Representations of Jewish Childhood From 1950s Communist Romania in Memoirs by Women Émigré Authors to the United States

ABSTRACT

This article examines the memoirs of three Jewish women – Marianne Hirsch, Anca Vlasopolos, and Haya Leah Molnar – to understand how they remembered childhood in 1950s communist Bucharest. I first show how Marianne Hirsch’s part-memoir, part-critical book, Family Frames, uses her personal experiences to theorize tropes of transcultural dislocation as specific features of post-World War II Jewish children’s identities in 1950s Romania. I analyze how these tropes equally permeate the memoirs by two of her generation’s peers, Anca Vlasopolos and Haya Leah Molnar, highlighting how the two authors deploy them in their narratives. Overall, I show that writings of one’s 1950s childhood experiences in Bucharest by Jewish emigrées to the US offer new alternative discourses about facing the past and the present in Eastern Europe and the US by the tropes of initial transcultural, dislocating experiences at the start of their lives.

KEYWORDS:

• Jewish childhood
• memoir
• Holocaust
• early communism
• Romania

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dana Mihăilescu is an associate professor of English/American studies, at the University of Bucharest, where she earned her doctorate in 2010 for the thesis Ethical Dilemmas and Reconfigurations of Identity in Early Twentieth Century Eastern European Jewish American Narratives. Her main research interests include Jewish American Studies, Holocaust survivor testimonies, trauma and witnessing, ethics and memory. She has published articles on these topics in international journals of specialty such as Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, French Cultural Studies, American Imago, European Review of History, and Studies in Comics. Her most recent monograph is Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890-1930: Struggles for Recognition (Lexington, 2018). For further details see: https://www.academia.edu/2197160/CV_dana_mihailescu.

ORCID

Dana Mihăilescu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7470-7410

Notes

1 Vişan, “‘Partially Color,’” 51–66; Vişan, “Reading Cutezătorii and Watching Jackie Chan,” 212–28; Pohrib, “Romanian Communist Childhoods,” 122–37; Luca, “Secret Police Files, Tangled Life Narratives,” 363–94; Jinga, “Copilărie şi abandon familial în România anilor ’80,” 314–40.

2 Vişan, “‘Partially Color,’” 54.

3 Crowley and Reid, “Socialist Spaces,” 4; Luca, “Communism: Intimate Publics,” 70–82.

4 Baron, Displaced Children, 2, 273.

5 Schuessler, “Frank McCourt and the American Memoir,” WK3.

6 Florian, “The Perception of the Holocaust in Historiography and in the Romanian Media,” 19–45.

7 Bond, Craps, Vermeulen, Memory Unbound, 3.

8 Hornung, “Return Visits,” 10–24.

9 Reiter, Narrating the Holocaust, 236.

10 Hirsch, Family Frames, 219.

11 Hirsch explains the concept as follows: “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch, Family Frames, 22).

12 Hirsch, Family Frames, 245.

13 Ibid., 219 (my italics).

14 Hirsch, “Pictures of a Displaced Childhood,” 71–89 and Bammer, Displacements. Cultural Identities in Question, xi–xii.

15 Bammer, Displacements, xv.

16 Hirsch, Family Frames, 227.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 More precisely, Czernowitz was part of Austria-Hungary between 1775 and 1918, Romania between 1918 and June 1940, the Soviet Union between 1940 and July 1941, Romania between July 1941 and 1944, The Soviet Union from 1944/1947 to 1991, Ukraine from 1991 to the present day.

20 Reference to these meetings appears in the unpublished memoir of Marianne Hirsch’s father, Hirsch, A Life in the Twentieth Century, 101–2.

21 Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, 256.

