In the Whirlpool:  Mirela Roznoveanu, A Rumanian Writer in New York By Aurora Cornu
 Mirela is long-armed and smiley and she wears eyeglasses in and out, a different pair for reading, for writing, for watching TV. She wears Gap jeans, and a Gap blouse. From profile, with the knotted hair, she looks somehow like Virginia Woolf. She was born in April 10 (8) 1947 and built 5 careers in one life: from 1971 to 1991 she was in Romania a recognized literary critic, novelist and journalist. Starting in 1996 she made herself in the USA a respected specialist on foreign, comparative, and international law research, and a renowned professor in this field, teaching around the world. Her struggle right now is to be recognized as a writer – a novelist, a poet and a literary critic – in the English language. At 44 she saw herself as an exile not just from her country but from her tongue language too.

 

When Mirela Roznoveanu was not twelve years old she became ill with rheumatic fever. She was hospitalized in the Children’s Hospital from Constantza, Romania, a city by the Black Sea where she lived together with her parents and a brother. One evening while in the hospital bed, with high fever, she overheard her doctor’s conversation with her mother. “Your daughter is not allowed to experience any kind of strong emotions. From now on, she cannot climb any kind of stairs and go through difficult school tests; high school is the most for her. She is forbidden to marry and have children, her heart is too weak. She will develop degenerative arthritis. At twenty-eight she will have heart surgery and she will die in her early thirties.”  
The thought of being handicapped and dead so soon crashed her. The next morning, laid out on the hospital’s bed after more blood tests, she prayed for a long time. She kept her eyes pointing to the cloudy sky seen through the windows across her bed while saying over and over the Lord’s Prayer. She implored God to have mercy on her; at one moment, mostly asleep, the little girl felt that from among the white clouds and light’s sky God’s hand came down and touched her left shoulder.  Over the next years she did all things she was not supposed to; she even surpassed the last prediction.

In the field of Rumanian literature, Mirela’s books represent an out of the norm bibliography. The Rumanian literary custom did not accept, until recent years, that an author could excel in more than one literary field. It was actually looked down upon to write in another literary genre other than one initially acknowledged. A novelist, playwright or a literary critic, for example, could not be taken seriously as a poet and vice versa, with perhaps very extreme exceptions accepted with sour smiles as pure singularities. Also a journalist’s literature had to be stigmatized for it could not be anything but a populist compromise.

Mirela has published in Rumanian three books of literary criticism (one of them being the acclaimed History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote, an essay on comparative literature); three novels discussed in PhD thesis; a poetry book praised by histories of Rumanian literature. She has been an active literary critic in Rumanian literary magazines as well as a cultural commentator on the Rumanian television, and a political and cultural journalist in newspapers and cultural magazines. While in the US she wrote in English poetry books, short stories, novels. As a renowned researcher on foreign, comparative, and international law and tenured faculty at New York University School of Law, she published a book on her field, Toward a Cyberlegal Culture (Transnational Publishers, 2001, 2^nd 2002). She has been for ten years (2005-2015) the Editor of GlobaLex http://www.nyulawglobal.org/globalex/ , the finest in the world online publication on foreign, comparative, and international law research, and from 2015 the Honorary Editor.

Her first book called Lecturi Moderne/ Modern Readings is a collection of essays about Rumanian contemporaneous writers and a few topics of comparative literature. The second book was a monograph devoted to a prestigious Rumanian writer, Dumitru Radu Popescu.  I was curious to know in her words about the frame of the History of Fiction Writing from Ramayana to Don Quixote. I read this book back in time in its first edition and I strongly advised her to have a second edition, reuniting both volumes in one single tome.

“It’s not a history in the traditional way’, she said. “What we call ‘novel’ in our cultural civilization existed under other names and displaying different epic architectures in other cultural civilizations. I use ‘epic architecture’ in general while ‘novel’ is the term used in our western cultural civilization naming this aesthetic reality.”

The second edition has seven hundred printed pages (1,600 computer pages) in a book of a big format (a sort of a ‘Bible” size).
          “I consider it an event for the theory of the novel, but unfortunately it is only in Rumanian.”

Her novels (Timpul celor alesi/ The time of the Chosen Ones; Viata pe fuga/ Life on the Run/, Platonia) were differently written, they do not resemble one another, and it is difficult to label them. Each of them brings a different aesthetic and complex universe. Those in the Rumanian language have as main characters creative and intelligent women living under the Communist and post-Communist eras that brought so much devastation; strong, tragic women who do not compromise with the repressive power.

