Roumania Roumania, by Aaron Lebedeff

When I first heard Roumania Roumania, without reading a translation and knowing nothing of its composer, I thought it wonderfully upbeat and it made me smile, then it became an earworm.  It was written and composed by Aaron Lebedeff, sometimes Lebedoff (1873–1960), who was born in Belarus and became a notable stage performer.  He was witness to dark days for European Jewry, although after some peripatetic years learning his craft he had the good fortune to arrive in New York in 1920, where he achieved considerable success.

Roumania Roumania was originally released in 1925 though Lebedeff made a further version in 1941 and another in 1947.  It was his most popular song.  Looking into it a little more though after I read an English translation of the Yiddish, I started to think it might not be quite the sunny song it appears on the surface.   It seems to play on clichés of fun-loving Romanian Jews eating and making merry, but there is an edge provided by the history of Jewish persecution in Europe.  Here are the words; I cannot vouch for the strict accuracy of the translation but the sense is clear:

Oh! Roumania, Roumania, Roumania …

 Once there was a land, sweet and lovely.

 Oh! Roumania, Roumania, Roumania …

 Once there was a land, sweet and fine.

 To live there is a pleasure;

 What your heart desires you can get;

 A mămăligă, a pastrami, a karnatzl,

 And a glass of wine, aha … !

Ay, in Roumania life is so good;

 No one knows of care;

 Everywhere they’re drinking wine -

 And having a bite of kashtaval.

 Hay, digadi dam …

Ay, in Roumania life is so good;

 No one knows of worry.

 They drink wine, though it’s late;

 And have a bite of kastrovet.

 Hay, digadi dam …

Oh, my, help, I’m going crazy!

 I care only for brinze and mămăligă

 I dance and jump up to the ceiling

 When I eat a patlazhele.

 Dzing ma, tay yidldi tam …

 What a pleasure, what could be better!

 Oh, the only delight is Roumanian wine.

Roumanians drink wine

 And eat mămăligă;

 And he who kisses his own wife,

 Is the one who’s crazy.

 Zets, dzing ma, tay yidl di tam …

“May salvation come from heaven … “

 Stop and kiss the cook, Khaye,

 Dressed in rags and tatters;

 She makes a pudding for the Sabbath.

 Zets! Tay ti didl di tam …

Moyshe Khayim comes along

 And takes away the best part;

 Moyshe Khayim, Borukh Shmil –

 Tickle her on the sly.

 Zets! Tay tidl di tam …

And the girl pouts, alas,

 Seems unwilling, but allows it.

 Tshu!

It’s good to kiss a lass

 When she’s sweet sixteen;

 When one kisses an old maid,

 She begins to grumble.

 Zets! Tay yidl di dam …

 What a pleasure, what could be better!

 Oh, the only delight is Roumanian wine.

As depicted here, Romania is a never-never land, sweet, lovely, fine: a Garden of Eden in fact, where good food and drink flow and there are no cares.  The song gets faster as we imagine the singer becoming more and more drunk, spouting gibberish and getting frisky, kissing any lady – even the ragged cook will do, though a young girl is better – who comes into his orbit, apart from his wife, and jumping higher and higher in his exuberance.  And when the kissing is done, there is still wine.

The carefree image contrasts with the real situation in Europe, and while there may well be an element of nostalgia, there is a greater one of irony, because Jewish life in the region was never at any time as sunny as painted here and only got worse as the century progressed.  Even though Lebedeff was in New York, he could understand the anti-Semitism on the rise in Europe during the 1920s and 30s, and by the time he recorded the 1941 version, the laughter would have turned to anger, the ‘life is so good’ aspect taken on a sarcastic slant.  Now, with the horrors receding beyond memory into history, we can again laugh at those crazy times in old Roumania, where fun was the order of the day; as long as we do not forget the reality.

