Operation Bucharest, by Jack Chick

American evangelist Jack Chick produced a lengthy series of cartoon booklets promoting his brand of Christianity, of which Operation Bucharest (No. 1 in the Crusaders series, 1974) was the first to be printed in full colour.  Produced during the Cold War, its stereotyped depiction of the communist authorities’ attitude to Christianity might have felt plausible to its intended audience.  The success of the series in promoting Christianity among the young has been attested to, however crude the message to a more dispassionate eye.

In winter-bound Romania, the ideological climate as cold as the weather, a group of Christians meet in secret to avoid persecution by the state, which is well aware of the massive impact Christianity will have on their godless creed if people are able to hear about it.  They appear to be Protestants, much like Chick, rather than the Orthodox Christians one would expect to find in Romania.

Unfortunately, they have been betrayed by a Judas.  They are arrested and brutalised, and the last Bible in the area is seized.  The remaining Christians need another copy, but someone has to get it to them.  A couple of American Christians, dubbed The Crusaders, are enlisted in the US to smuggle a microfilm of the holy book, translated into Romanian, into the country where it will be used to print more copies at a secret location.

Timothy Clark and James Carter are the unlikely partners.  Timothy is a white multilingual ex-Green Beret; James is black and streetwise, a former drug dealer and militant (as if the two are synonymous) who saw the light in about ten seconds when he met an elderly preacher who was not scared of him – it is noteworthy how quickly a conversion can be effected in the most unlikely of circumstances once the truth, of which the hearer had been unaware, is revealed.

James and Timothy are the epitome of muscular Christianity, blending piety with an ability to get out of trouble, as well as walking examples of the power of Christ to reach any heart, however unlikely.  Aside from the piety, they put me in mind of The Pretenders, the TV series starring the odd couple pairing of Roger Moore and Tony Curtis which aired in 1971.  The choice of James Carter may have been judged unfortunate when Jimmy Carter became president in 1977.

Timothy happens to be the nephew of the American ambassador in Paris, and Colonel Cherkov (which probably isn’t a play on words) of the KGB, learning of the trip but not realising the purpose – taking their stated reason as going on holiday at face value – hatches a plan to ensnare him in a honey trap by deploying the beautiful agent Sofia, then embarrass his uncle by making it look as though it was the uncle, not Timothy, who had committed the indiscretion.

In terms of politics, the Russian KGB is firmly in charge in Romania.  There is no mention of Ceaușescu or the Securitate and at one point Sofia says ‘What do you think of our Russian soldiers?’  One gets the impression Chick thought Romania was in the Soviet Union, but it is reasonable to assume he did little background research.  Why he chose Romania rather than another Eastern Bloc country is unclear, as Christians might have been depicted as having a hard time in any of them.  Perhaps he considered it to have a particularly brutal image.

The duo fly out to Paris and then travel on to Bucharest by train with their precious microfilm.  En route, Cherkov’s goons try to attack James to get him out of the way, but come off worse from their encounter with the brother.  Meanwhile, the talented Sofia goes to work on Timothy, but while he clearly likes her, to Cherkov’s increasing frustration he is disinclined to do anything that could be turned into a scandal.

Worse, during one of these trysts Sofia listens to Timothy quote scripture and she is promptly converted, along with the cameraman who was set to record the grand seduction.  Cherkov and his subordinate hear the conversation recorded on film, but they are beyond redemption it seems, and are not themselves converted.  The colonel is naturally furious at the failure of his plans; he would have been even more so had he known about the microfilm.

Sofia is carted off to the Gulag (no news of the cameraman), though as Chick tells us at the end, she may suffer now, but she will be Saved, unlike the communists.  The film is safely delivered, and the Romanian Christians can print their Bibles, a press and paper apparently not being an issue.  They only have to wait 15 years for the regime to disappear, and they can read it to their heart’s content without fear of the door being kicked in.

 

For more on the Chick Tracts, see Peter Laws’ article ‘The Terrifying World of Jack Chick’, Fortean Times, issue 389, February 2020, pp. 32-39.

Nicholas J R White: Carpathia

The cover of the April 2019 issue of the Royal Photographic Society’s Journal advertises ‘Nicholas J R White: A journey into the Romanian Wilderness’.  The article (pp. 250-56) is an interview with Tom Seymour about White’s Carpathia, documenting the efforts to develop a wilderness reserve in Romania’s Carpathian Mountains.

To enable him to undertake the project, in 2017 he was awarded an RPS/The Photographic Angle Environmental Awareness Bursary.  An enthusiast for the concept of rewilding, he worked with the Foundation Conservation Carpathia (FCC), a group of dedicated rangers who are attempting to undo the deleterious effects of logging and hunting to create a rich habitat for wildlife.

Patrols to deter illegal hunting and logging go hand-in-hand with the restoration of the landscape, constituting the largest rewilding undertaking in Europe.  To understand how the rangers work he visited them a number of times, including in winter, and built a strong relationship.

He recorded them with a large-format camera as they went about their daily activities, careful not to disrupt their routine even when he was unclear precisely what they were doing.  As well as accompanying the rangers, he used motion-sensor cameras to capture nocturnal images of the wildlife.

