states as "territorially-bound communities, whose borders c~~ b~more or less neatly delineated from those of other communltle~(Scheuerman), the practice of "othering" (Bhabha qtd. InHammond 241) which distinguishes between West and East(specifically, Romania) and p~siti?ns the t':o .regions on acultural, political and economiC hierarchy still mforms manyWestern representations of the Balkans.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. "The Ritual of Consensus." The Rites of Assent,Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of Amenca. NewYork: Routledge, 1993. 29-67.

Hammond, Andrew. "The Return to Denigration." The Debated Lan~s.British and American Representations of the Balkans. Cardiff:University of Wales Press, 2007. 230-265. .

Heywood, Andrew. "Introduction." Politic.al IdeologIes. AnIntroduction. New York: Macmillan EducatIOn LTO, 1992. 1.-14..

Judt, Tony. "Romania: Bottom of the Heap." The New York ReVIew of.Books 1November200l: 1-10.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. 1979. New York: Random House, 1994..Scheuerman, William. "Globalization." The Stanford Encyclopedia of

Philosophy. 21 June 2002. .30. November 2009.<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/globalizatlOnJ>.. .

$teftmescu, Bogdan. "On the Discrimination of NatIOnalisms. T~eRhetoric of Identity in Romanian Culture." Rhetorical Str~tegles .of the Literary/Cultural Discourse on National identIty. 30·November 2009.<http://stefanescuoptional. blogspot.com/20091l 01 published-in~krytyka-no.html>. .

Todorova, Maria. "Introduction." Imagining the Balkans. New York.Oxford University Press, 1997.3-20.

White, Hayden. "Introduction." Metahistory. Baltimore: TheHopkins University Press, 1973. 1-42.

Images of Romania in Contemporary NorthAmerican Narratives

Dana Mihailescu, University of Bucharest!

Abstract: My paper examines images of Romania as reflected in severalcontemporary narratives by North American authors, Bosnian AmericanAleksandar Hemon's novel The Lazarus Project (2008), Canadian Jill Culiner'stravelogue Finding Home. in the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers (2004) andAmerican Bruce Benderson's memoir The Romanian. Story of an Obsession(2004). My inlerest is to see how outsiders' perspectives offer Romanians thechance to more appropriately grasp themselves and to work towards creating apositive sense of identity. I argue that these texts start from a by-now clichedexotic lure towards Romania but end up by vigilantly pinpointing to a present-day Romanian fractured identity stranded between the communist legacy of atraumatic past and the invasion of capitalist consumerism. As I will try to show,these texts point to two main directions to follow. First, both Culiner's andBenderson's books stress the urgent need to fight a present-day amnesiactendency towards the communist past by acknowledging and confronting twomajor coordinates that have become deeply engrained in p~esent-dayR.omanians' psyche, namely a persistent culture of suspicion and categoricaldiscourse. In addition, Culiner's, Benderson's and Hemon's narratives suggestth~ need to open up spaces of negotiation between the call of the past and thevOIc.e.of the impinging present, in which the attempt to preserve positivetraditIons and myths and to assume and struggle with past burdens'cancounteract the destructive tendency of swallowing up all traces ofindividual past paths.

''A.,

'The writing of this paper has been supported by UEFISCSU/CNCSIS grant.' no. 205/0ctober 151 2007, entitled "Romanian Cultural Space in Transatlantic

Perspective. From Post-Communism to Post-Accession," director: ProfessorRcodicaMihaila, PhD.

Romanian CUlture in the Global Age

,lI'J:lllJ11 ,:ll'J:lllJ11 ,:ll'J:lllJl1 ,17'J:lllJ11 , 17'J:lllJ11 ,17'J17l.)1'1

(Romania R' , ,17J"W ~ ,:llO'T ~ 7J~~ ~ ~tilJ ~ llJ1W", omanla, RomanIa Romania R 'R 'Once' " oman la, omama

upon a time, you were such a sweet and beautiful country.)

