Blouse Roumaine –  the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women

Review by Octavian Ciupitu, Curierul Romanesc, Sweden

(after the Romanian Text of September 2009)

The above title refers to an E-book collated and edited by Constantin ROMAN and published in English, in January 2009, by the Centre of Romanian Studies (London). This is an anthology of the lives and times of 160 women, born between 1805 and 1983, whose claim to fame is linked to Romania.  In this first edition the book contains 1,047 pages, with  black-and-white as well as colour illustrations.

Constantin Roman set out with a great deal of energy and enthusiasm in revealing the destinies of some extraordinary women who were either native-born or, as the case maybe, were closely linked to the Romanian scene. The philosophy of this book is to present, for the first time in English as a language of wide circulation, the universal value of some outstanding women, some of whom are little-known outside Romania, but also some women whose contrasting destinies gained a controversial reputation. To these are added the names of fifteen “Honorary Romanians”, by marriage or by vocation, mostly royals.

This “Hall of Fame” displays a tapestry of individual biographical essays interwoven with the destinies of world celebrities of living memory, an exercise meant to demonstrate the seminal contribution  of  Romanian culture, which unbeknown to many permeated a wide world stage.

This review refers to the 1^st version of the 1^st edition which has 1,047 pages divided in the following chapters:

• Acknowledgements
• Foreward by Catherine Durandin
  
• Preface – Matisse’s ‘Blouse Roumaine’
• Chapter 1 – Five Millennia of Romanian Women
• Chapter 2 -  Gazetteers :

#  Gazetteer of 160 women by date of birth (1805-1983)

# Gazetteer of 160 Women presented in 58 categories by Call, Profession or Social Status

• Chapter 3 Profiles in Alphabetical order from A to Z
• Chapter 4 Indexes

# Index of Names

# Index of Geographical Locations

# Index of Quotations

• Appendix Notes on Romanian and foreign spelling equivalents – surnames and nouns

Daniel Rosenthal - 'Revolutionary Romania' (19th c)

The Foreword is signed by Catherine Durandin, Chevallier de la Légion d’Honeur, French Historian and Novelist, Professor of Romanian  at the INALCO - the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris, author of several books on Romania, who was invested  with the Order of the Grand Cross of Romania.

The Preface chapter, entitled “Matisse’s Blouse Roumaine” is an eighteen-pages long essay on the theme of the Romanian ethnic blouse (iia romaneasca) as it is painted in the corpus of Henri Matisses’s oeuvre and beyond. Constantin Roman uses the pretext of Matisse’s iconic painting to discuss in a broader context the Romanian cultural phenomenon embodied by a woman wearing the ethnic embroidered blouse,  starting  with the canvass of Daniel Rosenthal (1820-1851) the painter of “Revolutionary Romania” (1848), then presenting Nicoalae Grigorescu’s (1838-1907) “Girl from Muscel County” and moving on to Queen Marie of Romania (1875-1938) and Princess Ileana of Romania, Archduchess of Austria (1909-1991) both of them wearing the Romanian garb, as seen in a photograph of the 1920s and finally arriving at Matisse’s celebrated eponymous canvass “La Blouse Roumaine”(1940)  now at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and Pablo Picasso’s “Seated Woman with Book” (Norton Simon Museum, Passadena, California). Furthermore, the Preface presents two other themes entitled “A Romanian Blouse by Picasso?” and respectively “Post-WWII Romanian Women and the West”.

Chapter I: containing thirty two pages is most absorbing for its theme of  “Five Millennia of Romanian Women” which in its turn is subdivided in five separate subjects: “Women of the Carpathian-Danubian Space – Five thousand years of Civilization”, followed by “Women of Myth and Legend”, “Women of Old – from Antiquity to the end of the XVIII century”, “Modern and Contemporary Women – XIX and XX centuries” and respectively “ The New face of Romania – XXI century”.

Queen Marie of Romania, wearing the national dress

Chapter 2: has twenty four pages starting with a four-pages Timeline of Women by date of birth (1805-1983), beginning with the Revolutionary Ana Ipatescu (1805-1875) and finishing with the poet Ioana Alexandra Maris (b. 1983). This is followed by a nineteen-page Gazetteer of 160 Women within 58 distinct categories by Call, Profession or Social Status as follows: 22 Acadmics, 9 Actresses, 14 Anti-communist Fighters,  2 Architects, 9 Art Critics, 1 Book Binder, 6 Ballerinas,  20 Charity Workers, 2 Communist Politicians, 3 Courtesans,  2 Designers,  4 Diplomats,  11 Essay Writers, 6 Ethnographers,  87 Exiles or first-generation Romanians born abroad, 1 Explorer,  12 Feminists,  1 Folk Music Singer,  2 Gymnasts and Dressage Riders,  5 Historians, 15 Honorary Romanians,  3 Illustrators,  13 Journalists,  3 Librarians,  3 Linguists, 1 Literary Critic,  15 Mass Media Personalities,  5 Medical Doctors and Nurses,  1 Museographer, 1 Musical Instruments Makers,  24 Novelists,  15 Opera Singers,  14 Painters, 6 Peasant farmers,  4 Philosophers, 6 Pianists,  4 Pilots,  5 Playwrights,  29 poets, 30 Political Prisoners,  5 Politicians,  2 Revolutionaries. 34 Royals and Aristocrats,  8 Scientists, 4 Sculptors,  1 Slave, 20 Socialites and Hostesses,  51 Spouses and Relations of Public Figures,  2 Spies,  4 Tapestry Weavers,  25 Translators, 6 Unknown Illustrious,   4 Violinists, 3 Workers.