White says the rangers were pleased he was not there to record traces of the country’s turbulent past but wanted to convey a positive image highlighting the country’s beauty.  He notes that rewilding is not merely about the love of the outdoors: there are economic implications, with agriculture and construction dependent on a sustainable ecosystem.

We hear much about the despoliation of the Carpathian forests, less about the endeavours of groups like the FCC to combat it in the face of difficult odds.  White’s admiration for their dedication is clear.  Their work deserves to be better known, and he has done a valuable job in promoting it.

More information on White’s Carpathia can be found on his website:

https://www.nicholasjrwhite.co.uk/work/carpathia

An article on White’s project appeared in the New York Times, 15 March 2021, ‘The Making of a “European Yellowstone”’.

Greuceanu, by Stelian Ţurlea

Greuceanu: Novel with a Policeman (Greuceanu, roman cu un politist, 2007), by Stelian Țurlea, is a melding of Petre Ispirescu’s nineteenth-century fairy-tale with a modern crime novel.  Set in a provincial Romanian town, Greuceanu, the titular policeman, takes on the local gang bosses, their wives and foot soldiers.  They are thriving through intimidation and bribery, aided by police indifference and judicial and political corruption.  Their magnificent houses and lavish lifestyles are in marked contrast to the standard of living experienced by most people.

Greuceanu is a lowly member of the force who spends most of his time working in the archives.  This gives him an understanding of the way the town works, and he can see how the tentacles of criminality can be found anywhere there is money to be made.  He stumbles on an illegal gem-polishing operation that has severe consequences for the health of those who are employed in it.  Inspired by the new mayor and his lovely daughter, who have a genuine desire to clean up the town and are not afraid to put their personal safety on the line, he decides to look into it.

The trail leads to an unpleasant trio, the Matache brothers, and their wives, who collectively control the town, having taken advantage of the post-1989 freedoms to build up a criminal empire, such that there are those citizens who pine for the good old days, when social order prevailed.  Greuceanu goes head-to-head with the hoodlums, and as his successes gradually accumulate, he builds a reputation for his ability to get things done, despite the adversity he regularly faces.  Having dealt with the diamond polishing, Greuceanu uncovers a pyramid scheme, and slowly he dismantles the organisation.

Although he is likeable and honest, our hero is by no means possessed of great strength or, according to his own account, supernormal intelligence.  He is an ordinary chap, but he is marked out from his colleagues by being tenacious, resourceful, loyal to the town, possessed of a strong sense of right and wrong, and with the support of friends, and to an extent his immediate boss, who help him achieve his goals.  He also has, it must be said, quite a lot of luck.

As a result of his labours, involving significant personal risk, he emerges, as in all good fairy stories, triumphant – good having vanquished evil – and with the love of the fair maiden, in this case the mayor’s brave and beautiful daughter.  The implication, though, is that while the Matache extended family may have been vanquished, there will be other villains to take their place while existing civic structures are inadequate to contain them.  A just society requires more than the occasional star crime-fighter to keep at bay those who would exploit the system for their own benefit.

The 2015 Profusion translation has a brief introduction by Mike Phillips.  He draws out the parallels between the fairy story and Țurlea’s novel, particularly the zmei, ogres and witches faced by the original Greuceanu, and the mobsters in modern-day Romania.  They have in common a grasping nature which seeks to possess at the expense of the wider society.  In both stories they are overcome, and a happy ending ensues.  In dark times, it is always nice to see the good guys win.

My Tired Father, by Gellu Naum

Surrealist Gellu Naum’s My Tired Father was published in Romanian in 1972 and translated into English in 1999.  Cryptically fragmentary and dreamlike, it is a free-flowing impressionistic series of sentences which seem to settle briefly on a meaning before whirling away again, leaving the reader trying to establish connections and find a through-line.  The title suggests it is about the author’s father, but it is rather the narrator’s story and his relationship with an actress called Catherine Mahoney.  Another character, Dr Abend (evening?) pops up from time to time, but his connection is hazy.  The narrator, a professional musician, marries Catherine and they live together for over a decade and have a child, until he leaves and she suddenly dies.

It is prefaced by an alleged interview conducted by the translator James Brook, though as he admits Naum was not available for a conversation, it would appear he made it up, claiming to have obtained Naum’s ‘telepathic consent’ for the exercise to be conducted over ‘the ether’.  Why he didn’t just call it an introduction and include Naum’s pretend responses as his own insights is a puzzle.  The result is informative, but it is a laborious conceit, and even ‘Naum’ becomes irritated with Brook’s questions.  What the author (who died in 2001) thought of having words put in his mouth is not recorded.  Perhaps Brook thought he was being appropriately surrealist, but it misfires.

Cast as a ‘pohem’, there is little poetic about My Tired Father, and it might as readily be called prohse.  One approaches a surrealist work with the expectation it will not make obvious sense (or if one is less charitably inclined that it will be unnecessarily obscure), and this one can feel self-indulgent.  But it is short, pithy, and the narrative flows smoothly, carrying the reader along.  One puts the book down with an intuition that some insight into the narrator’s life has been revealed, even if it is not clear what it is, and leaving traces which stick in the mind.  Given the time and place of its creation, it is probably a miracle it exists at all.