Category Archives: Romania

by Joel | 30 June 2008 · 8:55 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: “Four Eyes”

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 9-10 (my translation):

My first two years of primary school I did at the Saxon school, with Tante Dora Teutsch as my teacher, a kind and gentle soul. I remember that she was the one who observed, while checking my calligraphy in a double-lined notebook for gothic letters, that I had begun to write above and below the lines. That is why I was taken to Doctor Pildner von Steinburg, who diagnosed “juvenile cataracts” in both eyes. Because an operation would follow, we planned to seek consultation in Vienna, which in those days had well-known ophthalmologists, but just then there chanced to arrive in Brasov an ophthalmologist, a professor from Vienna who, being informed of my illness, agreed to see me. He was, I remember, a tall man with a goatee, dressed in black, who examined me at length in a room plunged into darkness in which burned a candle, after which he sat me down before various devices with colored lights. In his opinion, I could be operated on in Brasov, by Doctor Pildner von Steinburg. Thus it was that, at the age of 7 or 8, I was put through two operations and, as one of them failed to produce the results desired, my left eye was operated on once again, in the private sanatorium on Castle Street. Its garden was on the slope of Mt. Tâmpa, in that respect resembling the garden in my home in Honolulu, which I see before me as I write. I remember the devices for testing vision, with moving spots of light, the operating room, the chloroform anesthesia, after which I vomited, full of fear, even though Mother, Father, and the doctor were at the head of my bed. Afterwards I lay in bed, completely immobile, with bandaged eyes, for several days that seemed endless to me. The lights dazzled me once the bandages were removed, but the objects around me had precise contours, as if they were in relief.

I wore glasses with thick lenses, and later on my playmates and my classmates at the Andre Muresianu mixed primary school would shout after me, “four eyes,” “bicycle,” or patroski (‘four eyes’), which didn’t particularly hurt me but did separate me from them and, without my realizing it, drew me toward my world of books, of art albums, of various collections that I spent time on, dedicated body and soul to those early passions of my childhood.

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by Joel | 27 June 2008 · 6:00 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Languages, Holidays

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 8-9 (my translation):

I was sent to a Saxon kindergarten. It seems to me that it would have been on Castle Street, beneath Mt. Tâmpa, but I don’t remember the exact location, even though I can still see before me the dark stairway to the upper floor. Fraülein’s name would seem to have been Liewehr, and I see myself singing, leaping like a pony, hear melodies like “Wulle, wulle, Gänschen” and “Alle Vögel sind schon da,” and see myself sitting on a stool cutting stars out of cardboard for the Christmas tree, on each of which Fraülein had written in gothic letters “Ştefan” and which Mama used to hang from the tree year after year. At about the same time, I went once or twice a week to a nursery school where we learned French with the Grande Dame Staia, singing “Savez-vous planter le chou.”

My education was, from the beginning, trilingual: Romanian at home, German in my earliest schools, Hungarian with the maidservants, because the latter all came from Szekler villages. Hungarian, I haven’t heard since leaving Brasov in 1937, and I’ve almost totally forgotten it, except for the songs I used to hear in the kitchen or on the Promenade, where we used to go for walks, listening to the city orchestra composed of solemn gentlemen in black jackets and stovepipe hats.

Christmases were celebrated at our home, where all the family gathered, but from the morning of Christmas Eve we were sent to my Aunt Jenny, who lived far from us, sometimes on Fork Street (Cuza Voda), sometimes on Postal Orchard. My parents felt bound to resort to this strategy because it was hard for them to restrain me until the arrival of the “Angel.” In those years, Father Christmas didn’t exist in Transylvania, and Saint Nicholas used to come on the evening of the 6th of December.

Otherwise, these traditions were scrupulously respected at home. At Easter came the Bunny, with Father making the sound of speedy steps going into the distance, to show that the Bunny had run past our house, leaving behind red eggs and chocolates, mandarins, and oranges. On the 6th of December came Saint Nicholas, with a big sack on his back, with a fur hat over his eyes and a white beard, in whom I believed with a religious intensity until I discovered that he wore the same gaiters as Father, and which he had bought a few days earlier at Lischka.

