Excerpts :
Princess Marthe Bibesco
Ana Blandiana
Smaranda Braescu
Madelene “Madi” Cancicov
Nina Cassian
Elena Ceausescu
Ioana Celibidache
Queen Elisabeth of Romania
Princess Gregoire Ghica
Princess Ileana of Romania
Dora D’Istria
Monica Lovinescu
Ileana Malancioiu
Queen Marie of Romania
Dr. Agnes Kelly Murgoci
Mabel Nandris
Countess Anna de Noailles
Ana Novac
Oana Orlea
Ana Pauker
Marta Petreu
Elisabeta Rizea of Nucsoara
Sanda Stolojan
Leontina Vaduva
Anca Visdei
Sabina Wurmbrand
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Sanda Stolojan
Novelist, Translator, Poet, Personal
Interpreter of the President of France, Human Rights activist,
Exile living in Paris
American vs. Russian Brutes:
“According to ‘Le Monde’ some three hundred people
are forced to work on the gas pipeline project in Siberia. Detainees,
relegated, deported people were camping in barracks along the
pipeline, amongst them women and elderly. This is how the USSR
works in June 1982, whilst the foreign governments negotiate
with the USSR, selling them high tech and wheat without bothering
about the fate of the individual in Russia. There is something
monstruous in the idea of these American farmers who produce
stupendous quantities of cereals, these limited but efficient
folk, who feed the Soviet Union, ignoring the millions of slaves
under a totalitarian dictatorship.
The monstruosity resides in the fact that such efficient brutes
allow other types of ideological brutes to survive, thus extending
the existence of slavery in Russia and in Eastern Europe: sheer
cynicism of the world of trade facing the totalitarian world.
We might well denounce Ceausescu’s madness – for as
long as Russia will remain a world power, Ceausescu will manage
to survive and keep himself in power. Hence this nausea when
thinking of the misery and drama of Romania, caught up in this
play, whilst being led by a madman, yet for a long time to come.”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Blacking out our the Romanian past:
‘I feel that, more than once, in Paris, I had come across
people who had known my parents. Like this old lady whom I met
the other day at a musical afternoon, a great-great grand daughter
of Franz Liszt, an acquaintance of my mother’s from the
1930’s. Why on earth haven’t I ever tried to introduce
myself to this circle, the mundane world which survived WWII
in Western Europe, whilst the Bucharest society of 1940’s
and 1950’s was wiped off? This is because Communism caused
our lives to collapse, because such a trauma cuts off the thread,
because we are actors of the next part, of the change in decor,
of the last train… Actors destined to be exiles, after
having experienced communism, without as such having known the
great epoch’ of our parents’ generation. Or rather
who got to know only the last stage of the last part, in which
one played the demise of free Romania. To have had a glimpse
at this epoch through the half-open door, puts me forever between
the two, on the threshold of this door. As an intellectual proletarian,
I swapped societies. I no longer felt the passion for this world
which had survived in France, or for the events which turned
Europe upside down. The precipice which openned behind me was
far too deep for me to wish, over here, in Paris, to pretend
as if nothing had happenned.” (“Au balcon de l’exil
Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Louis Aragon:
“Death of Aragon. Excellent obituary by Jeanne Hersch in
‘Le Monde des Idees” questioning Aragon’s much
publicised fidelity to the Communist Party, as if the fidelity
to one’s conscience might not be the first duty of a writer.
The moral perversion of Aragon, his refusal to the bitter end
of accepting the true colours of Communism, this is what she
denounced.” (“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain
a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Ion Caraion:
“On reading the poems of Ion Caraion I discover in them
a ground of resentment which comes from afar, from the misery
of the people, from the ancestral savagery, from the spirit
of the Neolithic peasant still extant at the turn of the century,”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
(Ceausescu) Assasin:
“It is awful to think to what extent we are attached to
the parish church, to the houses and streets which no longer
exist. The assassin who rases the sacred places is a total assassin
who imposes a total death, the death which empties the living
to the bottom of its memory. (Note written after having heard
about the demolition on Ceausescu’s orders, of the Vacaresti
Moastery, in Bucharest, 27th May 1987). (“Au balcon
de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan, Paris,
1999)
(Ex) Compatriots:
“What fascinates me about my (ex)compatriots is this: even
amongst the most cultivated ones there is a proximity to the
villain, the ruffian, the easy, possible and probable fall into
the rabble. Even amongst the best “mannered” people
one guesses this tendency of being prone to decay.” (“Au
balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan,
Paris, 1999)
Michel Foucauld:
“ The French television dedicated a whole programme to
Michel Foucauld who died recently. One had recalled that his
thought was at the antipody of the humanism inherited from the
classic period, a humanism from which is derived the ‘humane’
trait, the sense of values and of the sacred which each individual
preserves within his inner self. For Michel Foucauld, each epoch
is an episteme, as to each epoch there is a corresponding network
of relationships within which man is locked up, a prisoner of
an enclosed system. There are no human links which transcend
History, no links between yesterday and today, no traditions…
For Foucauld to rediscover one’s identity is only relative
and temporary. Michel Foucauld is one of those monsters of the
French Marxist and structuralist Intelligentia, who discovered,
of late, the goulag and who took part with us to our recent
demonstrations (against Ceausescu’s dictatorship t.n.).
