Best of
Romania

2000

Zalmoxis


Lucian Blaga - 2000
    While scholars with access to his works in Romanian are well-aware of their importance, his work has remained, up to now, little known in the English-speaking world. The book represents one of the first efforts to make Blaga's work accessible to an international audience.Zalmoxis is Blaga's first play and one of his most important literary works. It underlines much of his philosophy and also reflects his poetry. Blaga's attachment to Expressionist ideals is discernible in his treatment of the characters primarily as vehicles of ideas and his preference for primitive nature over the cultured metropolis.This book includes an introduction by Keith Hitchins of the University of Illinois, one of the leading historians of Romania in the United States and a scholar intimately acquainted with Blaga's life and work. In it, he discusses the life of Lucian Blaga, and the importance of his literary and philosophical work. The translation is by Doris Plantus-Runey from Wayne State University in the United States.

Laundry


Suzane Adam - 2000
    Though Ildiko’s family immigrates to Israel soon after, Ildiko’s life continues to be shaped by the secret deep within her; not until many years later is Ildiko able to reveal her story. In flashback fashion, she recounts her horror to her worried husband, who at the novel’s start is nearly hysterical with worry about a recent mysterious and possibly violent incident. Only as Ildiko’s story unfolds—and with it the parallel stories of her family and her husband—do readers come to understand what has taken place and how Ildiko’s story has come full circle. This psychological thriller focuses on family relationships and the aftermath of childhood trauma, and although not a novel specifically of the Holocaust, the narrative is driven by characters whose lives were shaped by it, so much so that those events become a silent character in the book.