Radu

excerpts  I passed dizzily from one room to another… nowadays, cubist furniture is commonly used and has long ceased to make a big impression, but four years ago there were extremely few lodgings that were furnished like that. Maybe a couple of banks had dared to introduce

excerpts  So closeSuddenly, the interwar people make the body visible: men are allowed to shave off not only their beards, but also their moustaches – a facial change that overthrows an aesthetic canon with centuries-old resistance – and women, punished and ridiculed

excerpt I will retell now a typical argument between us which might show that the multiple interpretations that I give to her present silence are not just the games of some sick imagination. She moved to the little country town, so it was in the last phase of our relationship,

Around 1820, Barbu Paris Mumulean thus concluded one of his poems: Hankering I will not fade / Cupid cometh but in aid / thus in luxury I may / crave until I wilt away. In actuality, these verses word the ideal of a generation that sets out to inventory, and answer for,

excerpt They'd dozed off. The devilish furnace of the sun was blazing fiercely. They were positively stewing as through the shadow cast by their soles two Gypsy women walked by, bent under the burden of a galvanized bucket with a chunk of ice protruding from it. Ice-cold

excerpts Most traditional stories move from a bad start to an agreeable conclusion. The story I am going to share with you falls short of the traditional canon. For one thing, it begins agreeably enough, only to draw to an unsavoury conclusion with ambiguously loose ends.

I saw the light of day in an atypical village of Bucovina. It was a multiethnic village, a kind of summary of Europe. A European Union avant la lettre. It is there, I believe, that a direction in my life was traced, an ecumenical dominant feature, one of understanding of

Vasile Socoliuc was born on August 7, 1937, at Tisauti, Suceava County. After taking courses at the Fine Arts School in Bucharest, he attended the N. Grigorescu Fine Arts Institute, graphics department. He worked as a graphic artist with the Publishing House for World Literature,

Hutsuls or Huculs, a group of Ukrainian highlanders, live in the Carpathian mountains, to the South-East of the Boykos, a region bordering on the territory of the Romanians. They differentiate themselves from the surrounding Slavic peoples by physiognomy, and by their traditional

My grandfather Mehmed Ali was an old-fashioned Turk. He wore a long beard and the traditional Turkish costume. Each morning he would sit down next to the charcoal, the earthenware pot filled with live coals, sip his coffee and puff his long-stemmed chibouk. He would often

Of the one I love, a songI will sing my whole life long. Sing, I will – sick to the bone,Like a loser, lest I'd moan.  She was daddy's precious gem,Wish I kissed her tunic's hem,Her red lips apt to inviteDaddy's teeth to take a bite. Oh, she was so

Somewhere in Bucovina, away from the madding crowd, there lies a village populated only by Polish successors of emigrants from Czadec. Attested in the 19th century, Plesca village, although separated from the ancestors' values, preserves their language, traditions and