Thus sound the opening l' f R .1925 Y'dd' h ' Ines 0 umenye, Rumenye aI IS tune due to LIth ' J ' ,vaudeville comedian Aaron Lebed~~~I~h ehwdls~en~ertainer andU.S, in 1920, The son h ' 0 a Im.mlgrated to thetitle on Jewish music galbas today b~come a classIc ,sine-gua-nonBarry Sisters to Jud urns, rangIng from Amenca's favoriteElizabeth Schwartz ;r ~:~~;~r'Nthe KI~zmer .Conservatory' Band,I" orweglan artIst Bente K h Iyncs basIcally convey a nostalgic ima e of R ,a an,. ts

t~e loss o~ its beautiful landscape, del7cious f~:a~ad d.e~rYdIngVlvre, feelIngs that many Jewl'sh" n JOle- e-

. ImmIgrants to North A ';;I~~:~~;n~~~ing by, the second decade of the twentieth c:~~~~~

2 persIstence of the song almost a~~~:~r~~' wthhetguestionhs ';hich its lyrics immediately b~~~u~~

, a are t e Images of R .contemporary North A' , omama that figure inb men can narratIves, to whom do the

elong, and ,:hat can one learn from these depictions? yIn thIS sense in what fI II I' .

contemporary narrati~es by Nort~ :ws'. will conside~ severalimages of Rom . n;encan authors whIch offerHernon's novel a;'hla, Lnamely Bos~lan American Aleksandar

e azarus Project (2008) C d' ,Culiner's travelogue Finding Home 1 th L' ' ana Ian Jill

, n e l' ootsteps of the Jewish

2 In this sense, one should note the 'Gabrea's 2006 documentary R li,sReof thiS song as the title for Radu

, , umenye. umenye' - a fil h' hRomanIan influences on klezmer' . . I m w IC ponders ondoina, and simultaneously records ~~Sl~, espe~lally the case of the so-calledand U.S. music thrau hout time ~ orrowl,ngs between Jewish Romanianknown contemporary gu S kl ,while ~e~turIng performances of two well-rooted Elizabeth Schwart~, . ezmer mUSICIans, Yale Strom and Romanian-

Fusgeyers (2004) and American Bruce Benderson's memoir TheRomanian. Story of an Obsession (2004). I argue that these textsstart from a by-now cliched exotic lure towards Romania, but endup by lucidly pinpointing to a present-day Romanian fracturedidentity stranded between the communist legacy of a traumaticpast and the invasion of capitalist consumerism. Considering allthis, I attempt to show how North American perspectives like theones above offer Romanians the chance to work towards creatinga positive s.ense of identity. As we will see, these narrativesindicate two main directions to follow. First, both Culiner's andBenderson's books stress the urgent need to fight a present-dayamnesiac tendency towards the communist past by acknowledgingand confronting two major coordinates that have become deeplyengrained in present-day Romanians' psyche, namely a persistentculture of suspicion and categorical discourse. In addition,Benderson's and Hernon's narratives also suggest the urgent needto open up spaces of negotiation between the call of the past andthe impinging voice of the present, in which the simultaneousattempt to preserve positive traditions and myths and to assumeand struggle with past burdens can counteract the threateningtendency of swallowing up all traces of individual past paths,

The three narratives I will analyze correspond to threedifferent genres, a novel, a travelogue and a memoir. Hence, thereis some variance in point of expected accuracy of portrayal whichneeds to be ascertained from the very beginning. That is to say, ifin the case of Culiner's self-called historical essay andBenderson's straightforwardly acknowledged memoir 3 truth-claims are in great measure considered as foundational pillars of

3 In an interview with Arnaud Jacob, Bruce Benderson categorically identifiesthe genre of his book, The Romanian. Story of an Obsession by stating, "Mynew book, The Romanian, is not a novel but a memoir. [ ... ] Everything in thebook is true. It's not fiction" (qtd, in Arnaud Jacob. "Interview with BruceBenderson." Trans, Franyois Hagel. 5 September 2009.<http://www.fluctuat.net/livres/interview/bendersoneng.htm> ).