Roznoveanu’s fiction attributes are profound introspection, breath taking narratives, complex plots with philosophical implications, and an unmatched power of description akin to the magic realism.

“My mother was the one that told me ancient stories of her Vlach clan; my father told me stories from World War II; my grandparents from my father’s side introduced me to Western civilization – my father’s father was an engineer who studied in Berlin and belonged to the Polish and Hapsburg aristocracy – while my mother’s parents passed on to me the Balkans highlands tales. Because in my family were spoken beside Rumanian other languages such as German, Vlach (Armân), Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish (my mom spoke with her siblings only in Armân language; the grandfather from the mother’s side had been a businessman and he spoke all Balkan’s languages while the other grandfather mixed Rumanian with German) I decided to choose Rumanian and only Rumanian. It was the only way to have good grades in school. I remember my classmates’ mocking me whenever I made language mistakes, and this had been hard on me.”

Why did you start with poetry in English? I was curious. We had begun our dialog at the Smith & Wollensky’s restaurant on 49th Street & Third Avenue, in New York City. We ate there a few times in the past, sharing a lobster, a Cajun steak and a half of a bottle of Cabernet or Pinot Noir. I thought that this place full of memories of so many writers and groups of talkative journalists from surrounding newspapers would be inspiring. We were about at the end of our late lunch and sipped slowly from the remaining red wine.

“As you know, when I arrived here, I did not know English. I learned it at work, in a few classes of English as a Second Language at Hunter College, and on my own. During this time, English words came to me cocooned in beautiful sounds and meanings close to Latin and French. I was in love with those words so profoundly imbedded in lyricism! I understood why poetry had been the first literary genus in the history of cultural civilizations…”

 I myself wrote somewhere about Mirela’s books:” She flies with a cosmic speed over the earth while I and my fellow writers are hardly traveling by chariots…” Marian Popa, a Rumanian literary critic living in Germany, wrote about Mirela’s poetry in his History of Modern Rumanian Literature: “to take knowledge as it comes, to try keeping one’s head up midst impending doom: Accept everything that’s given to you, / even in jest. Whatever you receive / will be to your advantage … And so one advances toward atrocious stridency when one’s anatomy is used as a means for getting situated in the center of things. The lyrical self is variously tortured, spat at, bitten, and devoured, tortured and dismembered, crucified even.” Heathrow O’Hare alias Professor Stefan Stoenescu, the Rumanian renowned translator and essayist, noted that: ”Translating Mirela Roznoveanu one cannot help being reminded of intensities and flights of the imagination from such distinctive poetries as those of Emily Dickinson or Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath.” Poet William James Austin, the author of the classic UNDERWORLD, wrote that “Mirela Roznoveanu’s poetry is “innovative” where it counts, I think — the imagery is really stunning. I can’t imagine anyone with any sensitivity reading her work, and not experiencing a strong emotional response.” Elizabeth Gamble Miller, Professor Emerita of Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas and Literary Translator of contemporary poetry, fiction and essays from Spanish into English endorsed Mirela’s Elegies from New York City:  “What I find fascinating are the startling images gleaned from such a breadth of human experience. The poetry is of such depth and complexity while not in the least hermetic. It is as if the image is the precise one to stir the conflicting emotions that permeate the poems. Mirela Roznoveanu’s world travels and breadth of literary experience carry a resonance that inspires further exploration into the poetic line.”

About Mirela’s novel The Time of the Chosen Ones, published in the second uncensored edition in 1999 in Romania, Jean Parvulescu, a well-known French writer born in Romania wrote about it in Contraliterature, a French literary magazine: “The inside time of this novel being, after an expression of Mirela Roznoveanu, ‘a pyramidal time’, invites to an exploded reading and continuous exploration of religious believes expressing a new attitude of the European novel.”

The characters in The Time of the Chosen Ones are intellectuals interested in philosophical issues; their conversations and introspections are intellectually intense; the critics considered this an overloaded aspect of the novel.

“But this was the spiritual life of those of us trying to survive in the communist era,” Mirela said. “We were like that. Our pretentious provincial intellectualism, the inclination to speculate, the subtleties of our minds were real. The metaphysical background had been always there. Perhaps in these aspects my novel reminds of the Argentinean’s Borges, Cortazar, and Juan Jose Saer.  My characters as myself were worlds apart from reality for social and political reasons. We struggled to exist in a terrible communist dictatorship, a sort of civil war, when a big part of the Rumanian society made a pact with the devil in order to oppress the other part of society. And the mixture of the harsh reality and the high intellectualism gives to the main characters a violent trajectory.”   