Given the aforesaid criteria, as each of the 160 women of this Anthology falls in several of the above categories, it stands to reason that the sum of all names in all categories put together are, understandably, well in excess of 160, more precisely they reach 577. To illustrate this point by giving a single example and searching for Silvia Constantinescu, the founder and promoter of the “Curierul Romanesc” Quarterly (Sweden) we find her name five times among the following categories of:  “87 Exiles”,  “13 Journalists”,  “3 Librarians”,  “15 Mass Media Personalities” and “25 Translators”, respectively.

Chapter 3: represents the main corpus of the Anthology containing 920 pages divided in sub-chapters each of these corresponding to a letter of the Alphabet. Each of the  sub-chapters is preceded by a list of names, period and date of birth and death, followed by individual biographical  essay for each woman. The structure of each entry observes an identical format: name, dates, category, portrait photograph,  quotations, critical biographical essay, primary and secondary sources, URLs and iconography. In the case of artist painters an exhaustive list of exhibitions is given; for instrumentalists and singers there are selected lists of main performances as well as recordings available on CDs and DVDs, or/and the location of Opera houses and theatres where they had main performances, or début. For the reader who wishes to find out in greater detail about the biography or achievement of particular women these references are a treasure trove of over 4,000 entries.

Chapter 4: contains 45 pages with three Indexes as follows: 20 pages – Index of Surnames, 12 pages – Index of Geographical Place Names and respectively 13 pages – an Alphabetical Index of  605 Quatations from ‘Abortion’ to ‘Zip’ and from ‘Indoctrination’ to ‘Torture’.

The ADDENDUM: is intended to guide one through the confusing differences of the Romanian and the foreign  spelling equivalents depending on the source language – Romanian, French, English, or German.

This wealth of information on women with  a varied and complex personality offers a fascinating learning curve for those readers gifted with an intelligent and inquisitive mind, who may be particularly   interested in a multidisciplinary approach of a social landscape projected against a European  history stretching over  two centuries.

As we follow the labyrinth of diverse destinies, depicted with fervour and consummate scholarship by the author, it is tempting to allow oneself to be spirited away in this ocean of  of information, where each detail competes with each other for its intrinsic value and occasionally even for its sensational dimension. The quotations too make for an illuminating reading on a path of discovery: to give only two examples which are close to the spirit and philosophy of the Curierul Romanesc Quarterly:

The first quotation is an extract from the book “La Apa Vavilonului” (At Babel’s river), volume 2 (2001) by Monica Lovinescu (1923-2008), journalist, political analyst, radio broadcaster, anti-communist and Human Rights Activist exiled in Paris:

In Romania dissidence was an exception. Our resistance was present when it did not exist in the other satellite countries and it ended just as it started with our neighbouring countries. We fought and died in the Carpathian mountains, as the West was blind and deaf, basking in its victory and forgetting its hostages. From the prisons where our élite was destroyed in the 1960s  emerged only the shadows of our earlier determination. Three successive waves of terror – 1948, 1952 and 1958 – had drained the collective organism. We caved into, a  near-total silence. We sacrificed ourselves for nothing. With this sense of utter uselessness most of the survivors emerged from the jails, some of whom, while “free”, remained at the beck and call of the Securitate..

Finally, a second quotation is extracted from the interview of September 1997 which Stefan Racovitza, an exile in Switzerland had with Silvia Constantinescu, the founder and editor of Curierul Romanesc Quarterly (Sweden):

“Yourself”… “and some other exiled Romanians, you were alluding to the inability of Western intellectuals to accept/understand the horrors of Communism and furthermore you were also alluding to the dominant position of the Left-wingers in the West. Such was the case in Sweden. This attitude made light work for the Romanian embassies and for the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest to denigrate those amongst the exiles who were politically active. The same was the case in Stockholm when it came to the campaign of denigration against the “Curierul Românesc” newspaper. This was carried out as much through Romanian communist channels as through their Swedish counterparts, which were extremely enthusiastic in this vein.”

The above two quotations of this Anthology were specially selected in order to prove that the idea of keeping alive the Memory of Romania’s Calvary  under Communism  represents an important theme of this book beyond the inevitable need of spicing the interest of the Anglo-Saxon readership with lighter interludes!

For this reason alone  the idea of  disseminating the Blouse Roumaine far and wide fills in an important gap – an exercise which is long overdue.

http://www.blouseroumaine.com

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: The original  Romanian text was published by architect Octavian Ciupitu in Curierul Romanesc, Sweden (see link below). Both the author and his wife Doamna Silvia Constantinescu founders of “Curierul Romanesc” allowed the translation of the above review  to be published by the Centre for Romanian Studies (London). The illustrations and the reference to the Foreword by Catherine Durandin were further added to the English version by the Centre for Romanian Studies (London).

