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Angela Gheorghiu
A Life for Art
Angela Gheorghiu
University Press of New England, 2018
Angela Gheorghiu is one of the most passionate and talented artists working in opera today, a larger-than-life figure whose intensity and drive, on stage and off, have commanded the attention of the opera world. Largely composed of exclusive interviews with the artist, this authorized biography of the internationally acclaimed soprano, covers Gheorghiu’s life and career from her childhood in Communist Romania to her spectacular Covent Garden debut in 1992 and up to the present day. In it, Gheorghiu shares new insights into the performance of many of her iconic stage roles and her collaborations with opera’s leading lights. Also featured are commentaries and reminiscences by such celebrated figures in the music and art worlds as Grace Bumbry, José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, Marilyn Horne, Bryn Terfel, and Franco Zeffirelli.
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Athene Palace
Hitler's "New Order" Comes to Rumania
R. G. Waldeck
University of Chicago Press, 2013
On the day that Paris fell to the Nazis, R. G. Waldeck was checking into the swankiest hotel in Bucharest, the Athene Palace. A cosmopolitan center during the war, the hotel was populated by Italian and German oilmen hoping to secure new business opportunities in Romania, international spies cloaked in fake identities, and Nazi officers whom Waldeck discovered to be intelligent but utterly bloodless. A German Jew and a reporter for Newsweek, Waldeck became a close observer of the Nazi invasion. As King Carol first tried to placate the Nazis, then abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Waldeck was dressing for dinners with diplomats and cozying up to Nazi officers to get insight and information. From her unique vantage, she watched as Romania, a country with a pro-totalitarian elite and a deep strain of anti-Semitism, suffered civil unrest, a German invasion, and an earthquake, before turning against the Nazis.
 
A striking combination of social intimacy and disinterest political analysis, Athene Palace evokes the elegance and excitement of the dynamic international community in Bucharest before the world had comes to grips with the horrors of war and genocide. Waldeck’s account strikingly presents the finely wrought surface of dinner parties, polite discourse, and charisma, while recognizing the undercurrents of violence and greed that ran through the denizens of Athene Palace.
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The Cancer Within
Reproduction, Cultural Transformation, and Health Care in Romania
Cristina A. Pop
Rutgers University Press, 2022
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
 
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Censorship in Romania
Lidia Vianu
Central European University Press, 1998
Through a series of interviews with prominent Romanian literary figures and a select presentation of their writings, Lidia Vianu asks how, under communism, did Romanian writers cope with constant ideological shifts and, in turn, respond to the censorship that so often accompanied such changes? Now that Romania has emerged from almost fifty years of Communist rule, what is the current status of censorship?These writers are important because, though working under the terror of communism, they dared to put their thoughts into writing, remaining true to their craft, and, in some instances, even arranging for publication.Vianu has chosen a series of subversive writings that not only indicted communism but were also widely embraced by the Romanian public. The author continues to argue that after the fall of communism and the disappearance of subversive literature, the Romanian public started to devour works of translation. A somewhat different form of censorship arose: state-sponsored censorship was replaced by what Vianu terms a crisis of native writing.
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Coming from an Off-Key Time
A Novel
Bogdan Suceava
Northwestern University Press, 2011

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989 marked, in one famous formulation, the "end of history." In his apocalyptic novel Coming from an Off-Key Time, Bogdan Suceavă satirizes the events in his native Romania since the violent end of the Ceauşescu regime that fateful year.

Suceavă uses three interrelated narratives to illustrate the destructive power of Romanian society’s most powerful mythologies. He depicts madness of all kinds but especially religious beliefs and their perversion by all manner of outrageous sects. Here horror and humor reside impossibly in the same time and place, and readers experience the vertiginous feeling of living in the middle of a violent historical upheaval.

Even as Coming from an Off-Key Time suggests the influence of such writers as Mikhail Bulgakov, the fantastic satirist of the early Soviet Union, Suceavă engages the complexities of a quickly changing country in search of its bearings and suspicious of its past. Bogdan Suceavă is an associate professor of mathematics at California State University, Fullerton. One of Romanian literature’s most promising and original young writers, he is the author of four novels, two books of short stories, and several collections of poems.

Alistair Ian Blyth’s previous translations include Filip Florian, Little Fingers (2009); Lucian Dan Teodorovici, Our Circus Presents (2009); and Catalin Avramescu’s An Intellectual History of Cannibalism (2009).

