed to be from the Republic of Moldova suspected of being an employee at the Romanian consulate in Chisinau. The Curentul Web site said it received hidden video camera footage, but it had no idea who taped it.
Ion Nica had been Romania’s most senior diplomat in the neighboring country since the expulsion of the Romanian ambassador, Filip Teodorescu, from Moldova in April, following allegations of Romanian involvement in the violent protests on Aprl 7 in the Moldovan capital Chisinau.Curentul stated that the tape appears to be the work of Moldovan intelligence services.
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