the respective genres, Hernon's novel has to be approached withthe awareness of a relative laxity as to the depiction of actualevents. (This is the case even if, just like narrator-writer VladimirBrik in the story, the author himself undertook a voyage acrossEastern Europe in order to write the book, probably also as anecessary correlative for following in protagonist Lazaru.s'sfootsteps.4) In this latter case, then, Hernon's im~ginative c:eatlOnof Romania relies at least partially on known, lived expenences.Consequently, any initial doubts raised by H.emon's ficti?nal typeof project lose much of their substance If one conSiders t~eauthor's background. Of all the three writers here noted, Hernon ISthe only one who is an Eastern European immigrant; born inSarajevo, he came to Chicago in 1992, at the age of 27, thereforehaving a clear Eastern European background ~nd. kno:vled~e to beused in order to invent truthful stories about life 10 this regIOn. Bycomparison, New York-born Jill Culiner was raised .in Cana?a,yet corresponds to the category of the third generatl?n Jewls~Canadians, as her paternal grandfather was born 10 shtetlSvyniukhy in present-day Ukraine in 1884 and em.igrat~d first tothe U.S. in 1907, and then moved on to Canada. LikeWise, BruceBenderson was born and raised in the U.S. but he is himself asecond generation Jewish American, his mother, Ida, having .beenborn in 1903, in shtetl Shedrin, Russia, and coming to Amer.lca atthe age of two, "so that her father could avoid being drafted 10 the

4 For a more thorough insight into the comparisons one can draw betweenAleksandar Hemon, the Bosnian writer immigrating to Chicago, and ~h~narrator-writer Vladimir Brik who himself grew up in Sarajevo, came to VISitChicago in 1992, and was forced to stay in the United ~tates when war brokeout in Bosnia, see Cathleen Schine's "Ralsmg the Dead (New Yor~ Times,. 25May 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/200 8/05/25/books/revl~w/Sch m~-t.html? r=]&ref=books» and Larry Rohter's "Twice-Told Tales: Displaced InAmerica" (New York Times. ]5 May 2009: C]).5 Shtetl is the Yiddish word for "small town," It refers to Eastern Europ~ansmall boroughs usually making up the Pale of Settlement, or the area to whichJewish residence was restricted in Imperial Russia, from ]791 till ]917.

czar's army" (Benderson 21). In other words, we have one fictionalnarrative by a writer with a direct memory and experience ofEastern European/recent traumatic history (as if the close-at-handdevelopment of these lived traumatic events gives rise to the needto create a necessary distance via an aestheticized approach) andtwo memorialistic projects by North American authors inpossession of postmemory as to Eastern European ways of life.

Nevertheless, despite these differences of spatialpositioning vis-~-vis Eastern Europe, a strong bond unites all threeauthors - their cosmopolitan, cross-cultural way of life, whichgives increased weight to their perspectives. Thus, after spendingalmost thirty years in Bosnia, and settling in Chicago, AleksandarHernon has never severed contact with his native land and culturebut has constantly kept in touch, both in the form of travel, and inthe Bosnian-language column he has been writing ever since 1995for a Sarajevo magazine.6 Similarly, Jill Culiner is a professionalphotographer, writer, and regular contributor to Radio France,whose time is divided between at least three locations CanadaHungary and France. Finally, Bruce Benderson is a writer livin~in New York and Miami, a regular translator of French literaturewho has worked as a journalist for quite a few American andFrench publications, including New York Times and Liberation.

All these preliminary data considered, one should equallyassert that these texts are widely uneven in point of the spacededicated to Romania (only one chapter from Hernon's novel,over half of Culiner's travelogue, the bulk of Benderson'smemoir), a characteristic which follows directly from the diversityofthe main focuses for each of these stories.