But why Romania, when Lebedeff was not from those parts?  Perhaps, though unlikely, it was on his mind when he wrote it in the mid-1920s because of the formation of Greater Romania in the period after the First World War; perhaps it was simply because the four syllables of ‘Roumania’ suited the rhythm of the song; perhaps it expressed a patronising attitude by urban Jews to their country cousins, or to Romanian Jews in particular who were seen as unsophisticated; perhaps there was a genuinely affectionate feeling that Romanian Jews had fun.  What seems uncomplicated lightheartedness shows on closer inspection that it is not quite as straightforward as one might assume.  No matter, it is a classic.

There are many, many versions of Roumania Roumania on YouTube, some of which are too reverent to do the song justice.  The following list is far from exhaustive.

Those by Lebedeff, remain the gold standard by which the others must be measured:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuj-qjyUjxY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1Pkq72HodA

The Barry Sisters are sedate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REoxY-iyVPU

Joel Grey has a nicely bouncy take with a punchy delivery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI5nuLELfb8

The Jewish Monkeys exaggerate the manic aspect, not entirely successfully:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa66GNZ4r2I

Cathy Berberian tries too hard to be kooky:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty0pJL-Uc5Y

Eartha Kitt is typically sultry:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_F_clNKPNQ

Gordon Jenkins and his Orchestra did an instrumental version in 1961, which rather defeats the point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQbxr5A2v8c

The Sirba Octet also perform an instrumental version, but it is brisk and energetic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBQGVthco6M

The Klezmer Conservatory Band captures the humour well and Judy Bressler’s singing is so pitch-perfect this is probably my favourite, apart from Lebedeff’s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K74sXKKus1w

Arthur Ransome (briefly) in Romania

Roland Chambers’ 2009 biography The Last Englishman: The Double Life ofArthur Ransome contains a reference to Romania in the First World War, albeit one so brief it does not merit an entry in the index.  It is on pp. 121-22.

Ransome, working as a journalist in Russia, was sent by the editor of the Daily News to cover the Romanian situation after its entry into the war in August 1916.  Not long back from Belorussia and looking forward to a holiday, he left Petrograd at the beginning of September on an assignment he was not happy about.  He knew Russian but not Romanian, and thought the language ‘one of the most difficult on earth’ as he undertook a crash course on the journey.

In the event he rather enjoyed the trip.  The weather was cooling in Petrograd as autumn had set in early, but the south was very warm.  ‘Romania was full of new faces, fresh perspectives, and on the train down to Bucharest, a tribe of attentive, energetic children and friendly soldiers who fed him sweets, melons, cheese, cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs and yellow wine.’

He stayed in Romania for six weeks and ‘treated the entire excursion as an Indian summer holiday,’ leaving just ahead of the invading German army ‘in hot gorgeous weather…as happy as a bird and as burnt as a brick,’ with a Turkish coffee mill he had bought for 12 lei in a street market on the Black Sea coast.  He briefly returned to Petrograd ‘full of the usual filth and snow of winter’ before leaving on that deferred trip to England.

Marele Jaf Comunist/The Great Communist Robbery

The Great Communist Robbery (2004) is a documentary by Alexandru Solomon detailing the strange event on 29 July 1959 when five men and a woman robbed a Škoda car carrying banknotes, valued at over 1.6 million lei, to the National Bank of Romania in Bucharest.  This was despite the currency having no value outside Romania, and the difficulties of spending it inside the country, where citizens were closely monitored and abnormal spending patterns would be expected to draw the attention of the police.

As Romania was a police state the crime rate was very low, so the robbery took the authorities by surprise and there was pressure on the security apparatus to solve the crime.  The initial suspects were the bank staff, but attention switched to disaffected members of the Communist Party.  The pressure was on the investigators, who were told that failure to arrest the perpetrators within a short period would mean they were out of a job.

After rounding up a large number of suspects and using robust interrogation methods, the group responsible – brothers Alexandru and Paul Ioanid (who gave the group its name the Ioanid Gang), Saşa Muşat, Haralambie Obedeanu, and husband and wife Igor and Monica Sevianu – was uncovered and arrested in September 1959.  Significantly, all of the members of the group were Jewish.  Confessions followed, but then the case became even stranger.