 

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A Contested Borderland
Competing Russian and Romanian Visions of Bessarabia in the Second Half of the 19th and Early 20th Century
Andrei Cusco
Central European University Press, 2017
Bessarabia―mostly occupied by modern-day republic of Moldova―was the only territory representing an object of rivalry and symbolic competition between the Russian Empire and a fully crystallized nation-state: the Kingdom of Romania. This book is an intellectual prehistory of the Bessarabian problem, focusing on the antagonism of the national and imperial visions of this contested periphery. Through a critical reassessment and revision of the traditional historical narratives, the study argues that Bessarabia was claimed not just by two opposing projects of ‘symbolic inclusion,’ but also by two alternative and theoretically antagonistic models of political legitimacy.By transcending the national lens of Bessarabian / Moldovan history and viewing it in the broader Eurasian comparative context, the book responds to the growing tendency in recent historiography to focus on the peripheries in order to better understand the functioning of national and imperial states in the modern era.
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The End and the Beginning
The Revolutions of 1989 and the Resurgence of History
Vladimir Tismaneanu
Central European University Press, 2012
A fresh interpretation of the contexts, meanings, and consequences of the revolutions of 1989, coupled with state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the demise of communist regimes. The book provides an analysis that takes into account the complexities of the Soviet bloc, the events' impact upon Europe, and their re-interpretation within a larger global context. Departs from static ways of analysis (events and their significance) bringing forth approaches that deal with both pre-1989 developments and the 1989 context itself, while extensively discussing the ways of resituating 1989 in the larger context of the 20th century and of its lessons for the 21st.Emphasizes the possibility for re-thinking and re-visiting the filters and means that scholars use to interpret such turning point. The editors perceive the present project as a challenge to existing readings on the complex set of issues and topics presupposed by a re-evaluation of 1989 as a symbol of the change and transition from authoritarianism to democracy.
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Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu
Ted Anton
Northwestern University Press, 1996
Winner of 1997 Carl Sandburg Award

On May 21, 1991, University of Chicago professor Ioan Culianu was murdered execution-style on campus. The crime stunned the school, terrified students, and mystified the FBI. The case remains unsolved. In Eros, Magic, and the Murder of Professor Culianu, award-winning investigative reporter Ted Anton shows that the murder is what Culianu's friends suspected all along: the first political assassination of a professor on American soil.
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The Eugenic Fortress
The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment in Interwar Romania
Tudor Georgescu
Central European University Press, 2016
The ever growing library on the history of eugenics and fascism focuses largely on nation states, while this monograph asks why an ethnic minority, the Transylvanian Saxons, turned to eugenics as a means of self-empowerment in interwar Romania. The Eugenic Fortress investigates and unpacks the eugenic movement that emerged in the early twentieth century, and focuses on its conceptual and methodological evolution during the interwar period. Further on, the book analyzes the gradual process of politicisation and radicalisation at the hands of a second generation of Saxon eugenicists in conjunction with the rise of an equally indigenous fascist movement. The Saxon case study offers valuable insights into why an ethnic minority would seek to re-entrench itself behind the race-hygienic walls of a 'eugenic fortress', as well as the influence host and home nations had upon its design. Georgescu's work is ground breaking in the sense that the history of this uprooted community is usually handled with sensitivity and serious (and critical) research into Transylvanian Saxon involvement with Nazism has been energetically resisted.
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Flying Against the Arrow
An Intellectual in Ceausescu's Romania
Horia-Roman Patapievici
Central European University Press, 2003

The ‘unbearable 80s’, as the last decade of the Ceauşescu era has been called in Romania, are in the focus of this quasi-autobiographical work. The book vividly portrays the difficulties encountered by a young intellectual trying to shape himself under the oppressive regime and provides a stark depiction of a man’s intellectual suffocation under hard-line socialist rule. 

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The Hangman's House
Andrea Tompa
Seagull Books, 2020
Set in the 1970s and ’80s, The Hangman’s House narrates the life and times of a Hungarian family in Romania. Those were extraordinary times of oppression, poverty and hopelessness, and Andrea Tompa’s latest novel depicts everyday life under the brutal communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu, referred to by the narrator as an unnamed “one-eared hangman.” Ceaușescu is omnipresent throughout the story—in portraits in classrooms and schoolbooks, in the empty food stores, in TV programs, in obligatory Party demonstrations. Most insidiously, he is present in the dreams and nightmares of common people, who, in this cruel period of history, become cruel to one another, just like the dictator.
 
Our narrator, a teenage “Girl,” observes life through tangled, almost interminable sentences, trying to understand and process the many questions in her life: why her family is falling apart; why her mother has three jobs; why her father becomes an alcoholic; why her grandmother dreams of “Hungarian times”; and, most troubling, why there is persecution all around. Brutal though the times are, Girl’s narration is far from a mere indictment. It is suffused with love, tenderness and irony.
 