About The Life Manager and Other Stories, written in English, Annie Gottlieb, the author of “Do You Believe in Magic?” wrote: „Mirela takes us there in the imagination, and it feels as if we are there in the flesh, because of the incredible power of description, the incredible love for nature so sensuous, which is in some ways so much more reliable than the human love always there. They are magnificent stories. And I admire Mirela so much for making that leap across the ocean. I wrote down some words from one of her stories that I thought were “suspended, vulnerable, and daring.” That’s Mirela. She is like the woman on the flying trapeze. She is suspended over the Atlantic. And I admire her so much for having always been ready to take that leap or to let herself be pushed. And I admire her very much for taking the leap to be published here in America, and to fight for her stories. And insist that they be read, and seen, and that they not sink into the ocean without a trace”. And Marylin J. Raisch, Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown University wrote in a book review about Toward a Cyberlegal culture: “She had the courage to pitch her claims high even if the more practical mission of the book prevented her pursuing all of her philosophical speculations. (…)  Certainly ubiquity and the penetration of the Internet with simultaneity have opened up unique opportunities for training and legal/intellectual exchange as never before.”

I read Mirela’s novels and I was struck by the fact that no one has ever expressed before in fiction as she did the scenery, the running of the time, the smells, the real nature through words; she posses the unique talent of getting the reader into the plot through a net of intelligent sensations, a powerful atmosphere impossible to forget or avoid by the reader’s mind and heart. I had been trapped in there; I ultimately became a character and experienced the impact of whatever was around. This power of her narrative is like a narcosis and a sort of neurosis that lingers forever in the readers mind.

“Ideas fade in time, as well as history events. What remains?” Mirela smiled. “The inner feelings of characters and the ambiance they are embedded in. That’s why we still read Iliad, Daphnis and Chloe, The Golden Ass, War and Peace, and the novels written in Japan in the eleventh century. The desperation of Achilles viewing Patroclus corpse is there, forever in my heart.”

Mirela is harsh against the Communist regime. The secret police searches on her parents’ house were traumatic. Visions of her mother spitting blood after secret police interrogations left a deep wound in Mirela’s memory. Armân or Vlach clans kept their valuables not in currencies or properties but in gold, so mother got as dowry a lot of gold, ancient coins from the time of Alexander the Great, all confiscated by the communist regime. The mother’s father, once a rich man having stores in Thessaloniki and Tulcea had no money to buy bread for everything he had had been confiscated. In this time, he had been declared a bourgeois, an enemy of the country and his children were expelled from schools. Uncle Dumitru Limona, the mother’s brother, who protested against the Soviet Russia occupation of Hungary in 1956, had been jailed for many years as a political detainee. The other side of the family lost also everything, a toy factory and a movie theater. The communist regime seized all private property. To own a house was viewed as a crime.  

Mirela’s novels have roots in her own life. Involved in a plot aiming to publish an anti-Communist newspaper in Ceausescu’s era, she was caught by the secret police in early 1989. Interrogated, demoted, forbidden to publish, her books expelled from publishing houses, and threatened by the establishment with a few years in jail she had been under the permanent secret police surveillance.  “All my friends were gone; they were told they would be fired if were to contact me. Even my boyfriend was happy we were not married and distanced himself from me. My son helped me stay alive. I was pushed to the point to end it all and if the Revolution did not happen in December 1989, I would be dead by now.  I own my life to those that died in those days of December and I will never forget it. When I wanted to see my secret police file in Romania in 2008, I was given an almost empty file. The real names of informants were missing as well as their reports about me. “The process of journalists” was missing too. The director of the Institute of the Investigation of Communist Crimes in Romania apologized saying that my file had been laundered. The names of former informants and collaborators are still protected there.”

Roznoveanu’s writing achieves effects through a vast repertoire of epic and theatrical means. By the time she started university she had read prolifically. In her home library she found anything she wanted from Homer to Durrenmatt. Her father loved to read plays for he wanted to write one on his own. Her first productions written in the fourth grade were plays. Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Schiller were her first readings. However, in high school, Mirela dreamt of becoming an opera singer. She had a soprano voice. She took private classes of piano and opera singing but her voice not mature yet she was advised to wait; instead of the Academy of Music (Conservatoire) she went to the University of Bucharest, Faculty of Philology where she graduated in 1970, postponing her opera dream. While at the university she spent her free time reading and attending opera and classical music concerts. She became interested in linguistics and history of languages, because in that Communist era the linguistics’ domain was the terrain of innovation and freedom from the oppression of censorship. Her master in romance languages was a thesis on the history of Rumanian language in the XVI century.