Christmas was, of course, the ultimate celebration, with a tree that reached to the ceiling, mountains of presents (the maidservants would carry theirs off in woven clothes baskets), a huge meal, interrupted by carolers who came down from Şchei hillside, or up from Old Brasov, who ended off with the chorus “To Şaguna High School” before being invited to partake of wine and pound cake. Name days were not celebrated; instead, birthdays had a special importance, with a ritual I still follow today, across decades and continents. Speaking of religious celebrations, I cannot forget Epiphany, when on the Twelfth Night came the archpriest Iosif (Sâvu) Blaga or the priests Nae Stinghe and Furnica, who had baptized me, and was now professor of religion at the “Real School” (Liceul Dr. Ioan Meşota).

NOTES: ‘The Grande Dame’ renders doamna maior; ‘stovepipe hats’ renders ţilindru pe cap (usu. cilindru) ‘cylinder on the head’; ‘continents’ renders geografii ‘geographies’; ‘Father Christmas’ renders Mos Crăciun; ‘Epiphany’ renders Bobotează (cf. boteza ‘baptize’); Twelfth Night (= Epiphany) renders Iordanul (the Jordan [River]); archpriest = protopop. I hadn’t realized that the Epiphany holidays came to focus on the baptism of Christ (in the Jordan River) among Eastern-rite Christians but on the coming of the Magi among Western-rite Christians. The Wikipedia entry for the holiday contains an interesting observation that may apply to Transylvanians in general: “Hungarians, perhaps because of their location between East and West, celebrate the coming of the Magi, but refer to the celebration as Vízkereszt or “water cross,” clearly a reference to baptism.”

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by Joel | 25 June 2008 · 10:55 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Earliest Friends

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 6-8 (my translation):

On the floor below lived Major Mihailescu, who had two children, Mircea and Coca (the daughter had an air I now recognize as Japanese), with whom I didn’t become friends. The major had an orderly he called Zachariah, with whom the maidservant who used to take me for walks had fallen in love, calling him “Zakarias” and singing a pitiful song that ended with the words “Zakarias szép eletem.” One day, the major had a conflict with Mr. Borescu, apparently having to do with the beating of carpets at unauthorized hours. When the insulted concierge leapt up to hit the major, the latter rushed into his house, from which he appeared in a martial pose, brandishing a saber in the air like a fencer, threatening the head of the typographer, who didn’t know how to respond to this unexpected invitation to a duel. I remember that during the 1940s, as a discharged general, Mihailescu was named inspector of the casino in Sinaia.

In the back of the courtyard lived Doctor Valeriu Negrila, married to a beautiful Polish woman. I was friends with their daughter, Valerica, while I was little, but later, as often happens, we drifted apart and hardly even greeted each other when I became a “Şagunist” and she a student at the Princess (Elena). One day when I was returning from a walk with the maidservant, I saw two people dressed in white carrying a stretcher on which lay a body covered with a sheet, with locks of black hair hanging out from under it. The maidservant later told me that Valerica’s mother had been found to have “taken poison,” but after a few days I saw her passing through the courtyard with Valerica in tow. I don’t recall the other neighbors, but I cannot forget the entrance hallway in the evenings, with gilded metal bars glittering in the light of the bulbs, and marble veneer shining in a way that seemed fairylike.

Just outside the alleyway, on the right and left were two shops: Lischka, men’s clothing; and Books Cooperative Enea, Stinghe, and Ţigoiu, one of whose owners, Professor Sterie (Sterica) Stinghe, had written a few books about the history of Brasov, and whose wife, named Lucia I think, had the habit of strutting around haughty and elegant, the tapping of her high heels audible from far off.

I lived on Customs Street, I believe, until around 1928–29, when I finished primary school, thus eight or nine years, maybe ten. The fact is, I cannot recall exactly when we moved from Spitz Palace, just as I cannot remember exactly when we left Prundul Florilor.

But I have some vivid memories of the building, which during the early years did not yet have electric lights. I recall those autumn days when Mr. Stroescu, the father of my primary school classmate, Elena Stroescu, used to set up his machine in the Graft Valley, beyond the walls, and cut whole cartloads of wood, which after being chopped up was hauled into the cellar on a kind of wooden stretcher by backwoodsmen hired by the day, who at lunchtime would pull out of their knapsacks “pită şi slană” [bread and fatback, usu. slănină] eating slowly and silently.