The six were told to participate in a film about the robbery.  The result was Reconstruction, a propaganda film made on Communist Party orders by Virgil Calotescu in 1960, in which the robbers played themselves.  (Rather confusingly there is a 2001 film also called Reconstruction.  Directed by Irene Lusztig, Monica Sevianu’s granddaughter, it is about the case but focuses on Monica.  A further Romanian film called Reconstruction, directed by Lucian Pintilie in 1970, is not about the 1959 robbery.)

The 1960 documentary, fragments of which are included in Solomon’s film, comprise crude reconstructions, with the accused unsurprisingly giving stilted performances.  Naturally the method of obtaining confessions is glossed over.  Instead the suspects sit at a small table looking uncomfortable while the interrogator narrows his eyes and asks questions in a firm voice.  Showing a pile of weapons is enough to elicit a statement of guilt.  The reality would have been far different: the family of one of the bank staff initially suspected were told he had died of a stroke while being questioned, a not uncommon occurrence they were informed matter-of-factly.

Screenings of the film were reserved for Party members, emphasising the efficiency of the state in dealing with malefactors and acting as a warning to others who might be similarly tempted.  The six cooperated in the project because they were led to believe they would receive lighter sentences, but the state failed to uphold its side of the bargain and their trial followed a standard Stalinist format, with pre-rehearsed public confessions.  Death sentences were handed to all six, but that of Monica Sevianu was commuted to life imprisonment as she was a mother, and she was later allowed to leave for Israel where she died in the 1970s.

The Great Communist Robbery dissects the robbery and the 1960 reconstruction by visiting locations and interviewing people who were connected to the robbers, the robbery and its aftermath.  Several were involved in the investigation and prosecution, including the judge who handed out the death sentences.  These retired functionaries skirt any hint they behaved improperly, and the lack of an interviewer’s voice means they are never asked hard questions; even when a former prisoner mentions the name of a Securitate officer who had ill-treated her and there is a brief shot of him, one of the interviewees.

Definitive answers on the robbery are not forthcoming in Solomon’s documentary.  Naturally the state-ordered 1960 film had its own agenda and cannot be trusted as impartial evidence.  Surprisingly, the men in the group had been significant Party members and intellectuals, while Monica Sevianu was on a watch list after having emigrated illegally to Israel where she married and had children before, for reasons never stated, returning to Romania and remarrying.  Some of the audience members in 1960 would presumably have known members of the group, who had been long-term Party activists.  But to show that such people had acted against in this way would have been embarrassing for the government.

Instead there were orders to the filmmakers not to include any political motives, nor to refer to the perpetrators’ political or Jewish backgrounds.  The reasons for their bizarre act were subsumed to the state’s requirements for obedience.  They were depicted as lumpen elements acting solely from base impulses of greed.  The Securitate were shown to be the heroes, assisted by the public, in bringing the perpetrators to justice so efficiently.

While the 1960 film was unable to arrive at a definitive reason for this quixotic act for ideological reasons, by 2004 many of those involved were dead.  The son of one of the robbers is shown examining the extensive files on the case, but they reflect the official position and shed no new light on why the robbery was carried out.  Various suggestions are propounded in Solomon’s film and found wanting, such as revenge for discrimination against Romanian Jews, or to gather funds to assist illegal emigration to Israel.

However, the extent of the group’s Zionist sympathies is unclear, nor why they would feel it worth taking such risks.  Using the money to pay bribes to corrupt officials within the country (not something which could have been aired in 1960) seems a plausible reason, but it is discarded with little discussion.  The film argues that state control would have made it difficult to spend the money in Romania, but amenable officials might have been able to launder the funds and use the proceeds discreetly, or the group themselves might have hoped to spend the money while remaining under the Securitate’s radar.  Perhaps the answer is to be found in personal psychology, a search for excitement in a grey society where individualism was frowned on, and the act was the significant factor rather than considerations of its aftermath.