 Around 1968 she wrote her first literary essays and short fiction, and this had been influential. After her graduation she worked as a literary critic and columnist for “Tomis”, a cultural magazine in Constanţa. Fired after a few years because she refused to attend the Communist Academy Stefan Gheorghiu in Bucharest, she had a job at the National Library in Constantza for one year, and after being told that the Regional Communist Party, the Education Department from Constantza wanted to fire her, she resigned and moved to Bucharest. By that time a law forbade citizens to change their residency from a city to another one. The capital of the country had been a closed city. Not having an ID with residence in Bucharest, she could not find a stable job. She published literary criticism in literary magazines and worked for the Rumanian Television as a free lance cultural commentator. Years later, she worked as a senior columnist for the weekly cultural and scientific weekly publication called Magazine, a sort of Newsweek published by the Free Romania (România Liberă) newspaper.  She published book reviews in Free Romania (România Liberă) and wrote for Magazin anything from scientific reportages and essays on the philosophy of science to ancient civilizations, while contributing to Rumanian cultural literary journals and writing her books.

 “How you did it?” I asked not sure I could grasp so many things at once.

”I trained my brain to switch from a sphere of writing to another and to work fast and without flaws.  I usually start my day around five in the morning and I go for more than 12 hours straight into work. Creativity can exercise itself in any domain of life once you have it within you. I am curious, therefore I am. I can do many things at once. In this way my lifetime line became a sort of spiral, so I lived longer. I stretched the time as a rubber band. I lived many lives at once; perhaps I am 210 years old in the objective line time?”

Mirela left Romania in January 1991. Her flight ticket had been for the beginning of December 1990, but a strike of Rumanian Airlines postponed her leaving.  When I asked her why she did it after the December 1989 Revolution, she said:

 “It was not fear only, for I lost much of my fear of death in 1989. It was another kind of fear, of wasting my life; of not being ever able to fulfill my life time projects: to read for a few years in a big European library for the second edition of the Civilization of the Novel, for example. Fortunately, I had that library here at New York University! To be able to travel in all Balkan countries and extend the documentation for Vlachica – and my sabbatical and university vacations allowed me to do that. One of my dearest wishes was to teach in a university. It happened in my new country. By that time in Romania I realized that I will not be able to leave in a normal country there during my lifetime.”

She had been rehired by the newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă), now under the management of her former colleagues and dissident journalists in the first days of the December 1989 Revolution. She worked in the Cultural Department of the newspaper, but she wrote anything necessary in those times such as editorials, political reportages, cultural essays, book reviews, and interviews. 1990 had been a dramatic year but also a very rewarding one. She was invited to visit Switzerland in April 1990 and for the first time in her life she crossed the border of a democratic country; while there she met in secrecy King Michael of Romania and had an interview with him, never published by her newspaper scared of repercussions coming from the neo-communist regime.

Then the Council of Europe invited her to a special summer session in Innsbruck in late June 1990 where there were hearings regarding the political situation of the Rumanian state after the barbaric miners’ invasion in Bucharest. She was chosen to be the intermediary between the Council of Europe and the Rumanian Government representatives there; she did this job so impeccably that the parliamentarians of the Council of Europe wanted her to be the first Rumanian ambassador to the Council of Europe, a request denied by the Rumanian President. “After talks with King Michael and the parliamentarians I became aware that what I wanted to believe was not the true reality of my Romania.”

In August 1990 she arrived in the USA to inquire about and to find out about the delivery stage of a promised new typography for the newspaper she worked for. She met Paula Jon Dobriansky, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State at the State Department in Washington, DC and a group of Human Rights Caucuses in the Congress. “I understood where my country was on the USA agenda; nobody cared in 1990 that the power had been taken back by the neo-communists. The US wanted stability for the American business and not thoughtful about what kind of regime would provide a safe business environment. Romania had been a battlefield between those that wanted an anticommunist country and the secret police and the former nomenclature trying to preserve their privileges. Those journalists writing against the communists were subject to death, accidents or defamation.”

