Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

On the way out of town, I looked at the local peasants and thought that if some of their forefathers had not burned down the houses of such as my forefathers, mine wouldn’t have left. I considered what had happened to my family within two generations, and what hadn’t happened for them, and instead of feeling outraged by the history of aggression, I felt privileged by it. Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators. While those ravaging others’ lives exhaust their energy on destruction, those whose lives are shattered must expend their vigor on solutions, some of which can be transformative. Hatred drove my family to the United States and its previously unimaginable freedoms.

The conditions in the Roma settlements to which Leslie took me next made Dorohoi look like East Hampton. Where the subsistence farmers of northern Romania ate simply, the Gypsies of Colonia were going hungry; while the farmers lived relatively short lives, the Gypsies showed obvious signs of chronic illness. The peasants may not have had modern plumbing, but the Gypsies had none at all; they defecated in the surrounding pasture, and the place stank to high heaven. At this writing, as a result of OvidiuRo’s work, fifteen hundred Roma children are getting the early education that might help them break out of poverty. I met some of those children, bright-eyed and full of fun, and hoped they could escape growing into morose teenagers and glassy-eyed adults like those who sat around Colonia in the squalor.

On the way back to Bucharest, I received a call from Duane Butcher, the chargé d’affaires at the US embassy (the de facto ambassador, given that we did not have an ambassador to Romania at the time). He wanted to know what had happened concerning the library kerfuffle. A Facebook post I’d written about the incident had been picked up by a wire service and was being widely reported in the national media. He said that he would be writing an official letter about the matter to the Romanian government.

ACCEPT soon issued a press release that quoted Florin Buhuceanu saying, “A human-rights organization militating for LGBT rights in Romania cannot access a lecture hall in the most important library in Bucharest? An illustrious American writer and journalist should not speak about sexuality and identity in a cultural institution? Books written by gay authors, foreign or Romanian, will be disregarded in an academic and literary setting because of the sexual orientation of their authors?” Remus Cernea, a member of Parliament, told the press that he had asked the education ministry to punish the people responsible within the Central University Library. (After being called out on the floor of Parliament and in the media, the library officials made a ludicrous claim that ACCEPT had made a “bad approach.”)

That night, I had been scheduled to engage in a public, forty-minute conversation with Cărtărescu at the New Europe College in Bucharest, a gathering place for the urban intelligentsia. Fifty or sixty people had been expected, but we found perhaps three hundred filling the seats, crowding the aisles, and spilling into the hallway. The beginning of our conversation was predictably affable, but twenty minutes in, Cărtărescu said, “And now I want to apologize personally for what happened to you at the library. I hope you know that these backward views do not represent the mind-set of all Romanians.” The audience burst into rambunctious applause. “We can only hope your other experiences in Romania have shown you the true hearts of our people,” Cărtărescu said, to further applause. Our talk ended up running for nearly three hours. I signed another two hundred books afterward, and their owners all expressed contrition. The last in line was Cernea, who said, “The legislation for recognizing civil unions failed, as you know, but there were three days of debate about a topic no one would have thought to discuss a year ago. Please give us a little bit of time. Our politicians are more conservative than our society.”