In a world of mirrors where nothing is what it seems there is a possibility the robbery never occurred and the group was set up, with alleged eyewitnesses coerced into their testimony, in order to expedite an anti-Jewish purge.  If so, it seems an improbably elaborate strategy, but there is a precedent of a sort in the theory that Sergei Kirov’s assassination in Leningrad in 1934 was sanctioned by Stalin and the NKVD as a pretext for a purge of the Bolsheviks.  Agreement to participate in the 1960 (fiction rather than documentary) film could have been secured by threats to harm family coupled with the offer of emigration – but would Monica then have been allowed to leave, with the risk of her exposing the fraud?  The rumour that the executions were faked to allow the five men to operate secretly as intelligence agents abroad is certainly unfounded.

This is a window on the way Romania worked under the communist regime, where dissent was repressed and anti-Semitism was forcing Jews, many of whom would have preferred emigration to Israel to life in Romania, out of their jobs, even if they had previously been staunch supporters of the Party.  The truth of the robbery will probably now never be known, but Solomon has gone some way to airing the issues.  Greater rigour in interviews would have been welcome, but might not have elicited any more information.  More seriously, there is a sense that delving further into the biographies of the six could have thrown up insights about their behaviour, and this is the film’s greatest weakness.

The Great Communist Robbery is available on YouTube courtesy of Cinepub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOt-JNz2mqE

Make the Most of Your Time on Earth, by James Smart (ed.)

With the strapline ‘1000 ultimate travel experiences’, the second edition (2012) of the Rough Guide compilation Make the Most of Your Time on Earth: The Rough Guide to the World consists of personal recommendations contributed by Rough Guide authors.  Each entry is a couple of paragraphs, with a link to brief further information.

There are four entries relating to Romania: ‘Tracking carnivores (i.e. wolves and bears) in the Carpathian mountains’; ‘Journeying to the end of the Danube’; ‘Riding on horseback through snow in Transylvania’ (a somewhat waffly entry, perhaps because there is not much to write about riding a horse in the snow, even in such beautiful surroundings); and the outstandingly predictable ‘On the Dracula trail in Transylvania’.

There is also an entry for Moldova, ‘Nightclubbing back in the (old) USSR’; it makes the valid point that Moldova does not have a reputation as an oasis of hedonism.  The writer did find some nightlife though at the Military Pub in Chisinau, notable for having an ex-Soviet tank in the middle of the dance floor to house the DJ.  As far as I can tell the place no longer exists, which is a great shame.

Such a volume has to be subjective, and a travel experience one particular type of reader will love is going to leave another one cold.  Whatever type of trip one favours, it is easy to agree with the aim expressed here of moving beyond the familiar, even if in the age of mass mobility it is increasingly difficult to find ‘authentic’ experiences, and these suggestions only patchily fulfill that aim.

The Legend and Romance of the Vampire, by Derek Hall (2010)

Derek Hall’s superficial examination of the vampire, aimed primarily at the teenage market, has a chapter on Vlad Țepeș and another on Transylvania, which despite being crassly titled ‘Land of the Vampire’ expands on the region’s folklore.  The book is nicely illustrated with some very attractive photographs that will delight the Romanian tourist board.  The text, however, while it is useful background for anyone whose ideas of the historical Vlad and of Transylvania come from films and mass-market novels, does not delve particularly deeply and is at times simplistic when dealing with the complex historical material.

European Stories: EUPL Winners Write Europe

European Stories: EUPL Winners Write Europe is an anthology of short stories by winners of the European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL) published in 2018 and available free online.  In the foreword, ‘Writing Europe – how literature helps us build communities’, Tibor Navracsics, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Youth and Sport, says:

‘Europe’s cultural and linguistic diversity is a tremendous asset. Yet, this diversity makes it difficult for cultural works to circulate across borders, and this is especially true for literature. This is why, in 2009, the European Commission decided to launch the European Union Prize for Literature to support outstanding works of fiction by new and emerging authors writing in their national languages. In the past nine editions, we have recognised 108 talented authors from 37 different countries. We are very proud to have such a great number of excellent laureates, who represent Europe in their diversity.