 When the miners invaded in June 1990 Bucharest, called by the President of Romania Ion Iliescu, it was meant to tell that Romania was on the road to the perestroika and to a velvet revolution not to a real democracy. Anti-communist journalists were savagely beaten and inside the Free Romania newspaper the former secret police informers and officers became aggressive. She was told to shut up or leave the country if she wanted to stay alive. She was told how and when she would be raped, disfigured or shot. The typographers, meant to prepare her book for publishing, wanted to destroy in September 1990 the manuscript of the Civilization of the Novel. They were angry on her for she worked for a newspaper against the Communists. “It was saved by a miracle; it was the only copy I had.”  The same with her book of poetry kept in the Eminescu Publishing House for 10 years. “I was told in 1990 it will be soon published. In 1991 the manuscript was discretely sent to be burned, saved miraculously again from the pile of manuscripts prepared for the crematorium.” She showed me this saved manuscript as well as the novel Platonia “published” in one single copy. “As you see, the dark forces followed me continuously in Romania. But I had been always saved.”

Early September 1990, after a group of neighbors’ search in her apartment for they considered her, under the neo-communist media propaganda (there were articles published against her), an ‘enemy of the good communists and of the country’ and a ‘foreign agent paid in dollars’, and after the third tentative of the same active secret police to destroy Free Romania (România Liberă) offices and hammer the redactors, she accepted the entire truth.

She was back from the USA and had been invited to a cocktail to the American Embassy in Bucharest when Adrian Dohotaru, her former colleague and journalist, a recognized playwright, by that time State Secretary in the Rumanian Foreign Office, approached her. She was designated to attend, as the representative of her newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă), the end of September 1990 United Nation General Assembly opening ceremony, with the group of journalists of President Iliescu. She was told that President Iliescu did not want her with him, and he replaced her with a former secret police informant still working for the newspaper Free Romania (România Liberă). She found out about this and confronted Adrian Dohotaru who advised her: “Be quiet and listen to me. You are again on the black list. If you want to be alive shut up or leave the country.” She heard these words not believing what she was hearing. “I value your writing,” he continued on a very low voice; ”save your son. Don’t say anything for we are listened and my bodyguard is right there,” Dohotaru made a sign with his eyes to a man.

Dohotaru died soon mysteriously when he became the Grand Master of the National Grand Lodge of Romania. “He had a conscience,” Mirela said. “He saved my life.”

I wanted to know why the secret police was so much after her.

“One of my distant acquittances (the nephew of Ion Tugui) who worked after the Revolution in the special troops defending the American Embassy in Bucharest, told me that he had access to my secret police file and browsed it. It was written there that I had been extremely dangerous for I had the power to influence people’s minds in meetings or gatherings. He said that this was equivalent to a death sentence.”

“Did you influence people’s meetings?” I asked her. It was your power real? I was curious to understand this statement.

“It seemed it was true. I did it before and after the Revolution. I influenced the outcome of many meetings with destructive agendas. At one meeting for example I asked why we have to destroy the old villages – it had been Ceausescu’s plan to move all peasants in buildings. I asked the representative of the Central Communist Committee Party who came to Free Romania newspaper to convince the journalist to start a campaign in the favor of this plan, to explain how this will happen. How villagers will live in buildings without running water, heat and toilets, how they will preserve grains and keep their animals without barns and stables and the entire meeting had been compromised to the fury of the person sent by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Octavian Paler, by then the redactor in chief, was very upset and confronted me. After the miners’ invasion in Bucharest in June 1990 I confronted the nomenclature hardliners and secret police informants gathered in the newspaper’s offices; they wanted to take over the newspaper under President Iliescu’ order while the armed miners were lingering around the building. One day before, the typographers devastated our offices under the same active secret police guidance. I was the only one there from the group of former dissidents. I told the gathering that history will record their spinelessness decisions. I reminded them that our children called those working for the Communist press ‘sh…t eaters’ and that it was up to them to continue to eat sh…t or not. And they could not do it.”

I wanted to know what gave her courage to come to a country where she had no job and did not know its language.

“The teacher of my son convinced me at a teacher-parent conference as well as my son, he was the one. And if I were to die anyway, I preferred to die in a foreign land instead of the country I was born.”

“Why the US?”

“Europe wasn’t safe for me.”

 Roznoveanu lives in Sunnyside, Queens, New York, in a one-bedroom apartment, a sort of an artist’s retreat full of paintings and books.