Source:

http://curierulromanesc.net/

by kind permission.

'Last Train to Trieste' by Domnica RADULESCU

‘Train to Trieste’

by Domnica Radulescu

Life under Ceausescu was not a piece of cake!

We learn from Domnica Radulescu, a Romanian Academic naturalised  US citizen,  or rather, through the narrative of the central character of her novel – one Mona Maria Manoliu, that life under Nicolae Ceausescu was not a piece of cake. So far – not much of a surprise, as this is a generally accepted truism.

All things being equal, one may well ask who might be interested in Romania, when a handful of established stereotypes would suffice?

‘Train to Trieste’ is set to dispel such reductive exercise: its very title evokes the Continent’s soft underbelly  which always represented a porous border between two very different European worlds: North vs. South and East vs. West.  First the Habsburg Empire, in the North  pushing for access to the Mediterranean South : this made Trieste a cosmopolitan nexus where Italians, Croats, Austrians, Greeks coexisted.  It was an enchanting city  where James Joyce lived before WWI,  the very creuzet which produced this author’s seminal writing, although the great Irishman conceded:

For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.

Domnica Radulescu would certainly not disagree with the Joycean concept. This is because, after the Second World War, as Europe was divided by an Iron Curtain,  Trieste’s attraction resided in its permeable  border control which drip-fed a steady trickle of refugees from the East of Europe seeking the mirage of freedom in the West. Here the loop closes, as the analogy with James Joyce becomes apparent.

Romanian-born Domnica Radulescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Gender Studies, USA, author of "Train to Trieste"

Like James Joyce,  in Trieste, who turned to his familiar Dublin as inspiration and moral sustenance, so did Domnica Radulescu‘s ‘Train to Trieste” got its spirit and  stamina from  the cities where its author lived and loved in Romania, from its mountains and scent of fir trees or linden trees in bloom, from its family dramas and above all from the fear of an oppressive regime, embodied by the ubiquitous secret service agents, their informers and victims.  These images are all entwined in a central thread of a social and political tapestry. The reader will soon discover the first part of the book being set in Romania, yet all along the second half,   as the story moves to Chicago, there are constant flash-backs to episodes and shreds of life left behind in the character’s native land.

One may get the impression that such construct would inevitably make for a melancholy reading: not in the least – although we come across many dark episodes of a life of misery and fear under dictatorship, the style throughout the narrative keeps an alert and spirited pace, coloured by exhilarating thoughts of a little girl, whose life we follow, as she turns into a seductively mercurial and irrrepressively oversexed woman, with a great joie de vivre. To the Anglo-Saxon reader, unaccustomed to the flowery Romanian language, charged with hyperboles, the style of the book may appear somewhat contrived. However, for those of us more familiar with this corner of Europe, quite the contrary, the style of Domnica Radulescu captures perfectly well the  Romanian ethos. This is not just a riveting fiction, it is an induction course in Political and Social History of life under Communism, two books for the price of one, yet constructed skilfully, in perfect harmony with each other.

During the 20^th century many Romanian exiles made France or Germany their adoptive country, although some settled elsewhere in the world. But those Romanians who wrote in French or German were little translated in English and indeed  still fewer of them wrote in English. Before WWII we can think of  Helen Vacaresco, Countess Anna de Noailles, Princess Bibesco, or Panait Istrati, all of whom wrote in French. After the war, exile novelists  Virgil Gheorghiu, Mircea Eliade,  Vintilă Horia, Emil Cioran, Gregor von Rezzori,  Herta Muller wrote in Romanian, French or German respectively. Nevertheless few of their titles were rendered in English and amongst the latter fewer still became bestsellers, or enjoyed the accolade of an International Prize, with a few exceptions, just!*.

Although the division of Europe, after WWII, fractured the natural links and flow of ideas between East and West, this did not prevent the Czechs to produce a Kundera, the Poles Wislawa Szymborska, or indeed the Albanians Ismail Kadere. By contrast, the spotlight of  international recognition  of East European writers has generally bypassed Romania, leaving her literature in the shadows. This lapse could  not be assigned only to the paucity of translation alone, but primarily to the absence of a broader, less parochial perspective of a Romanian fiction which did not sever its umbilical chord  from Nicolae Ceausescu‘s obsessions or indeed with the glorified,  wooden language stereotypes of Marxist speak.

By contrast, Domnica Radulescu, is a breeze of fresh air. Forget the pretense of her Mioritic co-nationals, left behind in their back water, lamenting their lack of international recognition  and blaming it for using a ‘little-spoken language’!  Twenty years after the fall of Communism  they have not yet woken up from their lethargy – their overblown egos of big fish in a small pond remain stunted and unconvincing! Had Domnica Radulescu been left behind in the Balkans, one may well ask what  might have been left of her free spirit? one would rather not surmise!

