Ice

I was about 6 years old when I heard that Hitler refused to congratulate Jesse Owens at Berlin Olympics. I am one of those who knew that Hitler was the hideous name of a bad man, and Jesse Owens – a kind Negro who ran faster and jumped further than anybody. Hitler could

The baptized JewIn the late 1990s I had planned to include at the end of my book The Imaginary Jew in Romanian Culture a chapter entitled The Baptized Jew. As I worked on this subject I realized that it had been extensively discussed by the historian Mihai-Răzvan Ungureanu

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

* The boom of geographic discoveries and trading expeditions that began on the eve of the Renaissance and continued throughout that era developed a new taste for describing remote, if not downright imaginary, countries and peoples. Before being discovered, the savage was

excerpts Motto: It is known that, when a people is about to disappear, first its high society disappears, and with it the literature. (Milorad Pavici, The Khazar Dictionary) Lazar Saineanu and his studies in folklore. An ethnographic controversyLazar Saineanu was a very

excerpts Beyond any currents, interpretations and influences, Judaism brought at least three fundamental principles to the basis of European culture: the secularization of the eternal, the ennoblement of matter through spirit, and the consideration of the human being as

In the nineteenth century, and also in the inner-war period, Romania had one of Europe's largest Jewish communities. Between the wars, its Jewish population was the third largest in Europe both in absolute terms (after Poland and the USSR) and as a proportion of the

The Ararat Publishing House published late last year a sentimental book entitled Stories' from the lives of Italian ethnics in Romania. I have known its author, Modesto Gino Ferrarini, for a long time, ever since our young days as journalists. Although he has been a

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

Visky András's play Juliet was launched into an international orbit. It was translated into Romanian, staged at the National Radio Theatre, and made into a CD. The play is requested in New York; the Greeks want to play it… Its success is well deserved. It is a sincere

If we contextualized the phrase 'minority culture' into a larger, European, even global, perspective, we would notice that it has lost at once its obscure, frustrating meaning of 'small', 'weak', or 'frail', because in the globalization

Eniko Szilagyi in Juliet, directed by Tompa GaborEniko Szilagyi in Juliet, directed by Tompa Gabor at the Hungarian State Theater in Clujexcerpt An open space without setting, the scenic box in its genuine realism. To the right a bed (straw, covered with a blanket), a worn-out