‘2018 is a very special year: we are celebrating the European Year of Cultural Heritage, as well as the tenth anniversary of the European Union Prize for Literature. To mark this occasion, we organised a specific contest “A European Story: European Union Prize for Literature Winners Write Europe”. This is a unique competition for short works of fiction, exclusively open to previous winners of the prize, to celebrate the wealth and creativity of Europe’s contemporary literature.’

Of these winners, 36 from 26 countries, writing in 23 languages, entered.  All the submitted stories are presented in the original language and in English translation. Short biographies of the writers preface their contributions.  There are two Romanian writers in the anthology.  Claudiu Florian’s first novel, Vârstele jocului. Strada Cetăţii, won the EUPL in 2016.  His story ‘The Inheritance’ (‘Die Erbschaft’) included here is in German (he is Director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in Berlin).  Ioana Pârvulescu won the EUPL in 2013 for her novel Life Begins on Friday (Viaţa începe vineri).  She is represented by her short story ‘A Voice’ (‘O voce’).

‘The Inheritance’ recounts a meeting in the mountains near the Carpathian Sphinx between Adamovicescu, a Romanian lecturer who is working on a system of philosophical thought called kaputmunditism, and what at first appears to be an alien.  However, by the end it would seem (if I have figured this out correctly) the creature is actually the grandchild of the mythological Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur on Crete. 

As Adamovicescu had had a stroke (his background is full of improbabilities and his four alleged doctorates were acquired with ludicrous ease), it is possible he is an unreliable narrator.  Most of the story is taken up by a dialogue in which he tries to explain life on earth to the visitor but only manages to confuse the situation by his incoherence.  The story concludes on a cliffhanger with ‘To be continued’, but hopefully that is a joke.

‘A Voice’ is a beautifully structured story about a homecoming.  A young woman at a passport control booth in an eastern European airport is processing passengers who have just arrived on an aeroplane from Paris.  Since the December 1989 revolution, the flights coming in from western Europe have been full and passengers are dealt with on autopilot by the overstretched staff.  One elderly lady proffers her passport, but when she speaks, the passport controller is overcome with emotion, rushes out and hugs the newcomer, even though she has never seen her before.   The scene shifts to 1947 and a young woman is trying to get into American-controlled Austria en route to Paris.  Despite having valid documentation she is put off the train, and only manages to complete the journey after much difficulty.

The third section, 44 years later, switches to a first person narrative and the same woman and her husband fly eastwards from Orly.  In exile she had worked for Radio Free Europe, broadcasting to her home country despite physical violence towards her and the murder of her mother, giving hope to those suffering from its repression.  Now at last she is free to return.  At passport control she proffers her passport and says “Good evening, Miss!” , whereupon the young woman in the booth comes round to hug her hard.  “I am crying like a fool because only now do I realise that we’re actually free,” she says.

There is another story in the volume, by Macedonian Lidija Dimkovska, dealing partly with Romania, at least obliquely.  ‘When I left “Karl Liebknecht”’ (‘Кога заминав од „Карл Либкнехт“’) consists of a series of short statements ostensibly by individuals gathered for a meeting organised by the Society of Admirers of Karl Liebknecht at Karl Liebknecht House in Leipzig.  All had emigrated from their countries of birth, and had lived at an address associated with the name Karl Liebknecht prior to emigration.

The first concerns Vitalie who had grown up in a house on Karl Liebknecht Street in Tiraspol, Transnistria.  One afternoon in 2006 he was on a trolleybus in the city when a bomb exploded.  He moved to Bucharest, and his father advised him to forget Transnistria and present himself as coming from Moldova.  When his father died he brought his mother to Bucharest but while he uses Latin script his mother struggles because she is used to Cyrillic, and he finds himself using it as well when jotting shopping lists, his sole legacy from Tiraspol.  Sometimes he misses the Dniester, he says, and feels Romania is a foreign country to which they have to adjust.