One thing is absolutely plain and the writing is on the wall for all to see – the official dictum from Bucharest, through its ‘cultural’ mouthpiece, the Institutul Cultural Roman, is that all Romanians who write in a foreign language do not belong to the “true” Fold of Romanian Literature (!)  Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the same indictment pronounced sixty years ago by the ‘High Priest’ of History of Literature, under Gheorghiu-Dej (Nicolae Ceausescu‘s predecessor),  one George Calinescu. who dismissed the oeuvre of Romanian exiles in Paris as being ‘unpatriotic’  (sic) because it was written in a foreign tongue! (Calinescu, op. cit History of Romanian Literature, UNESCO and Dragan Publishing, Paris, 1987). Ironically, today, twenty years after Ceausescu was put down in a classic coup de palais, the Romanian Academy’s own Institute of History of Romanian Literature is still named  after George Calinescu - the dictatorship’s own Court jester, whilst the attitude towards exile writers has remained hostile. Even as far back as the end of the 19th century Helene Vacarescu was crticised in Romania for “not being worthy of her ancestors” because she lived in Paris where her  French debut in poetry  enjoyed a great success…Her poem “The Soldier’s tent” was put to music by Sir Hubert Parry to become a popular patriotic song in the British Army fighting the Boer War… Queen Victoria was much impressed by the young Romanian poetess who was lionised in Paris, but not in her native land.

Away from this maddening crowd, in the United States,  Ms Radulescu has made her reputation as an Academic, rather than a fiction writer, as she is only at her second novel. Yet the omens look good: be true to yourself Ms Radulescu and resist being distracted by mermaid songs!   We are looking forward to your next novels.

Watch  this space!

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*)  in 1903 Princess Marthe Bibesco received from the Académie française a literary Prize for ‘Huit Paradis’,

Countess Anna de Noailles was the first woman elected to the ‘Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique’.

In 1949 Virgil Gheorghiu‘s ‘The Twenty-fifth Hour’ was made into a film of great success,

Vintila Horia‘s ‘God was born in Exile‘ was nominated in 1960 for the French Goncourt Prize in 1960  but both writers Gheorghiu and Vintila became the target of a witch hunt by the French Left, inspired by the Romanian Securitate.

Eugene Ionesco‘s plays ‘The Bald Primadonna’, ‘The Lesson’ and  ‘The Chairs’ marked the birth of the ‘Theatre of the Abusrd’ and was elected to the French Academy, 

Mircea Eliade was elected to Académie royale de langue et de littérature françaises de Belgique,

Both Anna de Noailles and Helene Vacaresco bear the name of two literary Prizes in France.

Daniel Rosenthal - 'Revolutionary Romania' (19th c)

Romanian-Jewish Topics (Part One of Two):
Quotations from an Alternative Anthology:
“Blouse Roumaine – the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women”

Presented and edited by Constantin Roman, Preface by Catherine Durandin, published by the Centre for Romanian Studies (London), 2009

1,100 pages, 160 biographies, 600 quotations, 4,000 references, credits, discography and URLs , 6 Indexes

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Lauren Bacall, Movie Star (Lauren's mother was born in Romania and migrated to New York with her parents.

Lauren BACALL,

“Betty” (née Betty Joan Perske), Miss Betty Bacall, Mrs. Humphrey Bogart, (b. New York, 16 September 1924)
First-generation Romanian-American, film star, wife of Humphrey Bogart

Romanian immigrants:

Mother left Romania by ship – aged somewhere between one and two – with her father, mother, elder sister, baby brother. Her father had been in the wheat business, had been wiped out, and had turned out whatever silver and jewellery there was left to a sister for money, enough to transport his family to the promised land – the New World – America. They arrived in Ellis Island and gave their name – Weinstein Bacal (meaning wineglass in German and Russian). The man must have written down just the first half of the name – too many people from too many countries, too many foreign names – so it was Max and Sophie Weinstein, daughters Renée and Natalie’s, son Albert.
(Lauren Bacall By Myself, pp. 5, Jonathan Cape, London, 1979)

Happy Times:
We had happy times, my grandmother cooking, singing German songs, reading constantly in French, German, Romanian, Russian and English. She and mother spoke Romanian and German when she did not want me to understand.
(Lauren Bacall, By Myself, op.cit. 5)

Read more about Lauren Bacall:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Georgeta (Georgette) CANCICOV, née Maria Jurgea
“The Angel Saviour of Moldavian Jews”
(b. 29 May 1899, Godinesti, County Bacàu – d. Bucharest, 16 April 1984),
Novelist, essayist, violinist, nurse in WWI, wife of Liberal justice minister and politician Mircea Cancicov

Georgeta Cancicov – Saviour of Moldavian Jews:
Taking advantage of the fact that Marshall Antonescu stayed at her house whenever he visited Bacàu and given the good relationship she had with him, Mrs. Cancicov interceded robustly and ensured that no ghettos be set up in Moldavia.
(…)
Then, there was the question raised that Jewish women be forced to perform labour in town. We again interceded with Mrs. Cancicov in a petition addressed to Marshall Antonescu, who decreed that the women should only do such work as befitting their profession, which was a gain in our favour.
(…)
On the eve of 22nd August 1944, there was an order to evacuate all Jews. (Consequently), on the morning of 23rd August, in the courtyard of the Church of Our Lady, a detachment of 600 Jews was gathered for evacuation. You can imagine their distress, as they had to leave behind their families and be driven among (the retreating) Hitler’s armies. As I intervened with Mrs. Cancicov, she communicated to me in writing that no Jews should be evacuated and I presented this order to the (military) commander. He checked with Mrs Cancicov, who confirmed, on her authority, that nobody should go, so he freed everybody. As a result no Jews from the any other detachments were evacuated either.
(…)
Of course, there were countless other little matters on which Mrs. Cancicov acted as the protecting angel and saviour of our wretched and oppressed Jewish people.
(D. Ionas, President of the Jewish community of Bacàu, Petition to the Prefect of the County Bacàu, dated 9th September 1945, in favour of Georgeta Cancicov, whose house was requisitioned by the Soviet Army, quoted by the Memoria)
(http://www.memoria.ro/?location=view_article&id=821&l=ro)