“I do not understand why American writers go to faraway retreats or in the middle of forests to write. My ‘forest’ is there where I live.” Her son graduated from medical school and he is now a specialist in gynecology working in a hospital in Florida. She was married to the boy’s father, a Rumanian literary critic and journalist, but shortly divorced and never remarried. She had lived her life together with her son and mother who died in 2001 in New York. Visiting her apartment, I realized how small her kitchen is.

“I rarely cook.  Cooking, as my son said, is not my major.”

One of the paintings in the living room is her portrait in an early Picasso style by a friend, Rumanian painter Razvan Neicu, done around the end of 2000. Another portrait in an expressionist manner by a Rumanian painter Petru Pavel hung in the hallway leading to her bedroom and it was painted in the early 70s; around it there are photographs of her son, her two granddaughters and the babies’ mother.

A small computer is on a wooden small table in the living room, close to the huge TV screen watched mostly for political news – CNN, Fox, BBC, and France24. Another computer stands on an ergonomic desk in her bedroom, also full of books, while an IPod is by the bed’s night stand. The laptop around too. Dressed sporty in jeans and a comfortable blue blouse, her hair tied up she made coffee. “Caesar said that blue is the color of serious people,” she laughed when I made a comment about the colors. “I am sure Caesar thought of committed people …those stubborn that accomplish their projects against all odds.”

Shortly after coming to the US she went back to school; she had been in school from March 1991 to December 1996 while also having a full-time job. She obtained a Master on Information Science from Pratt Institute in 1996 and in the same year had been hired by the NYU School of Law. Her field: international, foreign and comparative law research.  She became a tenured faculty in 2005. She had been invited to teach all over the world.

“I love teaching. I had always felt I had a precious message to pass on to my students.”

When did you write?

“My writing had been my first and most precious task of each day.”

 Are you happy now? How did you afford to retire?

“I worked an entire life for this moment. I had never had a grant to allow me concentrate only on writing. I was the bread winner of my family and having a child I could not afford to live like a bohemian. Mirela Roznovschi worked hard for Mirela Roznoveanu. Mirela Roznovschi provided to Mirela Roznoveanu a grant for the rest of her life. Just to write and be out of any worries. Let’s hope I can do it, I am pretty old now…”

We sat on the coach in the living room by the crystal table set on three Buddha babies holding blue flowers on their hands stuck on the side of their hearts.

“I wrote books that I wanted to read but I could not find them for they were never written, so my books actually came out of a necessity … that’s why I worked for 20 years on the Civilization of the Novel. The project of Vlachica’s novel started by the time I was 28. On her death bed, my mother asked me to draw to a close this novel. Professor Virgil Nemoianu, by 1991 the rector of Catholic University from Washington, D.C. urged me to write the novel of the Rumanian emigrants in America, and I wrote Life on the Run.  One of my friends in Romania, mezzo-soprano Lucia Cicoara-Dragan, soloist at the Bucharest Opera was preparing Carmen for the stage in 1988-1989; we talked a lot about this opera’s musical subtleties and her rehearsals, the way of singing her part; I wanted to read, by that time, a novel built on an opera composition, it was never written and so I wrote Platonia.”

Vlachica, which I read it in the manuscript, is a powerful and never-before told story taking place 300 years ago in the Balkans when Vlach clans, in hiding for centuries on the top of the highlands, were confronted with the Imperial Ottoman power threatening their very existence. Life on the Run, / a sort of a Fugue of Life is more than the author’s translation of her Rumanian novel Viata pe Fuga. It contains an eulogy for her Romania and it also contains a kind of eulogy for Roznoveanu herself. The novel is about a journalist and writer living in two worlds, about redemption, about exile, and the pain of reinventing of another self here in the US. It was based on many points on Mirela’s life, in a fictionalized kind of realism.

For her, reality is the prime matter of fiction writing. The separation from the mother tongue language became, for the main character of this novel, a true ontological cataclysm. Life on the Run dramatized, without any compromise, Romania’s crisis – one of the most destructive moments of the Communist era as well as the troubled post-revolution time.  The novel’s narrator is a lot the writer’s alter ego, marked by the hardship of her origins and the difficulty of her leap away from them. Reading this novel, I remembered many times Alexis de Tocqueville’s On Democracy in America. The French intellectual discovered America on its top levels; the European intellectual called Mirela came to know America starting from its bottoms. The conclusions are the same. I will paraphrase a famous sentence of Alexis de Tocqueville about democracy and socialism (“Democracy extends the sphere of individual freedom, socialism restricts it. Democracy attaches all possible value to each man; socialism makes each man a mere agent, a mere number. Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.”): while democracy seeks equality in liberty, communism seeks equality in restraint and servitude. And the learning to become free is another meaningful and symbolic level of this novel: “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville.