In this sense, Hernon's novel interweaves two main storylines and corresponding pictures. One is dedicated to the Chicagoevents taking place on March 2, 1908, when Jewish immigrant

6 Hernon confessed this to journalist Larry Rohter in "Twice-Told Tales:Displaced in America" (New York Times]5 May 2009: Cl),

Lazarus A:erbuch was unjustly killed in the house of policem~nGeorge ShIppy out of fear, and the shooting was later associatedwith allegations of anarchism, a situation visually told by meansof ~urn-of-the-century pictures from the Chicago HistoricalSocIety. The other plot-line refers to the present-day story of the~rst person narrat?~, Bosnian-born Brik, living in Chicago everSInce 1992 and WritIng a column about newly arrived immigrantsf?r The ~eader, finally deciding to go to Eastern Europe at thesIde of hIS countryman, photographer Rora, in order to do researchfor the .story he ~ants to write, "about a Jewish immigrant shot bythe ~hIcago poh~e a hundred years ago" (sic!) (Hernon 15). Thisp~rt IS accompanIed by photos of every-day life due to Hernon'sfriend, Bosnian photographer Velibor Bo:lovi6. Highly relevantthere are constant overlappings between the two stories, blurrin~a~y attempt at establishing definite lines between past and present.GIven that, the novel opens the debate over the connections one~an estab~ish between the past and present situation of immigrantsIn America and pleads for remembrance via cross-cultural~onfigurations of identity out of grief, with Romania fleetinglyIncluded on Hernon's fictionally-drawn map.

.By comparison, Jill Culiner's book is an attempt to retracethe trail of Fusgeyers, groups of Romanian Jews who organizedthemselves and started out for America and Canada around 1900in search of a better life, and in the attempt to escape persecution:In her endeavor to retrieve whatever signs of their presence areleft after the elapse of a century, she draws the readers' attentiona~ to the quickly spreading web of forgetfulness, and shesImultaneously discovers the present-day contours which makeRomania.

Finally, initially published in French in 2004 as~utobiogr~phie erotique and awarded the prestigious Frenchliterary prize Prix de Flore, Bruce Benderson's memoir recountshis unrequited love for an impoverished Romanian, Romulus,

Dana Mihailescu - Images of Romania In North American Narratives

whom he meets in 1999 while on a journalist assignment inHungary. This encounter prompts the author to absorb everythi~ghe can about Romania, its culture and history, a cultural space Inwhich he discovers a mirror for his own turmoil.

I believe that, thanks to the above-mentioned variousperspectives, the combination of these n~rrati,:,es can be ,afelicitous one in order to get a comprehensIve VIew of today simages of Romania in North American narratives. As. a finalargument in favor of this endeavor, one needs to conSIder thetimes of visiting Romania included in these three texts as well asthe locations covered. Culiner's book presents her journey fromMay 2001 and offers a passing note on her return in the autumn of2004, just prior to the publication of her travelogue. The placesshe considers, those making up one of the Fusgeyers' on-foottrails are rendered on a map at the beginning of the volume, andfollo~ cities, towns, and villages from the Eastern region ofRomania, namely: Adjud, Podu Turcului, Barlad, Tecuci, lvqti,Satu Nou, Siret River, Kohulen, Mirtshia Voda, Suraia, Foqani,Kuku, Ramnicu Sarat, Buzau, Mizil, Urlati, Ploie$ti, Campina,Sinaia, Predeal, Bra~ov. Benderson's travels to Romania spanfrom December 1999 to August 2000, plus a later return in August2002, equally including routes situated to the West, North andEast of his initial location, the Romanian capital Bucharest -namely the whereabouts of Bra$ov and Sibiu, Maramurq andConstanta. Finally, Hemon's imaginary travel to Eastern Europetakes place in 2004, and only refers to a passing s~ay in Bu~h~res.t.The books therefore engage in an analytical dIalogue VIs-a-VISRomania over a five-year span, from 1999 to 2004, noting thechanges that occurred in the interim, and providing insights fromdifferent locations. At the start of these journeys, one finds theimage of Romania as an exotic lure, which also constitutes mypoint of departure for the present essay.

