Pita

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

When the Hungarians conquered Transylvania, several Romanian noblemen decided to adopt Hungarian language and culture, in order to get prominent positions in the establishment. The most famous is, of course, Hunyady János, called, in Romanian, Iancu de Hunedoara. He eventually

None of the minorities living in Romania had a tenser relationship with the majority of inhabitants. Still, Romanians and Hungarians have been living together for centuries. The Hungarians in Transylvania praise their past, values and traditions within a context that permits

Life Histories in Bucharest – the 20th Centuryexcerpt All the Greeks in the city sought to make me their son-in-law. Demostene Gramatopol, 1910-? My initial intention was to interview both Greeks belonging to the old Greek community in Bucharest, and some of those who

We do not hate the Greeks; quite to the contrary, we love them and we share the same heritage: a nationality to build; for we have the same interests, the same pains, the same hopes; and when we say 'we love them' we can bring proofs to support this statement:

Lend us some cash, do, till pay-day, now how's one supposed to react to such an entreaty, and at such short notice, too?, one may have or not have the money, but when one has an equally hard time making ends meet, when the gap between the lustre of respectability and

Mosilor Street, the modern thoroughfare of a Bucharest that struggles so hard to appear occidentalized and yet doesn't quite manage to: something Balkan, Levantine lingers in the atmosphere of the streets, in spite of the concrete ten-floor blocks, of the road with

Here's the story Coco the clown told me one evening: I've never known my father. Neither have I asked who he was. Mother was a Galician Jewess who toured the big cities with a circus. She was known as the Spanish beauty. An acrobat she was, and used to ride a lovely

excerpts The gradual development of a cultural Moldo-Walachian elite of Albanian origin, that was able to manifest an awareness of the cultural identity of its origins through certain activities in this respect, an elite devoted to the idea of a modern and independent Albania,

IXRome (Hôtel d'Europe), 11 octobre 1870. Ma chère Sacha, . . . C'est ma première journée de Rome! J'ai passé la nuit dernière en chemin de fer, partageant un coupé à banquettes pour dormir avec une jeune Autrichien que j'ai rencontré à la

L'ARME INVISIBLE La francophonie a bonne presse chez les Roumains. Le fait que la francophonie littéraire roumaine ait révélé ses quartiers de noblesse en France, par l'entrée de Tzara, de Fondane, de Ionesco et de Cioran dans l'espace littéraire français,