Romania Journal
by Peter Rashkin
July 23
Olga Lazin and Nathan Shapira, two Romanian emigrees I met through the internet, came to dinner last night. It was so fine. The food--barbecued roast, babaganoush, pasta salad, home grown tomatoes--went practically unnoticed, eclipsed, as it were, by the conversation.
Nathan grew up in Romania. During WWII. He told me he's been to six universities, but his best education was high school in Bucharest. It was with his fellow displaced and disenfranchised Jews, under the nazi race laws. He said that they couldn't offer a diploma, a degree, or any hope for a good job on graduation. But they could teach about life.
Nathan had a very tough time in the Holocaust, but he survived. So did 400,000 other Romanian Jews, who generally fared much better than their lontsmen in other Nazi countries. After a terrible killing spree in which more than 100,000 were killed, Romania refused to go along with the "final solution."
At one point last night, we were discussing the bombing of Serbia. Olga and I were pretty adamant about what a mess it was. I'm particularly incensed that the US, which was built on the principles of ethnic cleansing, should be bombing a country to teach them how to behave. The hypocrisy. The contradictions.
"I am very conflicted about this," Nathan said after a thoughtful pause. "Most people look at bombing from above. I have seen it from below, in 1944, when we were bombed by the Allies. It looks very different. I was on a forced-labor detail, and we would go out in Bucharest after the raids to clean up. It was a very terrible and frightening thing to be bombed. But without it I might still be in a forced-labor camp, or worse."
July 22
I think I know what I'll read on the plane over...I'm printing it out now from http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html. It's probably the most important critique of "bourgeois capitalism" ever penned...the Communist Manifesto.
I never have read it. Written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in 1848, it starts: "A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism."
This should really be pretty good reading.
July 19, 1999....Preparations and Expectations.
"I have traveled widely," Thoreau wrote. "In Concord." I love Thoreau, a great thinker and writer, a great soul. Like Blake, he could "see the earth in a grain of sand, and the universe in a flower." For lesser souls like me, actually getting out on the road, going someplace different, seeing the world not in a grain of sand, but in all its wide-world mystery...that's the best. It takes my mind and spirit where books, movies and the reports of others cannot.
In a way, it's best to travel without goals or expectations, just move from place to place by impulse and see where you get and what you find along the way. But I'm going to far Romania for 10 days only, and I want to make the most of it. So I've been reading, studying, making plans and contacts. This trip will be well-planned, not spontaneous.
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