Lures of Exoticism Unraveling Romania at a Crossroads:A Fractured Identity

Exoticism as a correlative of traveling has been a realityfor over a century, its most resonant echoes going back to theearly twentieth century mainstream New Yorkers' fascinationwith the Lower East Side immigrant ghetto. In this respect, asSabine Haenni has noted, most research on turn-of-the-centuryslumming by historians like Amy Kaplan, Allen Trachtenberg, orBarbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett basically focuses on "the middle-class's concern with controlling the slums rather than on thepleasures the slums must provide" (Haenni 495) by foregroundingthe backward, uncultured aspect of the ethnographic other. Haennisuggests, however, the simultaneous importance of another aspectof the phenomenon taking place at the time, in which "the attemptto gentrify the ghetto" was coupled with the care not to abandonor destroy its cultural specificity by creating an "intimacy thatkeeps it different yet makes it acceptable to the middle classes"(Haenni 496). In other words, the exoticism of Eastern Europeanlifestyles in early twentieth century America took up two mainforms: either the case of exoticism understood as a lesser cultureto be assimilated by the superior mainstream, or the case ofexoticism as a multicultural phenomenon, reveling in differentcomponent traditions.

If one considers contemporary North American narrativeson Romania, both forms of exoticism seem to reside therein. First,following the connection with prostitution presented byBenderson and Hemon, the former aspect of exoticism is broughtto light, with its undertones suggesting a backward, unculturedand hubristic society. Given that, these books once again seem tofollow a direction initially flourishing in early twentieth centuryU.S., when exoticism largely followed gender lines. As indicatedby historian Riv-Ellen Prell, one of the key problems highlypublicized in relation to Eastern European immigrant women's

bodie~ in the ~.S. at t~e time was their so-called vulgar "Orientalbody, assocIated wIth promiscuity as opposed to Gentilewomen's .neat and pleasing appearance characterized by smallfeatures, hght eyes and a slim figure.?

" In. ou.r case, Be?derson starts his memoir by talking aboutthe fo;blddmgly ex?t~~ Romanian border" (Benderson 8), withRoman!an R~mulus InJtl,~lly.described as a fascinating "oriental"whose lOner lIfe betrays a bIzarre humanity" of a face expressinga cluster of '~cruelty, laziness,. sweetness and vulnerability"(Benderson 33). More to the pomt, Benderson's entire book is~onstituted around the exotic cliche according to which RomaniaIS a place of flourishing prostitution and human trafficking given afaulty legal system with many loopholes that allow theunderground existence of such practices. This happens since thebook explores Bruce's love for a 25-year old Romanian hustler~omuI~s. Early in the novel, Benderson remembers ho~Immediately ~fte.r the fall of Communism, in 1991, while workingon a film scnpt In Hamburg, he often saw Romanian "clusters oftee~aged refugees working as hustlers" and hanging around train~tatlO.ns and St. .Pauli districts, with young faces bearing anIdentical expreSSIon, that of being "seductively depressed"(Benderson 16).8

7 In this sense, Prell c!t~s the following self-revelatory notes belonging to ananonymous author writing for The Day issue of February 25 1929' "MJ . h . I' , . any. eWIS glr s a:e of the, Oriental type of physique. This may be very beautiful inIts pr?per setting, but In an Occidental, Gentile country a really graceful curvednose IS r~garded as a 'hooked nose,' the vivid coloring: black eyes, full mouth,~lack hair, appears 'common' and 'loud,' the full well-developed figure is8blowsy' or 'fat''' (qtd. in Prell 50)., To g~t a clearer picture of who were Romania's asylum seekers in GermanyImmedIately after the 1989 revolution, one can check out an excellent collectionof photos from, the internet archive "Moments in Time 1989/1990," created bythe German Cln~mateque and the Museum for Film and Television in Berlin(~https ://www.wlr-waren-so-[rei.de/in dex, ph p/Mem ories/Show /ob iect id/252/setId/19». r refer to the photos taken at Berlin's Lichtenberg Station in late 1990