Written by a woman and featuring a young woman narrator, The Hangman's House focuses intently on how women play the principal roles in holding together the resilient fabric of society. Evocative of the celebrated wry humor that distinguishes the best of Hungarian literature, Tompa’s novel is a tour de force that will introduce a brilliant writer to English-language readers.
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History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness
Lucian Boia
Central European University Press, 2001

There is a considerable difference between real history and discourse history - this book stems from this idea. The author points out that history is constantly reconstructed, adapted and sometimes mythified from the perspective of the present day, of present states of mind and ideologies. Boia closely examines the process of historical culture and conscience in nineteenth and twentieth century Romania, particularly concentrating on the impact of the national ideology on history. Based upon his findings, the author identifies several key mythical configurations and analyses the manner in which Romanians have reconstituted their own highly ideologized history over the last two centuries.

The strength of History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness lies in the author's ability to fully deconstruct the entire Romanian historiographic system and demonstrate the increasing acuteness of national problems in general, and in particular the exploitation of history to support national ideology.

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Hungarian Religion, Romanian Blood
A Minority's Struggle for National Belonging, 1920–1945
R. Chris Davis
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Amid the rising nationalism and racial politics that culminated in World War II, European countries wishing to "purify" their nations often forced unwanted populations to migrate. The targeted minorities had few options, but as R. Chris Davis shows, they sometimes used creative tactics to fight back, redefining their identities to serve their own interests.

Davis's highly illuminating example is the case of the little-known Moldavian Csangos, a Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking community of Roman Catholics in eastern Romania. During World War II, some in the Romanian government wanted to expel them. The Hungarian government saw them as Hungarians and wanted to settle them on lands confiscated from other groups. Resisting deportation, the clergy of the Csangos enlisted Romania's leading racial anthropologist, collected blood samples, and rewrote a millennium of history to claim Romanian origins and national belonging—thus escaping the discrimination and violence that devastated so many of Europe's Jews, Roma, Slavs, and other minorities. In telling their story, Davis offers fresh insight to debates about ethnic allegiances, the roles of science and religion in shaping identity, and minority politics past and present.

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Ionel Bratianu
Romania
Keith Hitchins
Haus Publishing, 2011
At the beginning of 1918 the British War Cabinet endorsed the view of the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, that after the war "Austria-Hungary should be in a position to exercise a powerful influence in south-east Europe." These reassuring professions were the essence of hypocrisy, since the Allies had already given away, at least on paper, large chunks of Austro-Hungarian territory as bribes to potential allies. In 1916 Romania was promised the whole of Transylvania, the Banat - both components of historic Hungary - and the Bukovina in return for her entry into the war. These promises persuaded the Romanian Prime Minister Ion Bratianu (1864-1927) to intervene in the war on the side of the Allies in 1916. He lead the Romanian delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, where he insisted on those promises to be fulfilled. His often-strained relations with the Big Four and the Supreme Council were further eroded when Romania invaded Hungary. Romania, however, in the end signed and adhered to the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye with Austria, Neuilly-sur-Seine with Bulgaria, the Treaty of Paris (1920), the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary, and the minorities treaty.
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Key Concepts of Romanian History
Alternative Approaches to Socio-Political Languages
Victor Neumann
Central European University Press, 2013
The theoretical analyses and interpretations contained in the studies of this volume focus on key-concepts such as: politics, politician, democracy, Europe, liberalism, constitution, property, progress, kinship, nation, national character and specificity, homeland, patriotism, education, totalitarianism, democracy, democratic, democratization, transition. The essays unveil specific aspects belonging to Romania's past and present. They also offer alternative perspectives on the Romanian culture through the relationship between the elite and society, and novel reflections on the delayed and unfinished modernization processes within the society and the state. The editors articulate the results coming from various sciences, such as history, linguistics, sociology, political sciences, and philosophy with the aim that the past and present profiles of Romania are better understood.
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The Land of Green Plums
Herta Muller
Northwestern University Press, 1998

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Letter to My Children
From Romania to America via Auschwitz
Rudolph Tessler
University of Missouri Press, 1999

"Sixty-seven members of my family—my mother, her father, my three sisters, three of my brothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins—were murdered at Auschwitz."

As Rudolph Tessler's mother stepped from the train in Auschwitz, shortly before she was sent to the gas chamber, she heard "Hello, Esther." In a polite tone, a young German SS officer greeted her as he would any old friend. His family lived down the road from the Tessler family in Viseu, their hometown in northern Romania. They, like the rest of the town, admired Esther for her wonderful cooking, particularly the delicious cakes she brought them each Christmas. Now he ushered her and six of her children to their deaths.