Jewish Ghettos:
There will be no Jewish ghettos set up here: (I defy you, that) should there ever be any of these set up, then I am going to be an inmate in one of them myself.
(Georgeta Cancicov, reassurance given to Schiller, the representative of the Jewish Community in Bacàu, quoted by D. Ionas, op.cit)

Read more about Georgeta Cancicov:

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Nina Cassian, - a successful Poet under dictatorship, who sought refuge in America at the end of Communism

Nina CASSIAN (Renée Annie Cassian)
(b. 27 November 1924, Galati),
Poet, novelist, translator, composer, exile and now expatriate living in New York since 1985

Conviction:
I worked to be understood by the farmers and workers, I was torturing myself and distorting my artistry. Some of us Romanian writers did it with conviction. That was the worst.
(Nina Cassian)

Excluded:
They don’t want me there, I’m not sure why. They used to consider me eccentric and rebellious…But now maybe it’s because they resent that I’m living a better life in America.
(Nina Cassian)

Uprooting:
It is a terrible tragedy, at age 60, to leave one’s country and live in a place where one is surrounded by a foreign language and with two impossible professions — poetry and classical music, I have had my share of fame and glory, and didn’t expect more.
(Nina Cassian)

Read more about Nina Cassian:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Maria Forescu, Romanian Movie star of the silent cinema: died at Buchenwald

Maria FORESCU (née Maria Füllenbaum)
(15 Jan 1875 Cernàuti, Bukowina – (?) 23 November 1943, Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Thuringia, Germany)
Movie star, operetta singer, Nazi concentration camp detainee, killed at Buchenwald

Maria Forescu (née Maria Füllenbaum) is one of Europe’s earliest stars of the silent movie. She dedicated herself to her career with great zest, acting in over one hundred and sixty films from 1911 to 1933, a thread which was abruptly severed by Nazi censorship which resulted in her dramatic deportation to the infamous Buchenwald cocentration camp where she was killed ten years later, in 1943.
(Extract from the Biography of Maria Forescu published in “Blouse Roumaine – the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women”, 2009)

Read more about Maria Forescu:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Nicoleta (Nicolette) Franck (née Apotheker/Apoteker)
(b. 21st July 1920, Iasi, România)
Lawyer, political analyst, journalist, translator, exile in Switzerland

Political illiteracy:
The tragedy of the vote (for presidential elections) of 26th November 2000 cannot be explained in any other way than in the perspective of the political illiteracy of the Romanian people. Our schools had not yet made good the teaching of history, and so distorted has it remained that our past is not correctly understood and thus we cannot shape the present or have a glimmer in the future.
(Nicoleta Franck)

Rumours:
Certainly after half a century of outright lies peddled by the communist régime, Romanians now believe only in rumours rather than public declarations. Consequently they are easily misled through whispered rumours, which are aimed at the calumny of honest people, pointing out their failures rather than at their achievements, – the latter, alas, being few and far between and rather slow in materializing.
(Nicoleta Franck)

Read more about Nicoleta Franck:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Clara Haskil, Romanian born pianist: her talent was discovered by Carmen Sylva, Queen Elisabeth of Romania who gave her a scholarship to study in Vienna.

Clara HASKIL,
‘La Princèsse de la Musique’,
‘Clarinette’, (nickname given by Dinu Lipatti)
(b. 7 January, 1895, Bucharest– d. 7 December 1960, Brussels),
Pianist, exile in France and Switzerland

Clara Haskil about Georges Enesco:
I always felt alone when I played with Enesco. I could not see what we had in common. This great man and little me. Yet we were both Romanian, and apparently our playing blended perfectly. But what else? Such a towering figure. And me?
(Clara Haskil, ibid.)

Clara Haskil about Dinu Lipatti:
Oh, I could spend hours talking about Dinu. He was always so aware, so alive, in spite of all the terrible pain he had to suffer. And his music-making! I really can’t find the words to describe what I felt whenever I hear him play. I often thought he felt almost guilty he had been blessed with so much genius.”
(Clara Haskil, ibid.)