I recall going with the maidservant to the first silent films I saw at the movie theatre Modern (a wooden shack sitting on the site they later made into the city park), where I enjoyed watching Lia Mara, Maciste, Zigoto, Fatty, Harry Piel, Pat and Patachon, with little Patachonel, and then returning at nightfall to find at the entrance to our apartment dozens of galoshes and overshoes belonging to the “students” at the night classes Father used to teach in the years after unification [of Transylvania and other territories with the Old Kingdom of Romania]: bank directors, officials, attorneys, merchants, who were keen to learn Romanian in those first years of Greater Romania. About that time, Zeidner Books had come out with a grammar of Romanian for foreigners, whose authors were Father and Michael Teutsch. It was a bit slapdash, of a type the Saxons called Zwinkelmisch [lit. ‘twinklemix’], but it sold well and was reprinted several times.

After the students left, Father used to amuse himself by telling stories about the mistakes his “students” would make. Carved in my memory are words like “Berger-leţkia” (lecţia) [lesson], or “tratavitele” in place of tratativele [‘negotiations’], which the Hungarians and Saxons had trouble pronouncing, as they did â as opposed to a. Other friends that I remember from the age of 4 or 5, besides Puiu Borescu and Valerica Negrila, were the sisters Takáts, Tony and Baba, somewhat older than me.

On the Promenade, where I went with the maidservant, I had “friends” who seemed at that time to be over a hundred years old, if not older: “Old Man Snow,” gone completely white, who talked with me as if I was his age, whom they used to call Cipu (Cipariu) or Ţipu, and who I believe was a judge on “penzie” [pensie ‘pension’]. One “friendship” that my parents did not regard well was that with the doctor of law, Aurel Olteanu, who wore a shiny clip on his tie, patent leather shoes with laces, and a long, sturdy cane, with whose handle he would hook my calf, while glaring at me with bulging eyes and shouting: “I’ve got you, you knave! I’ve got you, you bandit!” To me, the words were amusing, as I knew what bandit meant (Tomescu and Munteanu were famous bandits at the time), but I had no idea what knave [şnapan] meant and my parents showed themselves to be less than enchanted by this “enrichment” of vocabulary. The third “friend” was a little, or rather a short, elderly man, Patruţ Pop, wrapped summer and winter in a long overcoat, something between a blanket and a frock, wearing a black hat, who would stroke my head without saying a word. I vaguely remember having heard that Patruţ Pop was from the family of someone who had played a leading role on the Field of Liberty, at Blaj [in 1848]. As I grew and entered primary school, I lost track of those friends of my early childhood.

NOTES: Baciu spelt cearşaf ‘sheet’ as cearceaf—it’s just the difference between English sh and ch. A “Şagunist” is a student at Andrei Şaguna High School. After failing to find clipici in my dictionaries, I translated it ‘slapdash’ (after considering ‘rush job’), despite its relation to a clipi ‘to wink, blink’ (and its Saxon equivalent, Zwinkelmisch). The hardest phrase to translate in this passage was de moţi tocmiţi cu ziua, which didn’t make sense until I found that Moţi designates people from the Western Mountains (Munţii Apuseni) of Transylvania, sometimes known as Ţara Moţilor, known for their pre-Roman features, archaic customs, isolated settlements, and fierce independence—sort of the West Virginians of Transylvania. An explanatory translation like ‘men from Munţii Apuseni hired by the day’ was too long-winded, while ‘hillbilly day-laborers’ was too pejorative. I almost went with ‘itinerant woodcutters’ before settling on ‘backwoodsmen’.

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by Joel | 20 June 2008 · 11:02 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Birth, Baptism, Spitz Palota

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 4-5 (my translation):

I was born in Brasov on 29 October 1918, in the last days in which the Austro-Hungarian monarchy gave up its ghost, in other words, at the end of the era that Emil Cioran called “the Time of Franz Joseph.” My birthday was the day Czechoslovakia was declared independent, so the Republic of Czechoslovakia and I are of the same age. Father had just returned from the front and Mother was still living in her parents’ house, located in the center of the city, maybe 500 meters from the Council House. The house in which my grandparents were living—and I know it still exists in 1980—was an old building, with a stairway I remember as dark, at the corner of two streets, Michael Weiss and Prundul Florilor (Rosenanger), but their rooms were upstairs, with windows overlooking both streets. I heard that Michael Weiss was changed—horribile dictu—into Red Army. Of Prundul Florilor I know nothing, but I would not object, nor would I be all that surprised, if some day, even a day certain, this street might bear my name.

