Glass

Minority ethnic groups have usually developed some separate cultures within the larger framework of the majority. Their particular language and specific customs generally single out such societies. From the cultural point of view, the main characteristics of a minority society

An event that happened several years ago and has turned, in time, into an urban legend, goes like this: the employees of a German-owned media trust had become lazy and unruly, would come to work when, and if, they felt like it, and would actually work only between two coffee

excerpt Arvinte and Sodapop Marcel were marvellous indeed. When they broke and entered, the crowd would draw back in sheer rapture. The two would arrive at the scene, position their ladder or ropes, as the case may be, apply the skeleton-key or the bulldozer, and before

* Once upon a time there was an emperor, half snake, half man. This emperor had a daughter. She was locked in a room, so as not even the sun could touch her, until she was twenty-two. At that time, a Gypsy came to the pond to catch fish. He caught two fish, the kings of

At the Outskirts of Giurgiu*At the outskirts of Giurgiu there was a Turkish village, and that village was called Selima. When the Turks left the city, a hundred and a half years ago, we, the gypsies who tinned the pails, continued to live in that village. We remained in

Hans (some people called him Hanz, or Franz, others Krantz like the cake, and others didn't even take the trouble to call him that much) had a wife who towered over him by a full head, and had a truly horse-like face. Her legs were long and slender, and seemed to lack

excerpts . . . Chaplin. Einstein, Rubinstein, Chagall, Spinoza. I summon these exalted spirits above all because their proximity feels good; their genius, both innocent and supple, has a wholesome quality about it, and their absence from any intellectual banquet worthy

Lilac-less is your hair, your beautiful face in the looking glass. From one eye to the other glides the cloud, like Sodom toward Babel:like leafage it scatters the tower and foams round the sulfur thicket.  Then a lightning twitches your mouth – that den with violin splinters.

excerpt Two people went down the chimney in a house. Only one of them got his face dirty with soot. The dirty one looked at the clean one and didn't imagine that he might look different, so he didn't wash the soot away. The clean one, on the other hand, saw the

Who can even imagine nowadays that more than a century ago, Romania, going through a period of economic expansion, was a sort of terra promessa on which the seasonal workers relied in order to make money and on which the immigrants from western countries relied in order

I have always wondered why so many of those who happen to be born within the Carpathian arch, in Transylvania, have a sense of coming from a unique, privileged area, why they keep an enduring and unquestioned commitment to it whatever may happen in their lives, whether they

The character, or the characteristics, of a human collectivity, to the extent to which there can be such globalizing characteristics, have constructed, it is known, from the very beginning of history, just as many reasons that influenced the ideas one people made of the