Clara Haskil about Dinu Lipatti:
How much I envy your talent, may the Deuce take it! Must you have so much talent and I so little? Is there justice in this world?
(Jean-Yves Conrad, Roumanie, capitale Paris, Guide des promenades insolites, sur les traces des Roumains célèbres de Paris, page 130)

Read more about Clara Haskil:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Helen, Queen Mother of Romania and Mother of King Michael: during WWII she fought fearlessly to save Jewish lives: her tribute is alive at Yad Vashem

Princess HELEN of Greece and Denmark,
Romania’s ‘Queen Mother’ (Regina Mamà Elena)
(b. 2 May 1896, Athens – d. 28 November 1982, Lausanne, Switzerland)
consort of King Carol II,

Helen, Queen Mother of Romania, seen by Great Rabbi Alexandru Safran:
I would like to refer to the posthumous award of the title of “The Righteous Among the Nations” to Helen, Queen Mother of Romania. This letter is meant to bring to the fore two fundamental aspects pertaining to this matter: (1) actions by which the Queen Mother saved the lives of many Jews during the Second World War; (2) the risks personally taken by the Queen Mother in undertaking such actions.” (…)
“Such consciousness of possible risks extended over the whole period between 1941 and 1944. My own contact with the Queen Mother allowed me to gage her sharp and lucid perception of the realities of these unstable and turbulent times and at the same time to be appraised of her apprehensions concerning such risks. I can, at the same time bear witness that the Queen Mother constantly interceded on behalf of the Jews and that she saved Jewish lives in spite of all apprehensions: she was drawn to it by her kindness and her moral values.
Hoping that this letter will be helpful to the Commission of the Righteous Among Nations Award…
(Alexandru Safran, Grand Rabbi of Switzerland)

Read more about Helen Queen Mother of Romania:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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Lupescu - The indomitable Romanian royal seductress: she became King Carol II third wife: her remains were recently transferred from the Braganza chapel in Lisbon to a monastery in the Carpathians

Elena LUPESCU,
(née Elena Grünberg, alias ‘Wolf’),
(aka ‘Magda’, aka ‘Duduia’, aka ‘Princess Elena’)
Mrs. Elena Tâmpeanu – by her first married name
(b. 1896, Herta, România, or 1899, Iasi Moldavia – d. 1977, Estoril, Portugal)
Socialite, royal concubine, third wife of King Carol II, exile

Limerick on Madame Lupescu:
Have you heard of Madam Lupescu,
Who came to Romania’s rescue?
It’s a wonderful thing
To be under a King:
Is Democracy better I ask you?
(Anonymous)

Bleeding:
While he whom I adore, he in whom I put all my hope for the good of my country did not send me a telegram, not even a single line in order to share with me his happiness, happiness to which I had contributed… my heart is sad, it is bleeding because I expected to be the first to whom you would send a telegram.
(Elena Lupescu’s letter to Carol, Quoted by Lilly Marcou, Le Roi trahi – Carol II de Roumanie)

Read more about Elena Lupescu:

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

Romanian-Jewish Topics(continued in Part Two):

© copyright Constantin ROMAN, 2003-2009, all rights reserved

Presented and edited by Constantin Roman, Preface by Catherine Durandin, published by the Centre for Romanian Studies (London), 2009

1,100 pages, 160 biographies, 600 quotations, 4,000 references, performances & exhibition credit, discography and URLs , 6 Indexes

http://www.blouseroumaine.com/orderthebook_p1.html

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As a young girl from Hungarian-occupied Transylvania, Ana NOVAC knew the whole gamut of Nazi concentration camps. She was a surviver of both Nazi and Communist dictatorships, who opted for freedom in France.

Ana NOVAC, (née Zimra Harsany)
‘The Romanian Anne Frank’
(b. Dej, Transylvania, 21 June 1929)
Actress, playwright, poet, novelist Auschwitz, Kratzau, Plaszow camps survivor, exile living in Paris

Nationality:
I was born in 1929 in Transylvania (România). One good morning when I was 11 years old I woke up to be a Hungarian citizen without having moved to another place, another street, or even without having changed my shirt. At the age of 14 I was deported to Auschwitz as a Jew. On my release in 1945 I had again become a Romanian citizen. That is why I have the greatest difficulty in establishing my nationality, other than from my identity papers which specified that I was Jewish.
(Ana Novac, The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszow)

‘Anti-semite’:
That text was rejected by the censors as ‘anti-Semitic’….’It is useless to explain to a bureaucrat trembling for his job and his life that one can be Jewish, persecuted, and a bastard at the same time; that martyrdom and heroism do not necessarily go together; that misfortune does not imply any merit and does not confer any more right to glory than a car wreck, or an earthquake.
(Ana Novac, The Beautiful Days of My Youth: My Six Months in Auschwitz and Plaszow)

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Ana PAUKER (née Hannah Rabinsohn, or Rabinovici)

Ana Pauker together with Elena Ceausescu shares the distinction of belonging to the Romanian Communist Demonology

‘A Jewish Female Bukharin’
(b. 1893, Codàesti, County Vaslui, Moldavia – d. Bucharest, 1960)
Granddaughter of Rabbi Hersch Kaufmann Rabinsohn, communist activist prior to WWI, political prisoner, exile in the Soviet Union, NKVD operative/ spy, returnee,
vice-president of the Council of Ministers, (1949-52), Foreign Minister, (1947-53),
Politburo Member responsible for the enforced collectivization of agriculture, (1944-56),

