Times New Romanian

Description

Times New Romanian provides a picture of Romania today through the individual first-person narratives of people who chose to go and make a life in this country. Each chapter a voice, each story in Times New Romanian provides readers with a look into the Romanian world - the way things work, the vitality of the people, the living heritage of rural traditions, ordinary life - sometimes dark, sometimes sublime, always interesting. In a land full of character and contradiction, there is a strong attraction for those with the spirit to meet the challenges, where the one thing you can be sure of is the unpredictable. Life is not always easy. These stories will tell you why...If you want to know more about Romanians and their country, the voices in Times New Romanian make for an enjoyable and lively read. Inspired by Studs Terkel and Tony Parker, Nigel used their oral history style and his own experience in Romania to guide him in recording these interviews.

Sujets

• Travel writing
• Romania

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783065936
• Langue: English

Extrait

Times New Romanian
Times New Romanian
Edited by Nigel Shakespear
Copyright © 2014 Nigel Shakespear
www.timesnewromanian.com
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
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ISBN 978-1783065-936
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
A sincere thank you to each and every contributor for sharing your thoughts and reflections on the land of your choice.
Thanks also to Rosalind, co-traveller and co-editor.

Contents
Introduction
Walter Friedl
Frans Brinkman
Jerelyn Taubert
Mike Ormsby
Egle Chisiu
Andrew Littauer
Franco Aloisio
Colin Shaw
Nancy Rice
Judy and Spike Faint
Sonja van Zee
Rupert Wolfe-Murray
Ricardo Alcaine
Peter Hurley – The Long Road to the Merry Cemetery
Peter Hurley
Count Tibor Kalnoky
Leslie Hawke
Andrew Begg
Rob Rosinga
Anne Arthur
Ian Tilling
Liria Themo
Scott Eastman
Jonas Schäfer
Paul Davies
Carolyn Litchfield
Craig Turp
Krishan George
Charles Bell
Greg Helm
In the Holbav with Greg Helm
Pietro Elisei
Johan Bouman
Israela Vodovoz
Duncan Ridgley
Gianluca Falco
John Ketchum
Italo De Michelis
Philip O’Ceallaigh
Leaving Romania, What Would You Miss?
Contributor Contacts
Omnia mutantur, nihil interit – everything changes, nothing perishes.
Ovid
Introduction
On a wet day in May I found myself heading up Finchley High Street, passing a charity advertising itself as giving aid in Romania. I went in, and the girl unearthed an old flyer that elaborated on how they provided much-needed social welfare in the country. Like any other high street charity in the UK, it was a shop full of books, clothes and bric-a-brac going for a song. There was nothing special about it other than its purpose. I don’t imagine the Londoners in there browsing the shelves gave it much thought – they were looking for bargains. But why?
The short answer is that it was set up in the early 90s, when hundreds of charities responded to the need for help in the post-Ceaușescu period. This leads to the idiosyncratic situation today whereby charities in the UK are funding the welfare of another European Union country.
Romanians have a sense of being different, of living in a country that is different. And it is. Well, all countries have their unique qualities, but this one and its people raise the temperature. They don’t leave you unaffected or unmoved; they invite a reaction.
For millennia, foreigners from west and east have been crossing this place, the land of Romania. The poet Ovid, banished to the Black Sea from Rome, died miserable in 17 AD in Tomis – now Constanța. Today the position of the foreigner, a Western one at least, is privileged and limited. Privileged because most of us are usually treated kindly; limited because Romania is a deep well, difficult for an outsider to plumb.
‘They can always outsmart us,’ I was told by an experienced Western immigrant. They certainly played the Russians cleverly in the heyday of the USSR, and some would have it that they’ve played the European Union likewise in the last ten years. 1 This is a country quite used to dealing with outside powers and their representatives.
They can be their own worst critics. They will accuse themselves of ‘a lack of civility, a lack of respect, exhibitions of frustration, a world of excess’. They will do themselves down like the Romanian commenting in a Trip Advisor travel posting about Bulgarians being ‘a bit more civilised and open-minded than us.’ Self-absorbed introspection can look like self-flagellation – witness a well-known author writing on the Romanian feeling of hysteria, when he talked of those who’d been abroad for a long time returning to the abnormality of life here. There’s a recognition of the dark side of life here that can outshine flickers of hope.
