Where Quiet Desperation Reigns

The impressions most Americans have of Rumania (apart from Dracula, Frankenstein, and assorted vampires) come from the media, which have lately been reporting that the little Latin oasis in the Balkans is taking an “independent” stand from the Soviet Union on such issues as participation in Comecon (the East European EEC), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the correct posture toward Israel. This has led many to believe that Rumania is becoming “freer,” and that the Communist monolith is indeed a myth of the cold war. And who can fault the average American, in this era of an extra-terrestrial handshake, for failing to scrutinize this image? Detente in space must surely mean detente on earth.

I had not returned to Rumania since the day in 1961 when I left with my parents (who had been trying to emigrate for 17 years). I was anxious to revisit the land of my childhood, to compare impressions of my adolescent years with present reality. Talking to other Rumanian expatriates over the intervening decade had hardly led me to fantasize: I knew that Rumania had not become a land of milk and honey; not even of bread and margarine. But what I found was disquieting beyond expectation. Rumania is providing us, to use a phrase of Solzhenitsyn’s, with “lessons from the future.”

JG

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Juliana Geran Pilon

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The impressions most Americans have of Rumania (apart from Dracula, Frankenstein, and assorted vampires) come from the media, which have lately been reporting that the little Latin oasis in the Balkans is taking an “independent” stand from the Soviet Union on such issues as participation in Comecon (the East European EEC), the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the correct posture toward Israel. This has led many to believe that Rumania is becoming “freer,” and that the Communist monolith is indeed a myth of the cold war. And who can fault the average American, in this era of an extra-terrestrial handshake, for failing to scrutinize this image? Detente in space must surely mean detente on earth.

I had not returned to Rumania since the day in 1961 when I left with my parents (who had been trying to emigrate for 17 years). I was anxious to revisit the land of my childhood, to compare impressions of my adolescent years with present reality. Talking to other Rumanian expatriates over the intervening decade had hardly led me to fantasize: I knew that Rumania had not become a land of milk and honey; not even of bread and margarine. But what I found was disquieting beyond expectation. Rumania is providing us, to use a phrase of Solzhenitsyn’s, with “lessons from the future.”