Rabbi Alexandru Safran on Ana Pauker:
“Ana Pauker, a rabbi’s daughter…. when she was Minister of Foreign Afairs, wanted everybody to know, especially when I was present, that she was not a Jew, she was a communist”….
“… when she saw me approaching the Prime Minister and the other ministers she stepped out of the line and turned aside for a moment in order not to greet me. She thus thought to demonstrate that she, the communist, did not want anything to do with the Chief Rabbi and Jewry; that she had less in common with him than even the other members of government….”
“…the expression of Ana Pauker’s face during her time of glory, had always been impertinent”.
(Alexander Safran, Grand Rabbi of Switzerland, formerly Grand Rabbi of Romania: Resisting the storm, Romania 1940-1947, op.cit 139, 161, 166)

Tesu Solomovici on Ana Pauker:
The most shining star amongst the huge number of Moscow-trained spies and activists was, undoubtedly the Jewish communist Ana Pauker. She knew Joseph Vissarionovitch Stalin personally and worked under the orders and direct command of the henchmen of the Soviet repressive services, Lavrentie Pavlovitch Beria, Victor Semionovitch Abakhumov, Piotr Vassilievitch Fedotov and Pavel Mihailovitch Fitin and furthermore she enjoyed the admiration of yet another dinosaur of Soviet power – Vyactheslav Molotov. Notwithstanding all that, Gheorghiu-Dej succeeded, with a patient cunning to pluck out all her feathers.
(Solomovitch: 54-55)

Read more about Ana Pauker:

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Elisabeth Roudinesco Parisian-born Psychoanalist of Romanian stock

Elisabeth ROUDINESCO (Elisabeta RUDINESCU)
(b. 1944)
Academic, psychoanalyst, historian of science, historian, journalist, editor,
French-born Romanian living in Paris

Antecedents:
“Being Jewish, in such conditions, did not make sense, because I was baptised, but not being Jewish did not make sense either, because this baptism did not imbue in me any integrating principles. How should I answer my classmates who might enquire about my origins and my religion? My father called himself an orthodox convert to Catholicism; my mother rather considered herself a Protestant and both parents felt rather detached from any religious tradition. Furthermore, my mother kept in a drawer a fake birth certificate which was produced for her benefit by a willing abbot, by which she was spared the obligation of wearing the yellow star badge and consequently saved from deportation. How could one believe, in such conditions, in the validity of a ‘real’ birth certificate and how will I know what might be the implications of ‘really’ belonging to a religion? It took me twenty years to unravel this imbroglio of my Jewish origins.
(Elisabeth Roudinesco, Généalogie)

Dracula:
“One day, as I returned from the cinema, where I discovered that the most famous Romanian on this planet was Count Dracula, I bought Bram Stoker’s book, which I read breathlessly. As soon as I reminded my father that his worthy ancestors may not have been those whose descendant he claimed to be, he raised his arms to the sky and treated me (in Romanian) of that highest swear word of being a ‘tzigan’. From then on we did not stop wrangling. He was always singing the merits of Voltaire, Anatole France and Paul Valéry, whose friend he was, while I loved Balzac, Michelet and Proust.”
(Elisabeth Roudinesco, ibid.)

Immigrant’s delusions:
“My father who emigrated (from Romania to France t.n.) in 1904, passed his time obfuscating his origins. Being wary of anti-Semitism (in France. t.n.) and anxious to prove his desire of being assimilated, he was claiming an Orthodox father and that he himself had converted to Roman Catholic. This is how he could claim, without admitting it, a link with Alexandru Socec. As for any reminiscences regarding his own itinerary, he invented a family novel to suit his imagination, to the point of thinking himself more French than the French themselves and to relegating his native Romania to the status of a country inhabited by vampires and gypsies. He had in his disquisitions two way of looking at history. A scholarly approach, based on academic books and which he presented and eschewed  in the clearest manner. By contrast his private life was punctuated by mystery and rumor. My father would assign to archives and to the truth a positivist cult, whilst for his own family history, he was covering his tracks and was clouding the genealogies.”
(Elisabeth Roudinesco, ibid.)

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Annie SAMUELLI, victim of Communist witch hunt

Annie SAMUELLI
(b. 1912 – d. ca. 2003)
Clerk at the British Legation Bucharest, political prisoner, exile

Cosmopolitan bourgeois:
The debased spies, recruited from among the cosmopolitan bourgeois, have finally received their retribution.
(The Communist newspaper Unirea commenting on Annie Samuelli’s ‘conspiracy in favour of Great Britain and the U.S.A’. in the 1948 political trials. Quoted by Tesu Solomonovici, in Securitatea si Evreii, vol 2, pp.51l)

Miracle Rabbi:
Carla, aged 40, arrived at our cell: she was a brilliant accountant. Carla was given a 20 years prison sentence for having been a member of a so-called ‘subversive organization’. Although a Roman Catholic she would tell us about the pilgrimage to the tomb of the ‘Miracle Rabbi’:

Some hundred years ago, this rabbi would have led his folk on foot all the way to a small Romanian village to escape a pogrom in Poland. This humble and enlightened man handed out wise counsel, which was of the greatest help to the community. After his death at a venerable age, people would still come along to his grave to ask advice. The ritual unfolded in the following way: in memory of the rabbi’s long treck from Poland, the pilgrims, Jews and Gentiles alike, would walk to the cemetery, which was rather far from the city. Along the way, they would pick up a stone. Any request or problem would be scribbled on a piece of paper, which was put under the stone and placed on the rabbi’s grave. In time, all these stones grew to become a gravestone in the shape of a pyramid, which grew and grew. Each time a request or a problem was satisfied, the pilgrim would return to collect the stone and destroy the piece of paper.

