The great Romanian writer’s tenth novel – his only work in English – is a Proustian feast of memory and experience centering on young Paul and his family, who live through World War II in circumstances sadly familiar today, where a remote village is swept up in fighting between rival armies, one of them … Russian. The boy’s father, a fiercely idealistic teacher but a bungling family man, is deported to Siberia, leaving Mother to take charge of the school, bury the dead of all sides, and try to protect her ‘little orphan’ from the horrors of life as well as from its delightfully childish erotic adventures.
Fast forward to the postwar debates between the grownup son and his father, in Angela Clark’s superb, flowing translation:
The teacher in Father…
’As opposed to the other conquerors and occupying forces, the Russian has a great big heart, as big as a cartwheel. A Russian isn’t Russian unless, before he sticks the knife in your back, he kisses you on the cheek, explains to you why he, poor soul, has been forced, cursed and condemned to do it… and there you go, in the twinkling of an eye. But you can be sure he will be the one to suffer the torments of hell. God chose him for this kind of work: to help you, to liberate you, to teach you, to give you the shirt off his back today, because that shirt was yours anyway, yesterday…’
‘I think you’re exaggerating, ‘ I said.
‘Listen, I hope from the very bottom of my heart that I am exaggerating…’
from My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest
Mục lục
Preface
The House
The School
The Village
…
Long Live Gutenberg!
…
I’m Not an Orphan Any More
…
The Last Christmas
Old Iacob
The Departure
Giới thiệu về tác giả
PAUL GOMA was born in 1935 in Basarabia, a Romanian province annexed in the 1940s by the Soviet Union and at its collapse forming the independent country of Moldova with a breakaway area further east beyond the Dniester River called Transnistria where Russian Federation troops have been based since a ceasefire in 1992. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest evokes the writer’s wartime memories of this much-disputed territory. From 1956 to 1962, Goma spent two years in a Romanian prison and five years in ‘obligatory residence’ in a remote village as punishment for his student protests and literary activities. He nevertheless came to prominence at home in the Romanian ‘thaw’ of the 1960s, becoming an influential novelist by the end of that decade. In the late 1970s Paul Goma was the courageous single spokesperson publicly advocating human rights in Romania. He was sent into exile in France in 1977 and lived and wrote in Paris until his death in March 2020 in the Covid pandemic.
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