The French society which became materialistic and bourgeois,
since the 19th century, had produced intellectual terrorists,
who resemble rationalist priests, converted to the Devil.”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Franco-Romanian Jews:
“I went to Beaubourg to the symposium on Benjamin Fondane,
on whom I was writing an article in the ‘Cahiers de l’Est’.
In the auditorium there were gathered many Romanian Jews, a
world with which we other Romanians had few contacts, other
than some personal friends. An old émigré, Claude
Emile Rosen, read one of Fondane’s poems in Romanian. Stefan
Lupascom who knew Fondane was there too. Generally the tone
of the evening, imprinted by the philosopher Chouraki, a specialist
in the Jewish mystique, was Hebraic and anti-Romanian, with
pre-war Romania being painted in anti-Semitic colours all over.
During the course of the evening I felt an odd sensation of
being there only tolerated, marginalized, in spite of being
at the core of a cultural space with which I was very familiar.
In a certain fashion I was the “Jew”, the foreigner
within this audience. In fact our manner of living our exile
is aituated at the antipody of the sensitivity of these Franco-Romanian
intellectuals of Jewish origin. All a matter of the past, a
question linked to the antecedents of our lives, yesterday in
Communist Romania, today in Paris. Much further back, a matter
of ancestors, ours ensconced in the glebe of deepest Romania,
in its believes and traditions, theirs errant for three thousand
years; ours lost in the Neolithic mist, theirs mingled to the
history of Babylone and Egypt. These are profound matters, old
causes, as old as the biblical prophecies and their different
interpretations which shaped us. And then there is the recent
past, our situation and theirs under Communism, which forced
us lately to take the road of exile, where we see them again,
these old hands of errants. Today the experience of exile ought
to bring us closer, but our contact with them, like the one
of last evening only reveals to what extent we remained attached
to our land archtype implanted in the Parisian milieu. What
could be more foreign to their spirit than our obsessions, our
reactions, our commitment. It is by rejecting this spirit of
the glebe, that Cioran succeeded in placing himself above this
sate of mind which is justly ours, that of provincials in Europe,
a characteristic which was also his. And paradoxically, it is
whilst strongly denouncing his origins that he discovered his
profundity: for, as he said, ‘Nobody is in control of his
own profundity’. How could one solve this dilemma? How
could our exile bring us closer to the Jewish exile?” (“Au
balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan,
Paris, 1999)
French Socialists:
“Now that the Socialists are in the French government,
we hear various statements which remind us of the Communist
regimes (of Eastern Europe), where the mass culture is a weapon
in the hands of the authorities. A French poet working for the
‘Esprit’ magazine as a director of adult training
was challenged: ‘No more elitist culture, it’s all
over… you may pack up your bags and go.’ Why should
we imagine that the masses in France may be any different from
elsewhere? The medicres hate intellectuals. To empower the masses
means also offering them a suitable culture. But soon this is
no longer convenient, as they want to become cultural leaders.
From this point onwards there is only one step to make, one
which was made in Eastern Europe, before the official anti-culture
is all that should suffice. To what length would go the French
Socialism on the road of demagogy? Maybe the old foundation
of French culture might resist, but it will have to lower its
prestige, when challenged by the assault of the mediocres.”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Jewish Friends:
“My interpreter colleague Edouard Roditti, poet, essayst,
polyglot, homosexual and charming friend, hade paid us a visit
the other evening. Edouard loves Dalmatia, the Serb peasants,
the last of jewish villages (shtettls) of Moldavia… Presently
he is translating poems from anciend Turkish (which is Persian);
he laughs as he pretends being a descendant of Virgin Mary (who
belonged to the house of David), through one of his ancestors
Abravanel who came from Mesopotamia where the tribe of Judas
took refuge, before they came to settle finally in France, at
Narbonne. Such haunting of the past, such leanings for the Eastern
world, this manner of laughing at one’s self, are a mixture,
owing to which our jewish friends in France our our true interlocutors…
with them ahlf the way is already covered. With everybody else
one has to start again from the square one.” (“Au
balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan,
Paris, 1999)
Romanian Spirit:
“There is a certain quality in being detached, a merit
in renouncing the worldly, which include also the territory
of the Spirit. In order to find the Romanian Spirit one has
to travel far into the desert, where it took refuge a long time
ago, when confronted to the devastating violence of History.
In the desert, in the void of scepticism, which wiped the table
clean, it seems that it is there the remarkable Romanian Spirit.
