Humanitas

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

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.

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

Who is Eginald Schlattner and what story is he telling in his debut novel? For the readers in Romania, the Lutheran priest aged 65 who lives in his parish house at Rosia, near Sibiu, where he lives in a community mainly made up of Romanies, Romanians, and only a few Saxons

see movie trailer excerpt My grandfather was called Goldschmidt, H. H. I. G. Goldschmidt, and he came from Schirkanyen, near Fogarasch. He was a Saxon of Transylvania, coming from a family eight hundred years old! and, documents could prove it, a pure German for twenty five

Soulignant l'apport des écrivains, dramaturges, poètes venus de la sœur latine roumaine, Robert Sabatier fait cette remarque, dans le 6-ème tome de sa monumentale Histoire de la poésie française, celui consacré au XX-ème siècle: . . . mais il est vrai que

The ultimate test for everyone – therefore for nations too – is the capacity to contemplate while suffering. The Asians, the Chinese and the Indians in particular, are definitely superior to us from this point of view. These people give so much importance to contemplation

Mom and Dad weren't well-off or anything and, apart from that, the 60s offered only a limited choice of toys, at least in our neck of the woods. Back when he was working for the Maintenance Department of the Bucharest Transport Services, Dad would bring me – on Father

Little Arabella MillerDrove a yellow Caterpillar. And she drove it round and round,Razed her village to the ground. Arabella did her best,Her machine did all the rest.  The surviving populationGround their dentures in frustration,Seeing what a sorry sight Was their village

Ting-a-ma-Ling, the Softer Feminine Software Designer, tightened her lips slightly. She could not really put up with people talking so cynically about old men, kings or no kings. And Mol-loch's way, with his sheep's eyes and smiles, obnoxiously courting her all

In the Balkans full of various mythologies, it is said that nobody can move faster than angels[1] when it comes to passing from one human being to another, thus populating the earth. Yet angelic beings are not among the early manifestations of our national imagery. Romanians