Romanian Culture in the Global Age

Si~il~r to Benderson's case, this exotic aspect of Romaniaas a prostItutIO~-related site is also at the beginning of Hernon'sbook. Indeed, hIS novel, The Lazarus Project, only dedicates somedozen pages to Romania, indicating the car ride narrator Brik andphotographer. Rora took from Moldavian Kishinev to Bucharest,m a La~a d~lven by one Seryozha, a pimp with a terrified so-called glrl-fnend, .Elena, held captive in the back seat. As theyreach the ~omaman border and Seryozha keeps the woman's'passpo~, B:,k and Rora realize they are caught in a case of humantra~fickmg m front of which they initially stay passive and invoketheir. helplessness, especially since the Romanian guard seems tobe "I~ cahoots" with Seryozha (Hernon 260). Yet, unlike earlytwentle~h century depictions, neither Benderson nor Hernonemp~aslze the backward dimension of exoticism but wisely use itto raise aw.areness about those negative aspects of society whichneed me~dl~g. More precisely, their placing Romania on the mapof p~ostltutIO~ as a result· of poverty and human traffickingpractlce~ that mvolv~ taking girls from Eastern Europe (especiallyMoldaVia and Ukram.e) and bringing them to Western Europe'sbrothels draws attentIOn to the reasons behind such a situation.These are the continuous corruption on the part of officials (suchas border guards), the high level of poverty and low level ofaverage salary in the country, which need to be attended to.

. ?imultaneously, however, at the beginning of bothCulmer sand Benderson's projects to visit Romania there lurks afurther fascination with another type of an exotic locale. In

by Kai Annett Becker, a student of photographic design at Dortmund College atthe time who.' foll~wing one .of her professors' urges, went to take pictures ofrefugees commg daily and settmg up their camps there. The result is a series of 35photos portraying ~eople .whose age usually ranges from early teens to early 40's,and ,:",hose e~presston pal.rs Benderson's image of depression, or more correctly,WOrried, anxIOus stare, WIth many depictions of joy, probably this being the caseof those refugees who had just arrived.

Dana Mlhliilescu - Images of Romania in North American Narratives

Culiner's case, it takes the form of discovering a time-frozensociety, both in point of customs and outlook. As she confesses,

I wanted to see low-lying houses, hear bitter-sweetRomanian melodies and discover places as yet untouchedby mass culture and tourism. (...] Perhaps - just perhaps -if I crossed Romania on foot, if I passed through smallvillages, talked to people, then I would be able to findhints, vestiges from the past in this less developed EasternE'tIropean country. (Culiner 26)

In other words, Culiner is trying to revel in what she expects to bea society still breathing the past air. There is something of the1920's-1930's New Yorkers' fascination with the Lower EastSide immigrant ghetto and their "quest of esoteric t~pes an~ localcolor" (Haenni 496) that Culiner here betrays m relatIOn toRomania, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Ther~fore,Culiner seems to largely correspond to an already long establIshedpattern of the Western traveler towards the East since, to her, theRomanian experience is meant to be a pleasure zone rather than a

power site to explore. . . .Most importantly, what Culiner only hmts at m pomt of a

tourist's or traveler's expectations of Romania, Benderson finallyspells out as a quest for "an escapist experience" from theglobalizing forces of consumerism, by "trying to recapture somesense of myth in a world rapidly becoming uniform" (Benderson318). Yet, once on Romanian ground, disenchantment ensues forboth authors, since "(a]lI 1 would meet, however, was asimulacrum of what I'd left behind" (Benderson 319). In otherwords, they cannot discover the expected hidden idealistic cor~erthey hoped for but a society with its own problems, before whichthey have the choice of either remaining detached voyeurs orattempting to become responsible witnesses. In the case of all theauthors I consider here, I will try to argue in what follows that thelatter alternative is the one they successfully pursue.