Gaudeamus, by Mircea Eliade

Mircea Eliade (1907-86) wrote Gaudeamus (‘let us rejoice’) in 1928, but it was not published until 1986; only a three-page extract had appeared in 1928.  It has now (2018) been published in an English translation by Istros Books, which specialises in Balkan literature.  The text has been translated by Christopher Bartholomew with an informative introduction by Bryan Rennie and a lengthy afterword by Eliade’s nephew, Sorin Alexandrescu, translated by Alistair Ian Blyth, who is probably the most prolific translator of Romanian literature into English.

A portrait of Eliade’s student life, Gaudeamus is a sequel to his Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent (Romanul adolescenului miop) published in English by Istros in 2016, which deals with his time at school.  Now he is at university in Bucharest (1925-28) and he wrote Gaudeamus in a couple of week-long bursts in February and March of his graduation year.  Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent had already appeared in serial form, and is referred to in this book (his friends argue about their depictions in it).

Gaudeamus  poses as autobiographical, but to what extent it has been fictionalised is unclear (according to the introduction checkable aspects have been shown to be accurate, while other parts are clearly fiction).  It is best therefore to refer to the narrator rather than Eliade as the central character.  The narrator is extremely intelligent and ambitious, but the narrative shows how the university experience does not differ much in place or time: the neuroticism generated by the relentlessness of reading and exams, the worry that one is slipping behind, the pursuit of excellence beset by distractions, desire for members of the opposite sex; such aspects of student life are constant.

The changing seasons provide the backdrop to the narrator’s academic career.  He hardens, from being sociable, offering his attic living space for the formation of a student club with singing and drinking, to a semi-recluse who sees himself above the common man, his view of his peers literally a lofty one.  Gradually he eschews company, to the point his friends become concerned he is mentally ill.  However, he does not remain on his mountain top entirely, as even at this early stage in his career he is writing articles for the press.  However, as time progresses he narrows his focus to private study instead of the communal activity of lectures, working punishing hours until his head swims.  Gaudeamus is, among other things, a hymn to books and the reading obsession.

When he is socialising with his peers he engages in earnest conversations about the meaning of life, though these are of a higher tone than the usual intellectual fumblings of undergraduates.  The keyword is mediocrity, the greatest sin in his eyes, yet a label he is happy to assign his peers without compunction.  He may be precocious, but there is an underlying smugness in his sense of superiority.  We learn less than we might expect about Bucharest in the late 1920s as the focus is relentlessly on him and the exercise of his will.  He sees himself explicitly in heroic terms, with hints here of Nietzsche’s Übermensch, overcoming distractions while remaining above the bourgeois herd.

Unfortunately self-aggrandising can have unfortunate consequences for those in the hero’s orbit.  His views of sex relations are drawn largely from Dante and Cervantes, not particularly useful models in the twentieth century, and expressed in a misogynistic rather than chivalric attitude.  This results in the poor treatment of the two main women in his life, Nișka and Nonora, treatment he justifies in philosophical terms.  In particular he sees himself as the creator and moulder of Nișka’s personality – to which worryingly she concurs (a hallmark of emotional abuse).  He considers women’s education as a prelude to a lifetime of domestic concerns and therefore inevitable mediocrity, and those men weak enough to become so entangled prey to the same consequence: domesticity as the enemy of promise.  While tempted, he takes pride in having the strength of character to withstand their attractions.

Incapable of seeing women on equal terms with himself, unfortunately for them he sees his ability to remain immune from banal romantic attraction as a test of his personality, whatever the emotional havoc he might wreak on anyone unfortunate enough to fall in love with him.  For him romance is an intellectual exercise best conducted through lengthy correspondence (that with Nișka is reproduced verbatim, presumably written by Eliade, not the person Nișka is modelled on, at least one hopes so, in which he ignores, even revels in, her extreme emotional distress).  He is blunt in his assessments of their prospects to the point of brutality, seeing himself above such pettiness.

