Glass

* 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

The Slovakian migration to Romanian territory took place in several stages. It started in the 18th century (in particular the second half), and it grew stronger in the first half of the 19th century. The Slovaks mostly settled in four Romanian regions – the plains of Arad

Lend us some cash, do, till pay-day, now how's one supposed to react to such an entreaty, and at such short notice, too?, one may have or not have the money, but when one has an equally hard time making ends meet, when the gap between the lustre of respectability and

Mosilor Street, the modern thoroughfare of a Bucharest that struggles so hard to appear occidentalized and yet doesn't quite manage to: something Balkan, Levantine lingers in the atmosphere of the streets, in spite of the concrete ten-floor blocks, of the road with