I was baptized with the name Ştefan Aurel in the orthodox church in the “Fortress” (Council Plaza) by Father Nicolae Furnică on 19 January 1919, as evidenced in Vol. III, page 75, no. 4 of the Baptismal Registry, my godparents being Dr. Nicolae Popovici and wife, professor at Andrei Şaguna High School, later at the Theological Academy of Arad. (A detail: their daughter Lucia, with whom I used to play as a child, and whom I have never seen since, married Nicolae Aloman, who published a few fragments of very interesting prose in the first series of Biletelor de Papagal [Of the Parrot Tickets?], which fact was later communicated to me by Lucia Aloman in a few letters during the 1930s.)

Soon after my birth, my parents moved into rooms on a street that begins right at the Council Plaza, reaching as far as the Promenade, strada Vămii [Customs Street]. The house was the second or third on the left as you headed toward the Promenade. You couldn’t see it from the street, as it was a large building at the back of a paved courtyard, reached by way of a long corridor or gang. It was named, solemnly, Spitz Palace (Spitz Palota) after the name of the owner (Spitz-bácsi), a gentleman who seemed to me very old (how old could he have been?), with white mustaches and a bowler hat [gambetă]. The apartments opened onto long balconies on the right, perhaps three stories high, overlooking the courtyard. The building also had an exit at the back, which gave onto the Graft Valley, through a gloomy corridor, along which were aligned some cellars that seemed immense to me, in which they stored wood for the winter, which used to be cut with a machine that made a monotonous sound by Mr. Stroescu, from the Gypsy quarter.

From Spitz Palace, I remember the concierge Borescu, typographer in the workshop of the Hungarian newspaper Brassoi Lapok, which had a boy of about my age, Puiu, with whom I used to play in the courtyard. Puiu used to suffer massive beatings from time to time with a belt that Mr. Borescu used to pull from his waist, yelling as loud as his mouth could bear while his father would administer the beating: “Father, daddy, mother, mommy, grandma, dear mama!” Then one day he fell sick, I think from tubercular meningitis. I see from our balcony the black umbrella under which they used to lay Puiu in the sun, stretched on blankets, until one day the umbrella no longer appeared, and I found that Puiu had died. He was the first death of my childhood.

On the same floor as us, in rooms overlooking Customs Street, used to live Wilhelm and Emilie Schreiber, a pair of sad and withdrawn millionaires (I think their only child had died while still a baby), the co-owners of the factory Scherg. “Onkel Willi” used to come and go from the factory by carriage, which seemed to me fabulous, and “Tante Emilie” would sometimes play on the piano melodies as melancholic as she was, looking after the flowers in the pots on the terrace, which in their absence I used to water with an immense watering can, receiving as recompense a book with a dedication written in impeccable gothic calligraphy, which I can still see. At Easter, I used to go “watering” (darf ich spritzen?), receiving from her the first chocolate eggs and mandarin oranges, which had been brought the day before, in large packages, from the Hessheimer grocery.

NOTE: Baciu’s adjective describing the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, chezarocrăiască, gave me a lot of trouble. I couldn’t find it anywhere until I tried its masculine singular form, which is more commonly rendered as cezaro-crăiesc, equivalent to German kaiserlich-königlich, lit. ‘imperial-royal’, respectively describing the Austrian and Hungarian thrones. As an educated Transylvanian, Baciu’s Romanian is sometimes Germanified. For instance, he says that in high school his friends called themselves ştudenţi, with a German sh, and not studenţi as in standard Romanian. That may be why he rendered cezar ‘caesar, emperor’ as chezar ‘Kaiser’. The Romanian translation of königlich in this construction comes from crai, a Slavic term for ‘prince’ that is nowadays especially common in fairy tales (basme), as is its feminine equivalent crăiasă ‘princess’.

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by Joel | 19 June 2008 · 9:54 pm

Baciu’s Memories of Brasov: Introduction

From Praful de pe Tobă: Memorii 1918-1946, by Stefan Baciu (Editura Mele, 1980), pp. 3-4 (my translation):

From the Bank of Flowers to the Sandwich Archipelago

I write this autobiographical sketch in my study in Honolulu, in a spot on the globe where I would never have been able to imagine that I would live thirty years ago, when I was living in what the Nicaraguan poet Salomón de la Selva would call “the Romania of my birth.”

At this moment as I look outside, I hear a parrot sitting on a branch of the lemon tree in front of my window, while on the facing hillside one can see two Chinese cemeteries, their gravestones low and gray, hardly visible in the grass. Only occasionally, at the odd burial or religious ceremony, can one hear crackles and pops of devices designed to drive away bad spirits. In back of the hill rises a volcano long extinct—called Punchbowl in English, Puowaina in Hawaiian—in the crater of which lie the heroes fallen in battles in the Pacific, the Punchbowl National Cemetery. To the left and right of the cemetery stretch the infinite waters of the Pacific.