As if emotional abuse was not bad enough, he commits what amounts to a rape simply to enphasise the primacy of his wants, though at the same time transgressing his principle of detachment.  Meeting Nonora in the street he invites her back to his attic, promising to be ‘good’.  Once there, despite repeated protests to stop and telling him she is engaged, he assaults her.  As he describes it, ‘I was annoyed by her resistance, like that of a virginal tease … I pushed her down.  With one arm I pinned her arms, with the other I parted her knees and subdued her thighs.  The act took place before Nonora could even comprehend, and before I could hesitate.  We pleasured our bodies.’  Not really ‘we’ when she sobs afterwards and asks why he did it.

Given Eliade’s evident approval of his alter ego’s approach to life, it is not surprising to learn he was associated with Romania’s far right in the 1930s.  There are hints in Gaudeamus of widespread anti-Semitism which the narrator may not particularly like, possibly because he looks down on the individuals espousing such views rather than because he disapproves of the sentiments themselves, but does not challenge.  He is evasive about his own political views.

The book ends with the narrator having graduated and setting off on his own, without emotional encumbrances – as we always knew he would be – on life’s adventure.  Assuming author and narrator share characteristics, they have pretentiousness (a charge Eliade himself levelled against Gaudeamus later) and self-regard in common.  The introduction confirms what I had suspected: the influence on Eliade of André Gide.  It is reasonable to assume he had read at least Les Nourritures Terrestres (1897), though he was much more rigorous intellectually than Gide.  We can admire Eliade’s strength of purpose while disliking his self-absorption.

On the other hand, self-absorption paid off as Gaudeamus is an assured achievement for a 21-year old.  In fact it is so assured one wonders if it was reworked later.  There is certainly one point, highlighted by Alexandrescu, where he must have done so.  At the end he refers to the forthcoming destruction of the house, with his attic, to be replaced by a tall, grey building.  This was the case, but it did not happen until 1935.  There may have been other changes made to the manuscript after 1928.

Whatever changes may have been made, the book as it stands captures the personality of a remarkable, but flawed, individual at a pivotal moment.  Although the narrator may no longer be an adolescent, in his way he is still short-sighted.  With his obvious intellectual abilities, as he rides off on his early morning train there can be no doubt that as he, hopefully, matures emotionally, he is destined for great things.  It is ironic he sees so much personal promise in the dawn when, in 1928, the same could not be said for the continent as a whole.

Candy Crush (2015)

Candy Crush is a two-hander written by Paul Negoescu, directed by Andrei Georgescu, and acted by Alec Secăreanu and Victoria Răileanu.  Lasting 13 minutes and shot in a single take apart from a cut near the end, it follows a young couple in the minutes after they have finished making love in the man’s dingy-but-arty flat.  They get dressed, she makes a work call and he immediately picks up his laptop.  She rests on the bed and finds a long hair that isn’t hers and apparently not one of his.  He doesn’t seem at all fazed.

She goes through to the bathroom and finds a bottle of massage oil.  He says it was left by an old girlfriend, Dana, some time before, prior to getting together with her.  She probes his previous relationship and how it ended, about which he is suspiciously evasive.  He receives a text message and she asks mischievously if it is from Dana.  He says it is from his mother and gives her the phone to check.  She is using it and he asks her what she is doing, to which she replies that she is playing Candy Crush.  However, when he hands it back he sees she has deleted a number of photographs, and she says she had erased those with her in them because she does not want him to have them anymore.

He accuses her of acting strangely but she denies it.  She asks him to call her a taxi, and as they wait she asks about the expiry date of the oil.  He is caught out by the very recent manufacture, not able to explain how it could have been left by an old girlfriend months before its production, but he shrugs it off with no attempt to justify himself.  The camera pans back and forth between them, he on the bed calmly rolling and lighting a joint, which she declines, she in a chair with her arms folded.  Silence prevails until the cab arrives.

It looks like she is going to dump him for cheating but surprisingly they make arrangements to see each other the same evening.  A cut to a final shot, from the window, shows him, still smoking, looking down at her getting into the taxi and driving off.  The open ending leaves open the question whether she will forgive him, find a way to humiliate him or just stand him up; or whether he will simply ring someone else.