22 Ibid., xiv–xv, 88–9, 256.

23 Hirsch, Family Frames, 227.

24 Arendt, “We Refugees,” 110–19; M. Hirsch, “We Can’t Turn Our Backs on ‘Stateless’ Youth.”

25 Arendt was a stateless refugee for 18 years, from the time she fled Nazi Germany in 1933, to the moment she was naturalized as a US citizen in 1961: see Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt on the Stateless,” 46–50. By comparison, Hirsch and her family were stateless for several months in 1961, first while having only travel permits on leaving Romania, then in Austria where they did not board the plane that should have taken them to Israel but remained with only temporary residency permits until they were helped by HIAS to emigrate to Providence, Rhode Island and got a green card; see Hirsch, Family Frames, 228–30 and Hirsch “We Can’t Turn Our Backs on Stateless Youth.”

26 Bernstein, “Hannah Arendt on the Stateless,” 50.

27 Hirsch, “We Can’t Turn Our Backs on Stateless Youth.”

28 Hirsch, Family Frames, 238.

29 If Marianne Hirsch is a child of Holocaust survivors born in Romania after the war, Susan Rubin Suleiman is a child survivor of the Holocaust born in Budapest, Hungary in 1939, who emigrated with her family to the US in 1949, became a renowned scholar of comparative literature at Harvard and also wrote an autobiography about her childhood memories and the specifics of the 1.5 generation, more broadly: Budapest Diary (1996).

30 Suleiman, Crises of Memory, 5.

31 Ibid., 2.

32 See, for instance, Golopenţia, Viaţa noastră cea de toate zilele; Nanu, Călătorie în jurul casei mele; Vrăbiescu Kleckner, Pe urmele mele în două lumi.

33 Cazan, “Didactic Motherhood,” 160.

34 Cazan, “Didactic Motherhood,” 162–71; Mihăilescu, “Gendered Intergenerational Spaces,” 183–225.

35 Cazan, “Didactic Motherhood,” 162.

36 Ibid.

37 Vlasopolos, No Return Address, unpaged.

38 Hirsch, Family Frames, 226; Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, xiii–xvi.

39 Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, xix.

40 Cattaruzza and Iordachi, “Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust,” 3.

41 Vlasopolos, No Return Address, 10.

42 Ibid., 14.

43 Ibid., 17.

44 Ibid., 29.

45 Ibid., 24.

46 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 66.

47 Ibid., 67.

48 Ibid.

49 Ibid. This view of Jewish life in Bucharest during the Holocaust as representing a case of “relatively little discrimination” in comparison to Jewish life in other cities from contested regions between Romania and neighboring countries, like Cluj (Northern Transylvania) for Molnar’s father or Czernowitz (Bukovina), is simultaneously sustained in the unpublished memoir of Marianne Hirsch’s father, Carl Hirsch (83). In fact, a small number of the Jews of Bucharest were also deported, to Transnistria, but in far smaller numbers than in the contested regions under Romanian and their neighbors’ rule during World War II. That was the case because Marshal Ion Antonescu who ruled Romania during World War II implemented a dual policy towards the country’s Jews, depending on the regions where they lived. Jews from Bessarabia and Bukovina, regions that were under dispute with other countries and which Romanians were trying to populate themselves while getting rid of other ethnic groups that resided therein, were subjected to many openly violent anti-Semitic measures and laws and were deported towards Transnistria. (A similar aggressive policy towards Jews also occurred in Northern Transylvania, disputed by Romania and Hungary and taken over by Hungary from August 1940 until 1944, see Braham, Genocide and Retribution.) Jews that lived in the Old Kingdom (i.e. the provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia that made up the territory covered by the first independent Romanian nation state established in 1859 under Alexandru Ioan Cuza and proclaimed as the Kingdom of Romania in 1881 under King Carol I), South Transylvania and Banat were not usually deported and their discrimination usually took economic, legal and administrative forms in situ such as seizure of property, exclusion from public and private employment, forced labor for men, etc. For further details about the difference of Antonescu’s policies towards the Jews from the Old Kingdom and those from Bukovina and Bessarabia, see Ionescu, Jewish Resistance to “Romanianization”, 3–5, 18–24.

50 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 162.

