Rof

excerpts Most traditional stories move from a bad start to an agreeable conclusion. The story I am going to share with you falls short of the traditional canon. For one thing, it begins agreeably enough, only to draw to an unsavoury conclusion with ambiguously loose ends.

I saw the light of day in an atypical village of Bucovina. It was a multiethnic village, a kind of summary of Europe. A European Union avant la lettre. It is there, I believe, that a direction in my life was traced, an ecumenical dominant feature, one of understanding of

I was born and I spent my childhood in the capital of the country that is called Romania, a state that at that time had prided itself for about a decade with the name of Greater Romania, which was a creation of the preceding generation, but also the outcome of a long series

excerpts CADIR: What you do?IANKE: Linger around!CADIR: What about the children? This is big trouble! Here you stay in the house so calmly and the children stay there crying. IANKE: I knew it! Didn't I tell you? They are crying and waiting for the train! Luckily there's

Spek Jr. , from Satu Nou, had a tractor called Doja. Since nothing in the world is fortuitous, the name of that machine was not fortuitous either. Spek Sr. , a filthy Jew, as he was called by some people from Iosefin, was a fervent advocate of communism and had been hurdled

I was, am, and will remain, a Rusyn. Aleksander Dukhnovici A short historyThe Ruthenians are a population that is descended from a Slavic branch of the Indo-European nations. Their name is mentioned by Julius Caesar, with reference to a Celtic tribe settled in Gallia Narbonensis.

It is hard to say when the Gypsies came to Romania for the first time, and then settled for good, but the oldest documents date from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, when the royal charters mentioned the fiddler slaves, sold alongside the dependencies and objects from

The Roma Study Center, the History Faculty of the University of Bucharest I. The Roma's first contacts with the natives of the Romanian spaceThe Roma are a people hailing from India and their migration to Europe, in successive waves, spanned several centuries from the

We are very aware that there is a continuity in history from past to future, through the present. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski (1901-1981), Primate of the Millennium BackgroundRomanian history from the 14th century until the 18th century displays the significant influence

excerpt Motto: Prophetic utterance comes into being via negation: it is the knowledge induced by ashes. In the aftermath of speaking the word entrusted to them, prophets taste the ashes of the world upon their tongues; their wisdom is the aftertaste of ashes.   A portraitMany

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

excerpt Two people went down the chimney in a house. Only one of them got his face dirty with soot. The dirty one looked at the clean one and didn't imagine that he might look different, so he didn't wash the soot away. The clean one, on the other hand, saw the