Throughout Letter to My Children, Tessler offers vivid glimpses of the senselessness that surrounded him during World War II. Of the thousands packed in trains and transported from Viseu to Auschwitz, just a small group survived to see liberation. Among the survivors were Tessler, his father, and two of his brothers. This is the amazing story of their experiences as Hasidic Jews caught in the chaos and terror of the Holocaust.

Tessler's upbringing had emphasized community and family devotion—traits not forgotten in the concentration camps, where he and his family members often rescued one another from certain death. Few fathers and sons survived the concentration camps together. In spite of the odds, Tessler and his brother Buroch managed to stick together, sharing their father's labor assignments to protect him from death, preserving not only their family bond but also their spirituality. Tessler's father, always a source of strength and guidance to his family, provided counsel to many prisoners in the camp and eventually assumed the role of rabbi.

Despite an environment in which their captors tried to reduce them to animals, Tessler's remaining family and seven other Jews from Viseu made a special effort to observe their faith. Bending rules in ways that risked their lives, they worked together to smuggle wheat, grind it into flour, and bake matzos to distribute for Passover. The group also secretly gathered to pray on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. These religious observances offered some comfort in the camp.

In addition to vividly portraying the daily struggles of camp life, Letter to My Children follows Tessler beyond liberation, recounting his days as a displaced person struggling for a new life in the midst of the devastation of postwar Europe, as an American immigrant striving to rebuild his family and succeed in business, and as a philanthropist for education and health care. Recalling the age-old way of life in Viseu that was erased by the Holocaust, this inspiring story conveys the hope, determination, and perseverance that made Tessler a survivor.

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Listening to the Languages of the People
Lazare Sainéan on Romanian, Yiddish, and French
Natalie Zemon Davis
Central European University Press, 2022

This tale of great achievements and great disappointments offers a fresh perspective on the interplay between scholarship and political sentiment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Lazăr Șăineanu (1859-1934), linguist and folklorist, was a pioneer in his native Romania, seeking out the popular elements in culture along with high literary ones. He was among the first to publish a study of Yiddish as a genuine language, and he uncovered Turkish features in Romanian language and customs. He also made an index of hundreds of Romanian folktales. Yet when he sought Romanian citizenship and a professorship, he was blocked by powerful figures who thought Jews could not be Romanians and who fancied the origins of Romanian culture to be wholly Latin. Faced with anti-Semitism, some of his friends turned to Zionism. Instead he tried baptism, which brought him only mockery and shame.

Hoping to find a polity to which he could belong, Șăineanu moved with his family to Paris in 1900 and became Lazare Sainéan. There he made innovative studies of French popular speech and slang, culminating in his great work on the language of Rabelais. Once again, he was contributing to the development of a national tongue. Even then, while welcomed by literary scholars, Sainéan was unable to get a permanent university post. Though a naturalized citizen of France, he felt himself a foreigner, an “intruder,” into his old age.

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The Making of Mămăligă
Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish
Alex Drace-Francis
Central European University Press, 2022

Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade. 

The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.

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The Man Who Swam into History
The (Mostly) True Story of My Jewish Family
By Robert A. Rosenstone
University of Texas Press, 2005

The story begins with a grandfather who heroically escaped from Russia by swimming the Pruth River to Romania—or did he? Then there are stories of another grandfather who kept a lifelong mistress; grandmothers who were ignored except in the kitchen; migrations legal and illegal from Eastern Europe to Canada to California; racketeers on one side of the family and Communists on the other; and a West Coast adolescence in the McCarthy years. All of these (mostly true) stories form a Jewish family's history, a tale of dislocation and assimilation. But in the hands of award-winning historian Robert Rosenstone, they become much more. The fragments of memory so beautifully preserved in The Man Who Swam into History add unforgettable, human characters to the now familiar story of the Jewish diaspora in the twentieth century.

This combination memoir/short story collection recounts the Rosenstone family's passage from Romania to America. Robert Rosenstone tells the story not as a single, linear narrative, but through "tales, sequences, windows, moments, and fragments resurrected from the lives of three generations in my two parental families, set in five countries on two continents over the period of almost a century." This more literary and personal approach allows Rosenstone's relatives to emerge as distinct personalities, voices who quarrel and gossip, share their dreams and fears, and maintain the ties of a loving, if eccentric, family. Among the genre of "coming to America" tales, The Man Who Swam into History is a work of unique vision, one that both records and reconstructs the past even as it continuously—and humorously—questions the truth of its own assertions.