From below, in Pauoa Valley, where children play baseball and football, one hears the shouts of those leaping into the swimming pool, but the houses are all lost in the gardens of abundant greenery, especially in this year full of heavy and frequent rainfall.

I note these summary facts of a possible autobiography of tomorrow, not to rediscover my old self of yesterday and the day before, of Brasov, Bucharest, Bern, Rio de Janeiro and Seattle, because that I can do more easily through poetry.

I want, on the one hand, to fix certain guideposts for a possible autobiography sometime later, and—more importantly—I do it in order to avoid errors, omissions, misunderstandings or interpretations to which might be subjected the life of a man whose life unfolded over the last decades (1946–1980), in such countries and regions, in such terrains and latitudes, that any confusions could be explained as due primarily to lack of information.

In a world in which even some “experts” say that Mexico lies in “South America,” and in which it is seldom realized that the city of Honolulu is situated on the island of Oahu, it would not be remarkable some time in the future (and perhaps not all that long into the future) for legends to arise that I wish to prevent, at least to the extent I am able.

NOTE: I’ve translated Prundul Florilor, the former name of a street in Brasov, as ‘Bank of Flowers’, since the primary meaning for prund seems to be ‘gravel’ or ‘gravelly bank of a river’. But the German name for the same street in Brasov was Rosenanger ‘Rosemeadow’ (or ‘Rosedale’?). Better suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE: By coincidence, the Brasov county library has just started hosting a literary exhibit entitled Ştefan Baciu între Ulise şi Don Quijote.

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by Joel | 21 March 2008 · 12:30 pm

Romanian Idioms: Doamne, Paşti, paşte

Here are some entries featuring Doamne ‘Lord’ (vocative) and Paşti ‘Easter’ from the Dicţionar Frazeologic: Englez-Român, Român-Englez (Teora, 2007). I’ve added literal translations (in square brackets) and edited the idiomatic ones (except those in quotes) when the English seems too archaic, unfamiliar, or awkward (as many do).

The first such expression I learned was from way back in Army language school: la paştele cailor [at the-Easter of-horses] meaning ‘when pigs fly’, ‘when hell freezes over’, or “when two Sundays come in one week” (according to the Dicţionar Frazeologic, which also provides a synonymous la calendele greceşti [at the-calends Greek] ad calendas Graecas).

din an în Paşti [from year to Easter] once in a blue moon, once in a while

din Paşti în Craciun [from Easter to Christmas] once in a blue moon

Doamne ajută! [Lord help] God help me!

Doamne apără! [Lord defend] God forbid, “not for the life of me!”

Doamne/Dumnezeule [O Lord/O Lord-God] Good God! Great God Almighty! Goodness gracious!

Doamne fereşte [Lord forbid/protect] God forbid! Lord have mercy!

Doamne iartă-mă [Lord forgive me] God forgive me!

Doamne păzeşte [Lord guard] Lord have mercy!

Doamne sfinte [Lord holy] (archaic) see Doamne/Dumnezeule

BONUS: Here are a few idioms beginning with the verb a paşte ‘to graze on’ (compare pasture):

a paşte bobocii [to graze-on the-buds/ducklings/goslings] to be gullible or feeble-minded

a paşte vântul [to graze-on the-wind] “to gape at the moon; to catch flies”

paşte, murgule, iarbă verde (lit. ‘graze, o bay roan, on green grass’) “you may wait till the cows come home”

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by Joel | 19 March 2008 · 10:19 pm

Romanian Idioms: a face din …, a face pe …

Here are some entries in the Dicţionar Frazeologic: Englez-Român, Român-Englez (Teora, 2007). I’ve added literal translations (in square brackets) and edited the idiomatic ones, except those in quotes.

