Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  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.

  ACCEPT scrambled and found a smaller, less centrally located venue for the lecture at the National University of Theater Arts and Cinematography. After I spoke there, the question-and-answer session lasted nearly an hour. Many of the questions pertained to my family life: what it was like to have a husband and children; how it felt to find acceptance from my father and in a wider social context, a situation as unimaginable to them as my life of relative affluence would have been to my great-grandparents. Several attendees said that they dreamed of emigrating someplace where they could find such acceptance. Too many described severe depression as a result of social oppression, and several alluded to the change of venue for my lecture as an example of such persecution. While it was hardly comparable to a pogrom, the incident helped me imagine what it might have been like for my family to belong to a group that their countrymen found repugnant.

  The next day, Leslie and I drove seven hours to a horse farm in the northern Moldavian highlands, where we stayed overnight, eating rustic food and drinking homemade blackberry brandy. In the morning, we picked up one of the few remaining Jews in the region, who runs a sideline in genealogy, and proceeded to Dorohoi. It was haunting to look at the gently rolling landscape on our approach and think of my grandfather and his grandfather seeing those same hills. Life seemed to have changed little in the elapsed century. Farmers in oxcarts were going about their labor, and women in head scarves were hoeing the fields by hand. Their faces had the cracked skin that comes from brutal summers and winters in close succession. We followed a long dirt road up to Dorohoi’s Jewish cemetery, locked behind a tall metal fence. A man who lived nearby had the key, and for about $5 each he let us in, explaining enthusiastically, “I am not Jewish, but I like Jews.”

  The cemetery had been profoundly neglected—like virtually everything else near Dorohoi. A lowing cow wandered among tombstones swathed in nettles. Leslie spotted the first Solomon grave. Soon we found more—many those of people born after my grandfather had emigrated. It’s impossible to know whether these belonged to my relatives, but the Jewish community was never enormous (the county has about forty-five hundred Jewish graves), so it seemed plausible that these namesakes were my relatives. I put pebbles on some of the graves, following the Jewish tradition of placing a stone instead of laying flowers. I thought about these people who could have left but didn’t. We went into the funeral chapel, which was just a small barn with a Star of David on it, where we saw an old horse-drawn hearse.

  One of the graves had an inscription memorializing the Solomons who had died “at the hands of Hitler”; many of those dead had first names familiar from my own extended family. A memorial at the center of the burial ground commemorates the five thousand Jews who were taken from the area, never to return. I heard Aunt Rose saying, “We were lucky to get out of there.” I had hoped she might not be entirely right: that this wellspring of my family would be at least picturesque, that I’d have a surprising sense of identification with the place. I didn’t know how despondent it would make me to imagine being trapped in what still looked like a reduced life, with none of the intellectual excitement of Bucharest anywhere apparent. I’ve reported from war zones and deprived societies for decades, but they have always seemed profoundly other, and this felt shockingly accessible. I could have been born here and lived and died like this.

  As we left, we passed five sour-cherry trees, tall at the edge of the cemetery, and we rushed over to pick their ripe fruit. The dark red juice stained my hands, and I wondered who in my family might have stood beneath these trees and relished the same taste, so sharp and so sweet. I thought of how my own children would have scarfed down those cherries if they had been with me. I suddenly understood that my forebears had been children, too, in their day—that this place had been visited not only by the old men with beards whom I’d pictured as my ancestors, but also by boys and girls who would have climbed the trees to reap the plenty of their upper branches.

  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 Eas
t 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.”

  How did Romania relate to Jews, to the mentally ill, to gay people, to Gypsies? Many of the groups I represent in one way or another have attracted prejudice there at some point (as they have at other times, in other ways, in my own country). I had not intended to set off a scandal, nor had I anticipated my resonant sadness at this aspect of the six-day trip. I had likewise not imagined the surges of joy beneath those cherry trees and at New Europe College. The supporters of social liberalization in a conservative, deeply religious country do not constitute the mainstream, but neither do their opposites. Romanian is a Latin language, and Romanians blend the warmth of Italians with the combative spark of Slavs. Various Romanians pointed out that, because my grandfather was born there, I could get a Romanian passport, and some asked me to do so. I’m contemplating it. I understand why Aunt Rose characterized Romania as a horrible place we were lucky to escape, but it’s also a wonderful place and I’m glad that I returned.

  * * *

  I learned in 2015 that Andrei Rus, the professor who had arranged for my lecture to take place in the National University of Theater Arts and Cinematography, had come under attack from the Ethics Committee there. His contract was terminated for “ruining the University’s image” with his “gay propaganda and homosexual agenda”—which is particularly striking given that he is not gay himself. His colleagues asked that I write a letter of support for him, which I did; in the end, he was sanctioned but not fired.