Mirela sees, analysis critically her former country and the actual one. But the former impoverished life, with obstacles contrasts with the new one; she said that she had been in her former country a horse with legs tied up at the starting gate of the competition. Born in a little city by the Danube and brought up in a village in a lost place as Dobroudja, Romania, she fought not only with the communist casts but with class casts. In the US the snobbery of American writers, impossible to meet and talk to them is another harsh reality. When trying to teach comparative literature in the academy, nobody wanted her. Sometime her voice becomes angry; displacement, homelessness are other powerful feelings I felt during our conversation. When interviewing for a job with the academy in the US she was asked: why didn’t you cooperate with the communist nomenclature? Don’t you think you would have a great life full of privileges?

No two pictures of her look at all alike. In one, on Rumanian Wikipedia, she looks as sexy and mysterious as Greta Garbo; in another one, on the cover on a book about her, Mirela – a Paradox, her tragic profile seems of Iphigenia; the picture on her web site shows a stern professor while teaching.  Looking around I realized that her portraits did not make justice to the real Mirela.

“Beauty is a curse and it is also a door. With intelligence and talent together, beauty was a recipe for disaster in a conservative country forced by the communist regime to go back to the eighteenth century. Being beautiful I was not taken seriously by my Rumanian peers; for them it was impossible, I was a contradiction, for such a woman could not be creative and intelligent.  Especially in the 70s in the field of literary criticism led only by men this had been seen as an abnormality. That’s why I signed at the beginning my book reviews in “Tomis” only with M. instead of Mirela. When my first literary criticism book had been published, it was said it was written by three prestigious literary critics. I cried but my mom said that it meant the book was good: ”It does mean that your book is as good as their writings!” my mom put it.”

I asked Mirela why she views ‘beauty as a door’.

“Well, trying to talk to prestigious writers about criticism, poetry, and novel, they were all men in Romania, they were attracted to my beauty and allowed me to approach them, while I was attracted to their genius. Unfortunately, I could not enroll in a PhD program exactly for this reason! The door was closed for me! In exchange for accepting me as a PhD candidate, one of my professors wanted me in bed with him while the other one asked me to wait until my 50s when my beauty would fade…”

Roznoveanu does not drive and has no car. In New York City this is not a must.

“It is said in Europe that beautiful women cannot drive,” she laughed jokingly. “I actually have no sense of direction; I am distracted by what I think, and I cannot drive.” She laughed again. “It has also been said I am too competitive! I am not at all; I do what I want to. The field of literature is unlimited, there is room for all. I do not compete with anybody!”

She visited every summer in the past years the Balkan’s countries to see those places about which she wrote in Vlachica. She likes to travel to Asia. She visited twice India. She dislikes her name Mirela – “three musical notes!” while her real last name is not Roznoveanu but Roznowski – in Rumanian transliteration being Roznovschi.

“I like only ‘La’ from my first name, the note of Hydrogen; the Universe’s song.”

I wanted to know how she succeed in America, how the life of the emigrant had been for her.

“I did not come as a Fulbright scholar or invited by a university, although I could have a Fulbright. I came here on my own as a refugee unable to explain myself in the English language. I went to evening courses, paid from my small wages, for seven years of my life. At the beginning I had to wash hair in beauty parlors and clean houses to survive, while going to English as a second language evening class. After that I was a translator and a file clerk in a busy law office, not being allowed to rest on a chair for a single moment. For many months I even had a full time and a part time job, leaving at 8 in the morning and coming home at 12 am and attending school over the weekend. I was lucky to be hired by the NYU School of Law Library. While there, I enrolled in a master of information science school and after graduation I was able to obtain a professional job in the same place.”  