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Military Occupation and Diplomacy
Soviet Troops in Romania, 1944–1958
Sergiu Verona
Duke University Press, 1992
In 1958, after fourteen years of military occupation, Khrushchev—in an unprecedented act—withdrew the Soviet Union’s troops from Romania as part of a political move intended to encourage the withdrawal of Western military forces from Europe. In analyzing this crucial historic episode, Sergiu Verona’s comprehensive study illustrates the dynamics of Soviet military presence in Romania and provides a framework for understanding Soviet security policy, then and now, as well as the interaction between Soviet military objectives and diplomacy.
Drawing on declassified archival material in the United States and the United Kingdom, the author considers Khrushchev’s reversal of Stalinist expansionism by examining the motivation, function, and operation of the initial occupation of Romania; the complex involvement of Soviet diplomacy and its perception by the United States and other Western powers; the process by which Khrushchev decided to withdraw Soviet troops from that country; and the impact of this decision on Soviet policy. Verona extends his analysis, providing comparisons between Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s approaches to Eastern Europe, noting that similarities exist not only in domestic policies but in the realm of foreign policy as well.
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My Life as a Spy
Investigations in a Secret Police File
Katherine Verdery
Duke University Press, 2018
As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.
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National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania
Sorin Mitu
Central European University Press, 2001

This meticulously researched and elegantly written book is the most authoritative study of the emergence of modern Romanian identity in Transylvania during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Based upon a plethora of contemporary published sources, Mitu approaches national identity from a variety of perspectives - from within the Romanian community itself and their reaction to the image others had of them.

The author sheds new light on the problems of self-evaluation using a method he describes as "functional analysis" to examine a complex set of ideologies and propaganda. This approach helps the reader to understand the intricate web of contemporary Romanian nationalism.

National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania appeals to scholars of modern Romanian history, those focusing on the Habsburg Monarchy and the study of modern nationalism. The book is an important contribution to the expanding debate on nationalism and national identity from an East European perspective.

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The Passport as Home
Comfort in Rootlessness
Andrei S. Markovits
Central European University Press, 2021

A Scholar's Quest for Home and Identity

Experience the remarkable story of a Romanian-born, Hungarian-speaking Jewish professor. From Vienna to Columbia and Harvard, he navigates a life marked by rootlessness, seeking comfort and purpose. His journey unfolds against the backdrop of five decades, two continents, and significant political and cultural changes.

As we follow his pursuit of a home, we gain insight into the critical developments of post-1945 Europe and America. Markovits's emigration experiences, first from Romania to Vienna and later from Vienna to New York, shed light on the challenges he faced.

His journey offers a panoramic view of the forces shaping the latter half of the 20th century. Despite America's flaws, he finds it a beacon of academic excellence, intellectual openness, cultural diversity, and religious tolerance—qualities that Europe lacked.


Explore the complexities of identity, culture, and the universal search for belonging in this captivating narrative.

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Patrick Leigh Fermor
Noble Encounters between Budapest and Transylvania
Michael O'Sullivan
Central European University Press, 2018
This book revisits the trajectory of one section of Patrick Leigh Fermor's famous excursion on foot from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the 1930s. The highly regarded British travel writer and heroic wartime Special Operations Executive officer walked into Hungary as a youth of 19 at Easter and left Transylvania in August 1934. This intrepid traveler, "a cross between Indiana Jones, James Bond and Graham Greene" as the New York Times obituary put it in 2011, published his experiences half a century later. Between the Woods and the Water, that covers the part of the epic foot journey from the middle Danube to the Iron Gates, has been a bestseller since it was first published in 1986. In the present volume Michael O'Sullivan reveals the identity of the interesting characters in the travelogue, interviewing several of them eyetoeye. The many counts and barons among his 1934 contacts are a proof of Leigh Fermor's lifelong attraction to the aristocracy. Rich with photos and other documents on places and persons both from the thirties and today, the book offers a compelling social and political history of the period and the area. It provides a particular portrait of Hungary and Transylvania when they were on the brink of momentous change.
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Physicians, Peasants, and Modern Medicine
Imagining Rurality in Romania, 1860-1910
Constantin Barbulescu
Central European University Press, 2019
This monograph, a coherent and consistent historical narrative about Romania's modernization, focuses on one section of the country's elites of the late nineteenth century, namely the health professionals, and on the imagery they constructed as they interacted with the peasant and his world. Doctors ventured out of cities and became a familiar sight on dusty country roads in of Moldavia and Wallachia. Beyond a charitable impulse they did so thru patriotism as the rural world became ever more prominent within the national ideology. Furthermore, new health legislation required the district general practitioner (medicul de plasă) to visit the villages in his catchment area twice a month. Based on solid original research, the book describes rural conditions of the time and the efforts aiming to improve peasants' way of life with abundant quotes from doctors' public health reports and memoirs. The book sheds light on a variety of microscale realities of social life in the medical discourse on the peasant and the rural world in the mirror of medical discourse. Themes include general hygiene, clothing, dwellings, nutrition, drinking habits and healing practices of the peasantry, in the eye of medical specialists. Related official measures, laws, regulations, norms about public health are also discussed in the frame of wider modernizing processes.
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The Pãltinis Diary
A Paideic Model in Humanist Culture
Gabriel Liiceanu
Central European University Press, 2000

The intellectual resistance to totalitarian regimes can take many forms. This remarkable volume portrays one such story of resistance in Romania during the reign of Ceauşescu: that of Constantin Noica, one of the country’s foremost intellectuals.

