THESE LIVES

SF/fantasy author Moldovan remembers the trials of growing up under the heel of Communism in Romania in this memoir.

The author was born in 1954 in Turda, a small town in the Transylvania region of Romania, which was under Communist rule. His mother, Maria, hailed from a hardworking and affluent family, but their land was appropriated in 1949, once the Communists came to power, leaving them all but destitute. Also, his father, Ioan, was a liberal and a lawyer who defended farmers against governmental confiscations of their land; as a result of this work, he was sent to prison at one point for more than two years. Ioan never fully recovered from the trauma of his incarceration, and died when he was only 57. In plain but powerfully direct terms, the author documents the brutality of the regime under which his family lived, as well as its bureaucratic incompetence: “Communism was such a rotten system,” he says, “that I’m surprised it lasted so long.” His stories will be familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Communist rule, but that doesn’t detract from the poignancy of his accounts of hours-long lines to purchase potatoes, painful food rationing, and the imprisonment and murder of tens of thousands of political dissidents: “The new regime was like a bulldozer, leveling society.” Moldovan’s affecting stories are grim but not punishingly so, as he interlaces them with a welcome humor and a keen eye for the absurd. He also documents, with a sensitive intelligence, the irrepressibility of human pride; readers will find remarkable the lengths that farmers went to defend their land. Overall, this is a sad but never hopeless collection of true stories, conveyed with insight and empathy.

A gripping portrait of oppression in Romania.