Roznoveanu’s personal life had been unusual by Rumanian standards. She refused to attend a political academy; she dared to stay without a permanent job for five years in an era when people without a permanent job were sent to labor camps; in her TV shows she did never pronounced words such as ‘political’, communist’ ‘communist party’ and this was another grave charge against her; she gave birth to her son before marriage. During pregnancy, she was forced to hide, stop working, for she was not married, and her boyfriend worked for another newspaper. The personal issues of journalists were on the Communist Party agenda. “I was afraid for my unborn baby life. An accident could happen any time. To be unmarried and pregnant had been a crime when working for the media; the Communist Party wanted the journalists have a perfect file; any deviance from the ‘communist morality’ had been harshly punished. For six months I saw the light of the day through a window and I walked out only during the night. I delivered my baby having by my side in the hospital a close friend to watch over me. ” She had fallen in love after divorcing her husband with a writer and journalist. They never married and never lived together in the same home, which had been another unaccepted issue of that time.  She left him after 10 years when their home to live together had been ready, finding he was on the side of the neo-communist regime in 1990.  By that time he pushed her hardly to resign as a journalist and public figure, to give up her career and become a housewife.

“As soon as I left Romania, he became an official of the regime, he urged me to resign in order to get this position…”

After the Revolution, as Romania took the path of forgiving the crimes of the Communist dictatorship, Roznoveanu’s fiction became a sort of confrontation. Viata pe fuga/ Life on the run was uncomfortable for the establishment in 1997 and never distributed in book shops while the publishing house went bankrupt at the time of the publication. Platonia was published in one single copy in 1998, sent to her to New York to make her believe the book had been published. Discovering the truth, she managed to have it published in 1999. It was said her books wanted to ‘divide’ the country, and servile critics, former collaborators supporting the communist era authors, diminished her writing. As in politics the same people and values stayed in place in the literary life. “Even today it is uncomfortable for many to acknowledge the fact that I exist. I am someone who did not cooperate with the secret police and my life attested that it had been possible. I also did not perish in the USA. I proved myself here. I learned that the most an oppressive system wants to coerce a person, the highest is the jump when this pressure is lifted. However, freedom is not easy; it reclaims its victims too. I am the lucky one who survived.”

In one instance she said something about the future, about her books being better understood after the passing of time.

“Am I writing for the future generations of readers? I am perhaps ahead of my time? I have no idea. The truth is that my novels are better understood today as my essay on the history of the novel.”

Although she had been harsh about her former country, her book on the history of the novel received in 2008 (the second revised edition) the highest award in the Rumanian culture, the Award of the Rumanian Academy, while in December 2000 Mirela Roznoveanu was honored by outgoing President of Romania Emil Constantinescu for exceptional contributions from abroad in the service of Rumanian culture and democracy. Mirela has been named an Officer of the National Order for Faithful Service.

“When things come too late in life it is hard to feel happiness. It is like a void in the heart trying to be filled but emptiness does not go away. In my new country everything came at the right time, I had been acknowledged, and I am grateful for that.”  

She does not like to talk about many of those past events. I knew it is hard to forget painful things:

 “I discovered a forgetting protocol. I erase one thing at a time. But still does not help.”

What motivates you to write in the English language?  There is a sacrifice, an effort, and tenacity in a person learning a language late in her life, and who wanted to write literature in a new language.

“I thought I had something important to say. That’s why I did not give up. Other writers such as Conrad and Nabokov could do it, why not me? It meant it had been possible and I was supposed at least to try. The pain of not being understood gave me much suffering. Imagine a mature writer of forty-four having the linguistic baggage of a five years old. It had been a torture from which I had grown a lot inside. There is a tale in 1001 Nights about a prince that had to be silent despite dreadful trials in order to succeed. I had a similar experience.”

 I asked her who would be the author that had an impact on her life and what question would ask him if alive.

“I would like to ask Homer in what resided his tremendous enthusiasm of telling over and over Iliad and Odyssey to his listeners on the Ionian Islands and how he dealt with loneliness. He died alone on a beach of an island. And Ovid, I would ask him how he dealt in the ice-covered Tomis, today Constantza, with another language and the exile. And I would question Dante about his choice to leave his beloved city and die also in exile. They are my close friends. I learned a lot from them.”

What do you want the readers to be left with after reading your books?

“Perhaps the last image of Platonia by the Black Sea in the winter night, her way of being consistent with the  inner freedom of the artist; the belief in the sacred that is around us, the main thought in The Time of the Chosen Ones; the truth that what we have within ourselves it is impossible to be taken away from us despite any difficulties of our lives and this is Life on the Run; another way of seeing an accepted universe just stepping out from it and looking anew to it and this is The Civilization of the Novel.”

Despite talking about pain, frustration and sweating blood Mirela was smiling.

“I feel that fate wanted to restore here my broken path in the country I had been born.  God had sent angels on my behalf, maybe even archangels working hard to keep me breathing. I don’t believe in miracles. I rely on them.”
New York City, May 2015