Noica was an original thinker belonging to the remarkable intellectual generation of important figures such as Mircea Eliade, E. M. Cioran and Eugene Ionescu, but he chose to stay in Romania after the communist takeover when many others fled. Harassed and jailed for six years, Noica retreated to the mountains and gathered around him some brilliant young minds and future talent to challenge and nurture them in a time when communism denied them the materials of true intellectual importance.

This group of students withdrew to Noica’s retreat for intensive philosophical sessions to debate the works of Kant, Plato, Heidegger and discuss humanistic values. The author of this volume Liiceanu, himself a brilliant philosopher, was Noica’s closest disciple and during every meeting he noted every conversation in a diary which came to be known as The Păltiniş Diary. These conversations were secretly published and quickly devoured by intellectuals in Romania who were prepared to sacrifice part of their food provisions to acquire the book. The Păltiniş Diary sold out within a matter of days and because of Secret Police censorship, was not published again in Romania until 1991 by which time Noica had died and the group had disbanded to help with the reconstruction of post-Ceauşescu Romania.

The Păltiniş Diary is a wonderful homage to an intellectual master and to the power of intellect and freedom. The book will be of interest to philosophers, non-philosophers alike, and to anyone who seeks to grasp the true meaning of survival under totalitarian conditions. 

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Rakes of the Old Court
A Novel
Mateiu Caragiale, Translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.
 
Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.
 
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Remembering Communism
Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe
Contributors: Simina Bădica, Iskra Baeva, Tanya Boneva, Corina Cimpoieru, Liliana Deyanova, Albena Hranova, Nataliya Hristova, Petya Kabakchieva, Evgenia Kalinova, Anny Kirilova, Thomas Lindenberger, Tamás Lőnhárt, Izabella Main, Tsvetana Manova, Iliiana Marcheva, Vasil Markov, Andi Mihalache, Cătălina Mihalache, Milla Mineva, Cristina Petrescu, Dragoş Petrescu, Vania Stoyanova, Virgiliu Ţârău, Nikolai Vukov, Smaranda Vultur
Central European University Press, 2014

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past.

The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

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The Roma in Romanian History
Viorel Achim
Central European University Press, 2004
One of the greatest challenges during the enlargement process of the European Union towards the east is how the issue of the Roma or Gypsies is tackled. This ethnic minority group represents a much higher share by numbers, too, in some regions going above 20% of the population. This enormous social and political problem cannot be solved without proper historical studies like this book, the most comprehensive history of Gypsies in Romania. It is based on academic research, synthesizing the entire historical Romanian and foreign literature concerning this topic, and using lot of information from the archives. The main focus is laid on the events of the greatest consequence. Special attention is devoted to aspects linked to the long history of the Gypsies, such as slavery, the process of integration and assimilation into the majority population, as well as the marginalization of Gypsies, which has historic roots. The process of emancipation of Gypsies in the mid-19th century receives due treatment. The deportation of Gypsies to Transnistria during the Antonescu regime, between 1942-1944, is reconstructed in a special chapter. The closing chapters elaborate on the policy toward Gypsies in the decades after the Second World War that explain for the latest developments and for the situation of this population in today's Romania.
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Romania
Lucian Boia
Reaktion Books, 2001
Romania occupies a unique position on the map of Eastern Europe. It is a country that presents many paradoxes. In this book the preeminent Romanian historian Lucian Boia examines his native land's development from the Middle Ages to modern times, delineating its culture, history, language, politics and ethnic identity. Boia introduces us to the heroes and myths of Romanian history, and provides an enlightening account of the history of Romanian Communism. He shows how modernization and the influence of the West have divided the nation - town versus country, nationalists versus pro-European factions, the elite versus the masses - and argues that Romania today is in chronic difficulty as it tries to fix its identity and envision a future for itself.

The book concludes with a tour of Bucharest, whose houses, streets and public monuments embody Romania's traditional values and contemporary contradictions.
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Romania’s Abandoned Children
Deprivation, Brain Development, and the Struggle for Recovery
Charles A. Nelson, Nathan A. Fox, and Charles H. Zeanah
Harvard University Press, 2014

The implications of early experience for children’s brain development, behavior, and psychological functioning have long absorbed caregivers, researchers, and clinicians. The 1989 fall of Romania’s Ceausescu regime left approximately 170,000 children in 700 overcrowded, impoverished institutions across Romania, and prompted the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of institutionalization on children’s wellbeing. Romania’s Abandoned Children, the authoritative account of this landmark study, documents the devastating toll paid by children who are deprived of responsive care, social interaction, stimulation, and psychological comfort.