The two patterns here are: a face din X Y lit. ‘to make from X Y’, corresponding to English to turn X into Y; and a face pe (Xul/Xa) ‘to do/make the X’, corresponding to English to play the X, where X is a definite noun indicating a type of person. Personal direct objects in Romanian require the untranslated preposition pe, which in other contexts most commonly translates into ‘on’, as in pe jos ‘on foot’.

a face din alb negru şi din negru alb [to make white into black and black into white] to blow hot and cold, to play fast and loose

a face pe cineva din cal măgar [to turn someone from a horse into an ass] to discredit (a discredita), or to humiliate (a umili) someone

a face din lână laie lână albă [to turn grey wool into white wool] “to turn geese into swans”

a face din noapte zi [to turn night into day] to turn night into day

a face din om neom [to turn a person into a nonperson] “to undo smb.”

a face din ţânţar armăsar [to turn a mosquito into a stallion] to make a mountain out of a molehill

a face din zi noapte [to turn day into night] to turn day into night

a face pe boierul [to play the lord] to play the lord, lord it (over others)

a face pe bolnavul [to play the sick] to fake illness

a face pe bufonul [to play the fool] to play the fool

a face pe clovnul [to play the clown] to play the clown, “to bear the cap and balls”

a face pe deşteptul [to play the clever] to play expert, give oneself airs

a face pe gazda [to play the host] to play host

a face pe mărinimosul [to play the benefactor] to pretend to be generous

a face pe mironosiţa [to play the prude] to pretend to be innocent

a face pe modestul [to play the modest] to fake modesty

a face pe moralistul [to play the moralist] to play the moralist

a face pe mortul [to play the dead] to play possum

a face pe naivul [to play the naif] to act naive

a face pe nebunul [to play the fool] to play the fool

a face pe neştiutorul [to play the ignorant] to feign ignorance

a face pe politicosul [to play the polite] to act polite

a face pe prostul [to play the idiot] to play the fool

a face pe savantul [to play the savant] to play the scholar

a face pe sfântul [to play the saint] to play the saint

a face pe tiranul [to play the tyrant] to play the tyrant

a face pe victimul [to play the victim] to play the victim

UPDATE: Here’s a nice idiom that begins with a more typical use of pe ‘on’.

pe dinafară trandafir, pe dinăuntru borş cu ştir [on outside rose, on inside borscht with pigweed] “fair without, foul within”

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by Joel | 16 March 2008 · 12:48 pm

Romania’s Growing Bear Problem

Romania has a large and growing bear problem, reports Doug Saunders in the Toronto Globe and Mail.

Elsewhere in Europe, bears are almost non-existent. In 2006, Germany saw its first wild bear in 170 years, which the media named Bruno and became a major celebrity until he was abruptly shot by hunters last June.

But Romania, which last year became the European Union’s newest member (along with neighbouring Bulgaria), is the lone European country that is experiencing the opposite problem.

“It’s fair to say that our bear population is well above its natural level, and it is increasing far too fast,” says Serban Negus, who studies bears for the Brasov-based Forest Research Institute.

Romania’s central forests and mountains are home to between 5,000 and 5,500 bears, by Mr. Negus’s estimate, and that population is growing by 10 per cent, or about 500 bears, every year. This has led to a series of unfortunate encounters between humans and bears….

Under the 34-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, bears were kept safe: He made bear hunting a serious offence to make the entire bear population available for hunting parties he held for his close friends and comrades. As a result of that legacy, Romanians remain wary of bear hunting….

Romania’s bear population is kept in check through an ingenious policy devised by the government: It allows wealthy Europeans, especially Germans and Italians, to hunt the bears during seasons that span half the year.

In exchange for this rare hunting privilege, they pay a licence fee of between $15,000 and $23,000 per bear, depending on its size. That has been good for the tourist industry, and it’s brought badly needed revenues to this poor country’s coffers.

But the policy simply hasn’t produced results. Romania allows just over 300 bear licences each year, which isn’t enough according to biologists, and most years it hasn’t managed to sell all of them.

For lack of enough old Ceausescu hunting cronies or rich foreign hunters to keep the bear population under control, some conservationists have proposed resettling them in the now Braunbärrein forests of Central and Western Europe.

But the logistics are extremely difficult: Aside from the mountainous regions of the Alps and Carpathians, where bears tend to thrive, there are few places in Europe where they wouldn’t be poking their snouts in human settlements.

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by Joel | 17 February 2008 · 2:12 pm

Bucharest, 1984/2008: Back to Tineretului

One of our goals during our very brief visit to Bucharest in January was to see how much things had changed in the neighborhood we used to live in during 1983–84. The first change we noticed was that we could get there on the M2 north–south metro line, getting on at Aviatorilor and getting off five stops later at Tineretului. In 1984, the metro line (now M1) only ran in a broad northeast-to-west arc from (I think) Republica to Semănătoarea (lit. ‘the inseminator’), apparently designed to serve the huge housing blocs in the most populous new suburbs. So the Bucharest Metro has improved a lot since 1984.