At this stage it seems that it may have something to tell, a
superior message, but what it has to tell is of little interest
to matters of History. One may percieve even grandeur and distinction
in this Spirit which refuses to adhere to the world, even a
certain superiority in this refusal. But who ever cares about
refusal, about the non-resistence to the crime which now, more
so than ever, is at the heart of History,? What may be the use
of renouncing action? Maybe writing aphorisms like Cioran, meditating
about the furility of action…… Finally, whatever may
be its loftiness, compared to the values of the Spiri,t I still
suspect there is something illicit in the smile of the Wise…”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Romanian Culture:
“In the company of the poet Horia Stamatu, a pessimist
like all Romanians, we are asking ourselves: is there still
any more to extract from the Romanian culture? Ionesco said
the essential, introducing into his theatre plays a matter extracted
from his origins: a genius of the absurd, of the derisory and
of the derision. His super-Romanian genius allowed him this
tour de force of succeeding to express himself in French. Cioran
had imprinted to the classic French style a new tonality, a
scepticism filtered through a West-European culture. Vintila
Horia, introduced in French a certain Romanian ‘wisdom’.
Perhaps his style would lack somewhat the tension. Would it
be because the spirit of wisdom would not adjust so well in
French, or rather the oppsoite because it may introduce in French
a recitative character, closer to the story tale and the poetry?”
(“Au balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed
L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Romanians:
“The Romanians have an attraction for the esoteric speculation.
This aspect of their spirit is evident even amongst the very
young. This stems from a very profound depth. They adhere to
to believes and superstitions. The most evolved amongst our
intellectuals often end up in hermetism.” (“Au
balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan,
Paris, 1999)
Romanians in a hurry:
“Romanians have always been in a hurry, thirsty of a quick
success, always starting anew. Any means are good, time is short,
each one of them is an ‘adventurer’, nothing is supporting
him, nothing durable, no stable structure. The Poles have their
Church, The Czechs and Hungarians have their traditions inherited
from the Holy Roman Empire. With each generation, the Romanians
had been left to their own devices. A single structure left
– the village, now swept away. To cap it all, presently,
the Communist ill luck.” (“Au balcon de l’exil
Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan, Paris, 1999)
Securitate:
“The news from Romania is overwhelming: the people live
in a kind of symbiosis, be it an atrocious symbiosis with the
Securitate. Everything is a matter amongst ‘friends’:
I was told how somebody, usually a young and agreable chap,
invites himself to come and see you. After chatting with you,
he offers some ‘friendly advice’. He knows all the
details of your life. He is one to wish you well. ‘Let
us be reasonable, let’s not do foolish things, just drop
such and such action, or relationship…’ His infernal
appearance is omnipresent long after he had gone. You feel that
you are under surveillance, every day you experience a living
nightmare, you are no longer in control of your life. Romania
had become a prison for twenty million people.” (“Au
balcon de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan,
Paris, 1999)
Yalta Conference:
“Whilst typing the text of the proceedings of a symposium
convened by an American historian on the Yalta Conference, I
came to realize what becomes of the events interpreted by researchers,
in their dissertations, their references, their works on the
Second World War following Yalta. There is an enormous gap between
what the historians had written and what the people had experienced
during this same period: the end of the war, the economic collapse,
the prisons, the terror. Within such perspective even the humblest
of Romanians ought to have the right of being heard. To recall
such things during soul-searching moments when I am asking myself:
why should I be concerned? What stops me from turning the back
to this country? The academics enjoin the diplomats to be the
spokesmen, the same diplomats who subscribed to the division
of Europe. Who would bother nowadays to acknowledge what were
the trails of human beings in Eastern Europe? The political
disquisitions have nothing to do with the trials and the final
death of millions of sacrificed individuals. Have pitty on the
conquered, oh, injustice of History!” (“Au balcon
de l’exil Roumain a Paris”, Ed L’Harmattan, Paris,
1999)
Biography:
Sanda Stolojan was for thirty years a Romanian interpreter for
the French Presidency and one of the leaders of the anti-Communist
exile group in Paris. This milieux is presented in her recent
Memoirs published in Paris and translated into Romanian. She
was the founder of a Paris ONG called “The League for Safeguarding
Human Rights in Romania” (1984-1990). She was a constant
anti-Communist fighter and a close friend of Cioran, Eliade,
Ionescu and other Romanian greats of the Diaspora.
Bibliography:
Sanda Stolojan, “Nori peste balcoane. Jurnal din exilul
parizian”
Stolojan Sanda, “Ceruri nomade - Jurnal din exilul parizian
1990-1996”, Humanitas, Bucarest, 1999
Stolojan, Sanda, “Au balcon de l'exil roumain à
Paris : avec Cioran, Eugène Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Vintila
Horia”, l'Harmattan, Paris, 1999.
Sanda Stolojan , “Avec de Gaulle en Roumanie”, Editions
de l'Herne (Mémorables), Paris, ISBN : 2851972839
Stolojan, Sanda, “ La roumanie revisitee (journal 1990-1996)”,
L'Harmattan (Aujourd'Hui Europe), 2001 ; ISBN : 2747511413
Stolojan, Sanda, “
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