Carla heard the story from an inmate with whom she shared a prison cell in said town. Although she was Romanian Orthodox this woman prisoner was convinced that her husband was praying at the rabbi’s tomb for her to be given a reprieve of her prison sentence, because the rabbi had already miraculously saved their dying son.
‘Well, would you believe it?’ Carla would exclaim. ‘This woman was acquitted within six months. And you know how rare it is for a political prisoner to be freed. She had failed to denounce some refugee and she would have been sentenced to a minimum of five years. Now, owing to the Miracle Rabbi, she could go home’.
(Annie Samuelli, Dayyenu)

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Silvia SIDNEY, First Generation romanian-American Movie Star

Sylvia SIDNEY (aka SYDNEY), (née Sophia Kosow),
1stly Mrs. Bennett Cerf, 2ndly Mrs. Luther Adler, 3rdly Mrs. Carlton Alsop
(b. Bronx, New York, 8 August 1910 – d. New York, 1st July 1999)
First-generation Romanian-American, film and stage actress, needlepoint artist

As in the case of Lauren Bacall, (q.v.), another glamorous New York-born actress with Romanian roots, one may question Sylvia’s inclusion in the Blouse Roumaine. Sylvia’s father, Mr Kosow, was indeed Russian, but her mother was Romanian.

(Extract  from: ‘Blouse Roumaine – the Unsung Voices of Romanian Women’)

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Sanda Stolojan: a freedom fighter and sharp observer of Romanian exiles

Sanda STOLOJAN (née Alexandra Zamfirescu)
(b. 1919, Bucharest – d. 2 August 2005, Paris)
Essayist, poet, memorialist, translator, journalist human rights activist,
Personal interpreter for four French presidents, exile in France

Franco-Romanian Jews:
I went to Beaubourg to the symposium on Benjamin Fondane, on whom I was writing an article in the ‘Cahiers de l’Est’. In the auditorium many Romanian Jews were gathered , a world with which we other Romanians have few contacts other than some personal friends. An old émigré, Claude Émile Rosen, read one of Fondane’s poems in Romanian. Stefan Lupasco who knew Fondane was there too. Generally the tone of the evening, imprinted by the philosopher Chouraki, a specialist in the Jewish mystique, was Hebraic and anti-Romanian, with pre-war Romania painted in anti-Semitic colours all over. Throughout the course of the evening I felt an odd sensation of being there only tolerated, marginalized, in spite of being at the core of a cultural space with which I was very familiar. In a certain fashion I was the “Jew”, the foreigner within this audience. In fact our manner of living our exile is situated at the opposite pole of the sensitivity of these Franco-Romanian intellectuals of Jewish origin. It is all a matter of the past, a question linked to the antecedents of our lives, yesterday in communist Romania, today in Paris. Even further back, there is a matter of ancestors, ours steeped in the glebe of deepest Romania, in its beliefs and traditions, theirs errant for three thousand years; ours lost in the Neolithic mist, theirs mingled to the history of Babylon and Egypt. These are profound matters, old causes, as old as the biblical prophecies and their different interpretations which shaped us. And then there is the recent past, our situation and theirs under communism, which of late has forced us to take the road of exile, where we see them again, these old errant hands. Today the experience of exile ought to bring us closer to each other, but our contact with them, like that of last evening, only revealed to what extent we remained attached to our land archetype implanted in the Parisian milieu. What could be more foreign to their spirit than our obsessions, our reactions, our commitment. It is by rejecting this spirit of our soil that Cioran succeeded in placing himself above this state of mind which is justly ours, that of the provincials of Europe, a characteristic which was also his. Paradoxically, it is while strongly denouncing his origins that Cioran discovered his inner depth: for, as he said, ‘Nobody is in control of his own inner depth’. How could one solve this dilemma? How could our exile bring us closer to the Jewish exile?”
(Sanda Stolojan, Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris)

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Sabina Wurmbrand - a Pastor's Wife who knew the Communist Prisons

Sabina WURMBRAND (née Sabina Oster)
(1913, România –2000, California, U.S.A.)
Missionary of the underground church, pastor’s wife, political prisoner and prisoner of conscience, exile in the USA

Prison Carcer:
..I was marched to the guardroom and put into a prison cell. It was a narrow cupboard built into the wall in which you could just stand. The iron door had a few holes to admit air… After a few hours, my feet were burning. The blood in my temples beat with slow, painful thuds. How many hours could they keep me here?… Drops of water were falling from somewhere on the roof of the box. It was a desolate sound. I counted them to make time pass… I don’t know how long I did this, but at a certain moment.
I simply began to cry aloud to avoid despair:
’One, two, three, four,’
I cried, and again:
‘One, two, three, four…’
After a time the words became inarticulate. I didn’t know what I said. My mind had moved into rest. It blacked out. Yet my spirit continued to say something to God.
(Sabina Wurmbrand, The pastor’s wife)

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