We lived at Bulevardul Pionierilor 25, Blocul Z7. Note that Romanian place names look a lot like those in other Romance languages, except that the definite articles are suffixed, as in the masculine singular bloc, blocul ‘bloc, the bloc’, and feminine singular semănătoare, semănătoarea ‘planting machine, the planting machine’. (The masculine semănător, semănătorul indicates a human planter.) There are a few wrinkles. On masculine nouns that end in -e, like câine ‘dog’, the singular article is -le, as in câinele ‘the dog’. On feminine nouns that end in stressed -a, like the Turkish borrowing cafea ‘coffee’, the singular definite article is -ua, as in cafeaua [kafjáwa]. And on the huge majority of feminine nouns that end in unstressed -ă (schwa), like casă ‘house’, the singular article -a replaces the schwa, as in casa ‘the house’.

Like quite a few other streets in Romania, Bulevardul Pionierilor changed its name after the “Revolution” (or lovitură de stat ‘coup d’état’) in 1989. The Young Pioneers were so discredited under Communist rule that the boulevard is now named after the neighboring Parcul Tineretului ‘the Park of the Young’ (in the sense of tinerime ‘collective offspring’). Compare the adjective ‘young’, tânăr/tineri for masc. sg./pl., and tânără/tinere for fem. sg./pl., each stressed on the first syllable; and the noun ‘youth’, tinereţe/tinereţi fem. sg./pl., stressed on the penultimate syllable. Compare also the masc. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms, tineretului ‘of the young’ vs. pionierilor ‘of the pioneers’; and the fem. sg. vs. pl. genitive forms in fântâna tinereţii ‘the fountain of youth’ vs. poluarea apelor ‘the pollution of the waters (= bodies of water)’.

These genitive nouns are used as place names in their own right, as in other Bucharest Metro stops like Eroilor ‘of the Heroes’ or Industriilor ‘of the Industries’. The first things that caught our eyes when we came out of the metro at Tineretelui were the large video panel and billboard advertisements at the corner of the park. Big, ugly commercial billboards hide a lot of distinctive architecture and scenery in Bucharest these days. There’s a lot more traffic, too, than there was in 1984.

Some things were still the same, though: treacherous winter sidewalks with layers of uncleared snow and ice, litter discarded in public spaces, and the odd open manhole cover. One dark night in 1984, we almost stepped in an open manhole while walking down a street with no lights except those of a passing tram. This year, we noticed that someone had thoughtfully stuffed a Christmas tree into an open manhole on Strada Trestiana, right in our path. We were lucky it was daytime.

Our bloc at Pionierilor 25 contained several other flats housing Fulbright and IREX scholars from the U.S. (and apparently still did in 1995). We were a long way from the nicer northern neighborhoods cluttered with foreign embassies. I remember that, as Halloween approached in 1983, someone in the American, British, or Canadian embassy arranged for the diplomats to borrow costumes from the National Opera for an embassy costume party. We were a little worried that some embassy kids might come trick-or-treating at our doors. We had nothing that would pass muster for treats, but I prepared to shock the kids by offering them the boiled heads and feet of four whole chickens we had managed to find at the local market (rationed at two per customer). The chicken with lots of fresh garlic made a tasty broth, but no one came trick-or-treating that Halloween, so we discarded the heads and feet.

We did not eat too well that winter. Fresh food was hard to find. You had to supply your own containers, but eggs and (unpasteurized) milk, yogurt, sour cream, cream cheese, stale bread, wheat flour, and corn meal were usually available at local shops. Oil and sugar were rationed. However, in order to find fresh meat, hard cheeses, fresh fruit, or toilet paper, we had to keep an eye out for people queueing up at storefronts on our way to and from the city center, then get in line to find out what they were waiting for. At one point, we managed to obtain a big chunk of fresh pork through one of my Chinese classmates in Romanian language class.

On our open balcony, we stored apples, onions, and potatoes in cardboard boxes insulated with newspaper. They were usually available throughout the winter in the central open markets, along with sour cabbage and its broth (used to make ciorbă). The common wisdom for canned goods was not to buy anything that had been produced toward the end of each month, when factories were rushing to fill their quotas. (Each label carried the production date.) We ate a lot of bean soups and stewed apples that winter.