The clue to her attitude is in the deleted pictures, and the ephemerality of Candy Crush, a game without meaning or pleasure beyond the moment.  This is a candy crush relationship with no future, and she is clearly somewhat smarter than he is.  The sense is that the taxi is taking her away and she will not be coming back and, as he watches her, he knows it.  It is a beautifully realistic small film, economically told with subtle performances that convey the difficulties of negotiating relationships when commitment is in doubt.

The film is on YouTube, from Cinepub:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lv_6SEv6HTI

Ana Lupas at Tate Modern

A room at Tate Modern is devoted to a work by Romanian artist Ana Lupas (b. 1940), titled The Solemn Process (1964-2008).  It comprises 21 metal objects, a display in harmony with the industrial setting of the Bankside power station.  There are also two large sets of sepia photographs in a 5x8 grid at either end of the gallery showing straw objects of varying shapes, many like doughnut rings.  Some are shown in conjunction with individuals, but these are not your typical agricultural products.

The shape is the key, as the metal objects share similar dimensions to some of the objects in the photographs.  In the first phase of the project, 1964-74, Lupas worked collaboratively with villagers in Transylvania to create these oddly-shaped straw and clay sculptures using techniques based on those employed to make harvest festival wreaths and in house building.  The results were photographed at various locations in the open air.  Unfortunately in the early- and mid-1970s the worsening political and economic climate halted their production.

Between 1980 and 1985 Lupas attempted to reverse the decay to which the organic structures were subject.  This was not successful so in the third phase, between 1985 and 2008, the objects were encased in metal to mimic the shape of the originals.  It may not have preserved them but it did hide the decay and gave an idea of the original shapes.  The final products bore a resemblance to the original sculptures in that respect, but nothing else, and might be seen as a betrayal of the original impulse to create an artwork using ephemeral materials that would eventually exist only in the photographic record and the memories of its witnesses.

What is surprising is that the initial stage was carried out during the Communist period, when one might have expected such works to be frowned on, with depictions of peasants producing something which could actually be eaten favoured by the regime.  On the other hand, she was demonstrating that ordinary everyday objects and processes could be utilised in the name of art, whether playful or, as here, solemn.  One wonders what the locals who had the wreaths hanging around made of them; they are missing from the narrative.

1,000 Places to See Before You Die, by Patricia Schultz

This hefty 2003 travel book (a new edition was published in 2011) contains nearly 1,000 pages covering the world, or more accurately some of the world.  It is divided into eight sections: Europe; Africa; the Middle East; Asia; Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands; the United States and Canada; Latin America; the Caribbean, Bahamas and Bermuda.  It is heavily weighted in favour of the United States, which has nearly 200 pages devoted to it.  The whole of Asia gets less than a hundred.

Romania is represented by only two locations, occupying less than a couple of pages: ‘The painted monasteries of Moldavia’ (subtitled ‘the Sistine Chapels of the East’), and what it risibly terms ‘Count Dracula’s Castle’, i.e. Bran (subtitled ‘In a Lost Corner of Central Europe’).  The latter section is more about Dracula than Bran Castle, and calls Transylvania ‘a time-locked country that never seems to have felt the 20th century’s touch, never mind the 21st’s’.

Naturally any list of the 1,000 places one must definitely see before clogs are popped is going to be arbitrary to an extent, and there will be disagreements about what has been included and omitted.  However, for such a sizeable country with much to offer this all seems inadequate, but then the region generally is not well served by Schultz.  The Czech Republic has 7 entries, Hungary 4 and Poland 3.  Belarus, Bulgaria, Slovakia and the western Balkans are clearly not worth visiting at all.

While much of the book’s content will inevitably date, places like the painted monasteries and Bran Castle are not going anywhere so it is still of some use and may stimulate a few travel ideas.  But Romania, among others, deserves better.  Really, I cannot understand why anyone would want to shell out for this book when there are so many up-to-date country-specific guides available, all of which contain recommendations of places that are worth a visit, and without the implicit suggestion that if you die before you see them, your life will somehow have been unfulfilled.