Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

In my teens, I asked my great-aunt Rose where in Romania our family had come from. She claimed that she didn’t remember. I said, “Aunt Rose, you lived there until you were nineteen. What do you mean, you don’t remember?” She said, “It was a horrible place and we were lucky to get out of there. There’s no reason for anyone to go back.” I begged her to tell me at least the name of the place. She gave me an uncharacteristically steely glare and said decisively, “I don’t remember.” That was the end of that.

My paternal grandfather—Aunt Rose’s older brother, a farm laborer—had preceded her to the United States when he was sixteen, fleeing pogroms and generational poverty. He was processed at Ellis Island and settled in New York City, where he brought up his family under financial duress, only just able to feed his children. He nonetheless ensured that my father got a good education, and my family has lived in relative prosperity ever since. I’ve often wondered about the life my grandfather left behind. My forebears presumably had inquiring and capacious minds much like mine, my brother’s, and my father’s, and I have pondered what it would be like if we lived in a society that provided little scope for social mobility.

My friend Leslie Hawke moved to Romania fifteen years ago and founded an NGO, OvidiuRo, to teach Roma (Gypsy) children. I joined its board of directors in part because I saw a parallel between the oppression of my Jewish ancestors and the oppression of the Roma. We had bettered our lives through access to education outside Romania; they might better theirs with access to schooling in Romania.

When a Romanian publisher bought the rights to The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression last year, it reignited my curiosity about this ancestral place, and I signed on for a promotional tour. I saw an elegant circularity in the contrast between my destitute grandfather’s departure and my return as a published author. A second cousin I had unearthed on Facebook said that she thought we hailed from Dorohoi, a small city about 250 miles north of Bucharest, near the Ukrainian border. An amateur genealogist friend offered to do further research, and she located papers confirming that the family had indeed come from Dorohoi. My grandfather and two of his brothers had sailed steerage from Hamburg in 1900, sending for their parents and siblings four years later.

My publisher had worried that Romanians might not be ready to talk openly about depression, but the zeitgeist had shifted more than they had guessed. Romania’s greatest living writer, Mircea Cărtărescu, agreed to write an introduction and to participate in the book launch. Even before I arrived in Bucharest, the book was a bestseller, and my first two days there I was interviewed on all three major television networks, on Romanian National Radio, and in many leading newspapers. A large crowd squeezed into a capacious bookstore for the inaugural event, and The Noonday Demon went into a second printing the next day. Everyone treated me kindly, and I was impressed by the high level of intellectual and political discourse I encountered.

But all was not to go as smoothly as planned. Before I arrived, Leslie had been in touch with Florin Buhuceanu, who leads a Romanian gay-rights organization called ACCEPT. Leslie’s friend Genevieve Fierau had a connection to the Central University Library, a spectacular building in central Bucharest with an impressive lecture theater that was opened in 1914 by King Carol I. They agreed that this would be the ideal place for me to speak to Bucharest’s LGBT community. Genevieve arranged a meeting for Leslie and Florin with the library director, who, after what they characterized as a cordial hour-long discussion, confirmed that the hall was available, and that she would be delighted for the lecture to be held there. Florin thanked her for her courage in supporting an LGBT organization, signed and returned the contract, and posted details about the event on Facebook.

Romania had cleaned up its act on gay rights when the United States appointed an openly gay ambassador, Michael Guest, who served from 2001 to 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush. But prejudice remains deeply embedded in Romanian culture, and Putin’s homophobic shadow, which falls long in Eastern Europe, has not helped matters. In early June 2014, the Romanian Chamber of Deputies defeated a bill that would have granted legal recognition to gay couples, with 298 votes against and only 4 in favor. That same week, the library director phoned Genevieve, accused her of lying about the nature of the lecture, and said that the library would never have agreed to host an event in which gay identity was to be discussed. Thereafter, she did not return either Florin’s or Leslie’s multiple messages.