  MYANMAR

  * * *

  Myanmar’s Moment

  Travel + Leisure, November 2014

  My assignment for Travel + Leisure was to describe Myanmar’s most fascinating sights and most luxurious lodgings. I had recently been elected president of PEN American Center, an advocacy organization supporting freedom of expression, which gave me access to a group of writers who were forming a PEN center in Myanmar. So my month in the country long known as Burma seesawed between luxury river cruises and interviews with ex–political prisoners. The contrast was not as extreme as it sounds; the luxury was far less opulent and the prison alumni far more upbeat than one might have imagined. This essay examines Myanmar’s social, political, and economic life in greater depth than was pertinent for Travel + Leisure.

  * * *

  I had anticipated a time of hope in Myanmar. In the eighteen months prior to my visit in January 2014, eleven hundred of the country’s political prisoners, including the most celebrated ones, had been released; censorship of the media had eased; limited parliamentary elections had taken place; and most international sanctions had been lifted. Foreign investment was beginning to invigorate the economy. Opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize and an icon of courage in the name of justice, had been freed in 2010 after two decades under house arrest and was campaigning for the presidency; her National League for Democracy (NLD) party had finally won seats in the legislature. The country seemed to be progressing economically and socially.

  What I found instead was an extremely cautious neutrality. No one denied that things were better, but no one thought things were fixed. The exuberance of transition was tempered by the majority Buddhist philosophy of a people who had seen too many guttering flickers of hope extinguished. The population had been optimistic, perhaps, in the lead-up to independence in 1948; they had been optimistic again in 1988, when student uprisings promised a new justice; they had even had a streak of optimism during the Saffron Revolution of 2007, when thousands of monks rose up against the government only to be brutally crushed. By 2014, the people had eliminated such buoyancy from their repertoire of attitudes, and they were merely waiting to see what might happen next.

  Neither were they bitter about their painful history. I had anticipated that former political prisoners would rant about their appalling treatment while incarcerated, but few of them did. Many said they were grateful for their experiences. In prison, they had had time to develop their minds and hearts, often through meditation. Most had set out knowingly to do things that would land them in jail, and they had marched to their cells with heads held high. When they were released, their heads were still held high. The writer and activist Ma Thanegi, who spent many years in jail because she had been Aung San Suu Kyi’s personal assistant, told me that the best way to oppose the regime was to be happy in prison. “It’s like spitting in the face of the military,” she said. “They wanted us to be miserable, and we were not going to oblige them.” If they could be happy there, then their punishment had failed, and the regime had no power over them. As she explained it, their adamantine cheer was both a discipline and a choice.

  In 1993, the writer, activist, and physician Dr. Ma Thida was sentenced to twenty years for “endangering public serenity,” contact with illegal organizations, and printing and distributing illegal materials. Her health deteriorated drastically in prison; she developed pulmonary tuberculosis and endometriosis. At her sickest, she weighed only about eighty pounds, had a continuous fever, vomited constantly, and could barely drink water or w
alk more than a few feet. Then her liver began to shut down. Ma Thida had been allowed to keep a supply of medicines to treat other prisoners, but the prison doctor confiscated them when she sought to treat herself, on grounds that she might use them to commit suicide. Only after she began a hunger strike did he relent. Kept in solitary confinement, Ma Thida begged for a companion, even a murderer or a thief, but her request was denied. She was not allowed paper or pencils; in six years, she managed to write only three short stories using smuggled implements. “But I still owned my body and mind,” she said. “So I treated this as time to learn how to get free from the circle of life. In this way, I could find total freedom.” When her captors asked what she wanted, she said, “I want to be a good citizen. That’s all. Nothing more and nothing less.” She noted the incomprehension on their faces. But her jailer eventually said, “Ma Thida, you are free, and we are not.” Upon being released in 1999, she said to him, “Thank you for this time in prison.” She refused to thank him for releasing her. She clung to the prospect of writing about her prison experience, knowing that her books might be read only by censors, but even to make those functionaries understand her perspective would count for something. Now that her prison memoir is a Myanmar bestseller, she can inspire the younger generation to resist. “My imprisonment therefore becomes totally positive,” she told me.

  She was at pains to point out that the reforms in Myanmar had been instituted by the military government, and she viewed them cynically. “We Burmese show tremendous grace under pressure. But we also show grievance under glamour, and the fact that these reforms have begun to unfold does not change the deep problems in this society that we learned to see so clearly while we were in prison. What’s really changed here is not the laws, not even the enforcement of the laws; what has changed is awareness. People are aware of their rights and use them to make demands and argue. That is the full measure of progress.” This was no small matter, in her view; more important than the next president was the population that president would lead.