Launched in 2000, the Bucharest Early Intervention Project (BEIP) was a rigorously controlled investigation of foster care as an alternative to institutionalization. Researchers included 136 abandoned infants and toddlers in the study and randomly assigned half of them to foster care created specifically for the project. The other half stayed in Romanian institutions, where conditions remained substandard. Over a twelve-year span, both groups were assessed for physical growth, cognitive functioning, brain development, and social behavior. Data from a third group of children raised by their birth families were collected for comparison.

The study found that the institutionalized children were severely impaired in IQ and manifested a variety of social and emotional disorders, as well as changes in brain development. However, the earlier an institutionalized child was placed into foster care, the better the recovery. Combining scientific, historical, and personal narratives in a gripping, often heartbreaking, account, Romania’s Abandoned Children highlights the urgency of efforts to help the millions of parentless children living in institutions throughout the world.

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Russia on the Danube
Empire, Elites, and Reform in Moldavia and Wallachia, 1812–1834
Victor Taki
Central European University Press, 2021

One of the goals of Russia’s Eastern policy was to turn Moldavia and Wallachia, the two Romanian principalities north of the Danube, from Ottoman vassals into a controllable buffer zone and a springboard for future military operations against Constantinople. Russia on the Danube describes the divergent interests and uneasy cooperation between the Russian officials and the Moldavian and Wallachian nobility in a key period between 1812 and 1834. Victor Taki’s meticulous examination of the plans and memoranda composed by Russian administrators and the Romanian elite underlines the crucial consequences of this encounter. The Moldavian and Wallachian nobility used the Russian-Ottoman rivalry in order to preserve and expand their traditional autonomy. The comprehensive institutional reforms born out of their interaction with the tsar’s officials consolidated territorial statehood on the lower Danube, providing the building blocks of a nation state.

The main conclusion of the book is that although Russian policy was driven by self-interest, and despite the Russophobia among a great part of the Romanian intellectuals, this turbulent period significantly contributed to the emergence, several decades later, of modern Romania.

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Secrets and Truths
Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police
Katherine Verdery
Central European University Press, 2014
Nothing in Soviet-style communism was as shrouded in mystery as its secret police. Its paid employees were known to few and their actual numbers remain uncertain. Its informers and collaborators operated clandestinely under pseudonyms and met their officers in secret locations. Its files were inaccessible, even to most party members. The people the secret police recruited or interrogated were threatened so effectively that some never told even their spouses, and many have held their tongues to this day, long after the regimes fell.With the end of communism, many of the newly established governments—among them Romania's—opened their secret police archives. From those files, as well as her personal memories, the author has carried out historical ethnography of the Romanian Securitate. Secrets and Truths is not only of historical interest but has implications for understanding the rapidly developing "security state" of the neoliberal present.
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Silicon Valley Imperialism
Techno Fantasies and Frictions in Postsocialist Times
Erin McElroy
Duke University Press, 2024
In Silicon Valley Imperialism, Erin McElroy maps the processes of gentrification, racial dispossession, and economic predation that drove the development of Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area and how that logic has become manifest in postsocialist Romania. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research in Romania and the United States, McElroy exposes the mechanisms through which the appeal of Silicon Valley technocapitalism devours space and societies, displaces residents, and generates extreme income inequality in order to expand its reach. In Romania, dreams of privatization updated fascist and anti-Roma pasts and socialist-era underground computing practices. At the same time, McElroy accounts for the ways Romanians are resisting Silicon Valley capitalist logics, where anticapitalist and anti-imperialist activists and protesters build on socialist-era worldviews not to restore state socialism but rather to establish more just social formations. Attending to the violence of Silicon Valley imperialism, McElroy reveals technocapitalism as an ultimately unsustainable model of rapacious economic and geographic growth.
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Soviet Occupation of Romania, Hungary, and Austria 1944/45–1948/49
Csaba Békés
Central European University Press, 2015
This book compares the various aspects – political, military economic – of Soviet occupation in Austria, Hungary and Romania. Using documents found in Austrian, Hungarian, Romanian and Russian archives the authors argue that the nature of Soviet foreign policy has been misunderstood. Existing literature has focused on the Soviet foreign policy from a political perspective; when and why Stalin made the decision to introduce Bolshevik political systems in the Soviet sphere of influence.This book will show that the Soviet conquest of East-Central Europe had an imperial dimension as well and allowed the Soviet Union to use the territory it occupied as military and economic space. The final dimension of the book details the tragically human experiences of Soviet occupation: atrocities, rape, plundering and deportations.
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The Space of Boredom
Homelessness in the Slowing Global Order
Bruce O'Neill
Duke University Press, 2017
In The Space of Boredom Bruce O'Neill explores how people cast aside by globalism deal with an intractable symptom of downward mobility: an unshakeable and immense boredom. Focusing on Bucharest, Romania, where the 2008 financial crisis compounded the failures of the postsocialist state to deliver on the promises of liberalism, O'Neill shows how the city's homeless are unable to fully participate in a society that is increasingly organized around practices of consumption. Without a job to work, a home to make, or money to spend, the homeless—who include pensioners abandoned by their families and the state—struggle daily with the slow deterioration of their lives. O'Neill moves between homeless shelters and squatter camps, black labor markets and transit stations, detailing the lives of men and women who manage boredom by seeking stimulation, from conversation and coffee to sex in public restrooms or going to the mall or IKEA. Showing how boredom correlates with the downward mobility of Bucharest's homeless, O'Neill theorizes boredom as an enduring affect of globalization in order to provide a foundation from which to rethink the politics of alienation and displacement.
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Steamboat Modernity
Travel, Transport, and Social Transformation on the Lower Danube, 1830–1860
Constantin Ardeleanu
Central European University Press, 2024