Well, a lot has changed on the food front. Now there is a small but convenient Mega Image supermarket (with signs on the doors saying, “Now hiring“) across from the entrance to the park. We walked in to have a look around and, after a little hesitation, I couldn’t resist photographing the shelves of goods, none of which would have been remarkable had we not longed for such a local market when we lived there 24 years ago. The bread, meat and deli shelves were not in danger of going bare. They even had Romanian-made vegetarian products like tofu in natural, cumin, dill, and pimiento flavors.

However, the prices did not seem very cheap. The average Romanian monthly wage is about 1400 RON (new lei), which works out to about US$600 at current exchange rates, or about $1000 in purchasing power parity. Nevertheless, the Romanian economy has been growing at a feverish pace since 2000. Bucharest, in particular, seems in 2008 to be a bit of a boomtown, much less dreary and downbeat than it was in 1984. But the countryside seems to be lagging behind.

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by Joel | 4 February 2008 · 5:22 am

Calculating the Cigarette Value of Books

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 224-225:

The black market epitomized everything that Vichy disapproved of. It went with selfishness, materialism and indifference to the authority of the state. Denunciations under Vichy often concerned black-market matters, and were couched in interesting terms. Someone describing himself as ‘an average Frenchman who suffers from restrictions’ blamed the black market on Jews. In the south-east, black markets were often blamed on the Italians.

In practice, most Petainists used the black market. Sometimes Petainist officials were blatant practitioners: the Graeve family in Chinon trafficked wine at a time when both the son and daughter of the family held positions in the Vichy administration. Vichy bodies and local authorities often used unofficial channels in order to get food for their own employees. The Vichy government itself came to recognize that suppressing the black market entirely was not possible or desirable. A law of March 1942 regulating the black market specifically excluded transactions to cover personal needs, and a circular to prefects in the summer of 1942 talked of ‘struggle against all traffickers of the black market but complete freedom left for family supply’. Policemen turned a blind eye to small quantities of illicit goods. Even the Church, normally marked by intense moralism and asceticism, did not wholly condemn the black market. In December 1941 Cardinal Suhard stressed the need to obey the law but then distinguished disobedience from ‘the modest extra-legal transactions by which the extras judged necessary are procured and which are justified both by their small scale and the necessities of life’.

Black markets were not, in any case, wholly black. Transactions did not always involve strangers selling goods in a completely free market for cash, and they did not always involve people who thought of themselves as criminals. Money did not necessarily mean much during the occupation. At a time of rapid inflation, everyone preferred goods with a more tangible value. The coupons that gave particular companies the right to buy certain raw materials were traded, illegally. The barter that might normally have operated at village level became institutionalized. One firm advertised a swap of typewriters for bicycles. Cigarettes acquired particular importance, both because nicotine-starved smokers wanted them and because they provided a convenient unit of exchange. Both Micheline Bood, the Parisian schoolgirl, and Charles Rist took a touching interest in the cigarette value of books. A peasant boy in the Corrèze bought an hour of violin lessons for a pound of butter.

Sounds a bit like Romania during the 1980s, where the black market Cigarette Standard was Kents, for some reason I have never discovered. An unopened package of Kents was a serious offer, although some medical procedures might require a whole carton—or a bottle of imported Scotch.

UPDATE: During our year in Romania in 1983-84, I always kept a carton or two on hand in case the need arose. I only dispensed a full package on four occasions: two to the embassy driver who dealt with the customs officials when we first arrived (with lots of luggage); one to help friends book a room in a big, empty hotel in Brasov, where we attended a wedding; and one to a band of gypsies who serenaded my wife and me with naughty lyrics that I made an effort to translate in an otherwise empty venison restaurant in snowbound Poiana Brasov.

My wife also gave a carton of Kents to a neighbor lady who needed a medical procedure. (It may have been an illegal tubal ligation, or even an abortion, but we didn’t dare to ask. In a totalitarian society, it’s best not to.) Her obsessive homeopathic health-nut of a husband later brought the carton back and scolded us for encouraging the evil habit of smoking. So my wife later gave his wife a bottle of Scotch instead. I assume it went to a doctor without the husband finding out about it.

I kept one carton in reserve in case we had any trouble crossing the Bulgarian border by train on our final departure. After we had crossed without incident, I shocked a team of Romanian boys and their coaches who were on their way to a football match in Sofia by donating my carton of Kents to them. After they recovered, the coaches came back to our compartment to tell me they had never been so surprised in their lives. I told them that Romania had given me a surprise or two as well, and wished them luck in their match. They just nodded knowingly, thanked us again, and returned to their team.

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