As an Englishman not integrated into Romanian society but on the outside looking in, I had gone there to work and found it a country of character, a long way from the anonymity of developed consumer societies. From my first night staying in Bucharest’s Hanul lui Manuc hotel in 1996, I was engaged by the incongruities and the strangely inexplicable, although it wasn’t difficult to understand the young lady who knocked on my door at midnight, asking for a light. In the 90s I was always being asked, ‘What do you think of our country?’ In time the question more or less disappeared, but I was still looking for an answer.
Working with the public administration, mostly on EU-funded social projects related to the Roma (also known as Gypsies), the real benefits to their communities weren’t easy to see. Involvement in so-called Structural Fund projects in the social sector was akin to wading in the Danube delta – slow and murky. Projects are a ready source of money and resources, subject to the manipulation of the undisclosed agendas of others. Much of my time was spent working out who was after what; we were a long way from ‘what you see is what you get’. Unforeseen blockages were the rule. Expectations slid into oblivion, leading to cynicism and disillusionment. Romanians were clearly better adapted to deal with this, but for me the environment became discouraging. Notable exceptions were the educated young people who were my colleagues, in almost complete contradiction to the problematic world with which we were dealing.
Bureaucracy can be painful anywhere, and Romania provides its fair share of pain. You learn that to get anything done you need a lot of energy or good friends. It took two and a half hours and 37 signatures to open a bank account. Often enough, officials just don’t know the answer. Eight calls to different individuals in the local administration, just to sort out a local community problem, left one friend giving up on it. Sometimes it’s worth going back the next day to find someone else to talk to; it could all go smoothly.
I heard about corruption, although I lived protected from it. My wife had met Cristina, an ex-teacher reduced to begging outside our local supermarket, and we took her on as a language trainer. She told us stories about the area we lived in and about her hard life. In one memorable instance, she had taken her granddaughter with a deep, bleeding cut to the Emergency Hospital, where she had to scream and shout that she had no money before an Indian doctor sewed the girl up – with 36 stitches. In June 2010, the newspaper Evenimentul Zilei gave a breakdown of the extra payments required to lead a life in Romania: about €20,000 – for a lifetime, presumably. This didn’t include unofficial payments that sometimes need to be made to get a job as a teacher, lawyer or doctor, about which Cristina waxed lyrical. Wages and salaries are low, and most people aren’t financially well off, but there can be money to go round when needed. The subtleties of the black economy in the country remained byzantine to us.
Consensus can be hard to come by, and the default mode is to contest. A casual glance at the politics of the country will suggest that politicians are extremely aggressive, continually aiming to destroy each other. It may be a game, but a secretary of state told me that all political parties were in the same boat, being the most conservative institutions in the country. In his party he had little chance of promotion on merit. To get on you have to pay. The more you pay, the bigger the role. And having paid for the position, you get your money back in power. You go into politics to make money. The politics are not ideology-driven but formed around circles of interests.
In her books, the Romanian-born Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller hasn’t painted a pretty picture of the place as it once was. She also criticised the EU for not paying more attention to the communist past of its new states. She was well received in Bucharest in September 2010, where she was asked if there was nothing she liked in Romania. Her answer – that she liked some very extraordinary people who she knows and who are her friends and if there were more of them in Romania, things would go better – suggests that her feelings haven’t changed. 2 She had been in permanent conflict with the Securitate , and remained at odds with them and their successors even after she’d left the country.
Fear of state authorities is still there. Less than five years ago we met a woman who’d been subject to a Securitate recruitment effort in the 80s, when she was called down to their local headquarters. They tried to persuade her to report on her colleagues. Saying she wasn’t suitable for this work, she had to sign a letter declaring she would never tell anyone about their request. Of course she spoke to her parents, and her mother remains nervous today.
Her mother was an elegant lady, with hair tied back, her face showing traces of refinement. She remembered the interbellum years well, recalling the days of horse and carriage, of men dressed in gloves and carrying canes, as if those were the days when people behaved better. Essentially, she was an imperfectly preserved specimen of the local bourgeoisie. More than once she and her daughter referred to being unable to trust people. H