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries.

Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The book offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising. Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

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A Tale of Two Villages
Coerced Modernization in the East European Countryside
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi
Central European University Press, 2010
This dramatic story of land and power from twentieth-century Eastern Europe is set in two extraordinary villages: a rebel village, where peasants fought the advent of Communism and became its first martyrs, and a model village turned forcibly into a town, Dictator Ceauşescu's birthplace. The two villages capture among themselves nearly a century of dramatic transformation and social engineering, ending up with their charged heritage in the present European Union.
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A Task for Sisyphus
Why Europe’s Roma Policies Fail
Iulius Rostas
Central European University Press, 2019
Despite an increasing number of EU and government initiatives in their favor, the situation of Roma in Europe has only worsened. This book explores the many miscalculations, misconceptions, and blunders that have led to this failure. Looking at Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania, Rostas shows how policy makers in each country have mishandled already confused EU policy, from failing to define “Roma” to not having a way to evaluate their own progress. Rostas further argues that the alleged successes of these policies were actually the product of poor information and sometimes outright deception. Examining perennial topics among Roma like school segregation and political representation, the author shows how often the so-called success of Roma policies can be fallacious and simply pave the way for further problems.Rostas maintains that when the EU’s Framework for Roma program comes to an end in 2020, there must be a fundamental shift in policy for there to be any real improvement for Roma. Policy makers will have to address Roma issues not only in terms of poverty and social exclusion but also in terms of the particular nature of Romani ethnic identity. This shift requires reconceiving Roma as a “politically insular minority” and rearranging the power dynamics of local government to ensure that when the new era of Roma policy begins Roma themselves will have a voice in its formulation.
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front cover of Transforming Peasants, Property and Power
Transforming Peasants, Property and Power
The Collectivization of Agriculture in Romania, 1949–1962
Constantin Iordachi
Central European University Press, 2009
The subject matter of the volume is part of larger research agenda on the process of land collectivization in the former communist camp, focusing on state, identity and property. The main innovation of the volume is to apply recent interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the collectivization process, asking what types of new peasant-state relations it formed and how it transformed notions of self, persons, and things (such as land). The project conceived of changes in the system of ownership as causing changes in the identity and attitude of people; similarly, it regarded the study of personal identities as essential for understanding changes in the system of ownership. This perspective is rare in the area-studies approaches to the topic.
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Wasted Morning
A Novel
Gabriela Adamesteanu
Northwestern University Press, 2011
Upon its original publication in 1983, Wasted Morning catapulted Gabriela Adamesteanu to the first rank of Romanian novelists. She has since been translated into many languages, and now her most famous novel is available in English for the first time. At the center of Wasted Morning is Vica Delca, a simple, poor woman in her seventies who has endured the endless series of trials and tribulations that was Romanian history from WWI to the end of the twentieth century. 

She's a born storyteller, chatting and gossiping tirelessly. But she also listens, so it is through her that Adamesteanu is able to show us a panoramic portrait of Romanian society as the fortunes of its various strata shift violently. Rich or poor, honest (more or less) or deceitful, all of the characters in this polyphonic novel are brought vividly to life. From Bucharest's aspirations to be the Paris of Eastern Europe to the darkest days of dictatorship, the novel presents a sweeping vision of the personal and collective costs of a turbulent century.
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