51 Ibid., 165. For the early communist years of 1945–1947, Carl Hirsch adds the amazement he and his wife, Lotte, had on coming to Bucharest from Czernowitz at the war’s end and finding “a city full of life with no shortages of anything as if there hadn’t been any war” (84), and how things then soon deteriorated in point of the inflation that befell Romania and the scarcity of jobs.

52 Hirsch, Ghosts of Home, 255.

53 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 69.

54 Vice, “Children’s Voices and Viewpoints,” 11.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 19.

57 Vice, Children Writing the Holocaust, 1–11.

58 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 11.

59 Ibid., 4.

60 Ibid., 31–2.

61 Similarly, in his memoir, Carl Hirsch notes how already by 1947 “the [Romanian communist] authorities now had limited the living space allowed to each person, so big apartment holders were interested to sublet on their own rather than get strangers sent by the Housing Authority taking over part of their apartment” (90). He also explains, however, that when he, his wife and baby Marianne moved from Timişoara to Bucharest, they benefited from such laws to the expense of others, because he was leading the building construction department of the Institute for Projects in Light Industry, belonging to the City Government Ministry. He was thus easily given a residential district apartment vacated by a friend who had just been granted permission to go to Israel. Reflecting on all this, he honestly remarks, “This is a good story which exemplifies the circumstances under which we lived in Romania. We took it as a way of life pragmatically and tried to make the best of it but we also recorded in our minds that people were thrown out of their apartments in downtown Bucharest to make room for the many new established authorities and offices like our Engineering office, located in a former high rise condominium building. We were just happy that we got an apartment” (99).

62 Vlasopolos, No Return Address, 48–9.

63 Ibid., 41.

64 Deletant, România sub regimul comunist, 68.

65 This phenomenon involving the Romanianization of employment and gradually meaning that only Romanians could own companies or be employed has been thoroughly explored in Ştefan Cristian Ionescu’s book Jewish Resistance to “Romanianization”, 1940-44.

66 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 166.

67 Rotman, Evreii din România în perioada comunistă, 32.

68 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 31.

69 Baron, Displaced Children, 20.

70 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 48.

71 Baron, Displaced Children, 32.

72 Florian, “The Perception of the Holocaust,” 25–26.

73 Hirsch, Family Frames, 219.

74 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 34–35.

75 Vlasopolos, No Return Address, 12–13.

76 Ibid., 33.

77 For further details, see Mihăilescu, “Gendered Intergenerational Spaces,” 198–9.

78 Vlasopolos, No Return Address, xiv, 56.

79 Molnar, Under a Red Sky, 126.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 233–5, 261–7.

82 Ioanid, Răscumpărarea evreilor, 22, 62–3.

83 Ibid., 163.

84 This aspect demonstrates the conscious choice of the authors’ families to merely use Israel as destination country for being permitted to leave Romania given their identity and identification as Jews in 1950s–1960s Bucharest. In this way, as Hirsch explains, as soon as it became possible to claim family ties to Israel, many Jews applied for passports to leave in that direction (Hirsch and Spitzer, Ghosts of Home, 256). The fact that once in Western Europe many Jews instead applied for visas to the US, the epitome of democracy and security in their imagination (see Hirsch, “We Can’t Turn Our Backs on ‘Stateless’ Youth”), poses the broader question of the complex relations between Jewish identity and the nation-state, particularly the functions that Jews ascribed to Israel and the US as desirable locations for leading their lives in the wake of World War II. This topic deserves further analysis and will hopefully make the object of a future study, but at present it falls beyond the scope of my article.

85 Oswell, The Agency of Children, 1–8, 51–61; Baron, Displaced Children, 13.

86 Hirsch, Family Frames, 230.

87 Oswell, The Agency of Children, 4.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, Unitatea Executiva pentru Finantarea Invatamantului Superior, a Cercetarii, Dezvoltarii si Inovarii (UEFISCDI) [grant number 5/2018, PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2016-0091], Transcultural Networks in Narratives about the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.