legend, of that malevolent count, one whose bizarre habits could not help but make him a star of Broadway and Hollywood, until after my arrival in the United States. When asked about my birthplace, I would naively reply that I came from a little city deep in a forgotten province called Transylvania, and no one would let me say more before the laughter started. The laughter would grow all the heartier because I understood nothing of it. “Ah, Dracula,” they would say, with a wink. All right: now I know.
Yet you should not think that the Jewish children of Transylvania lived happily and without fear. Theylived happily, but not without fear. We were always worried, anxious, threatened from all sides. Bandits, we were told, were spying on us from high in the mountains. And there were the louts and cowards, steeped in some ancestral hatred, who would attack us and beat us; like Dracula, they apparently needed to draw some blood—Jewish blood—to feel proud of themselves.
I am no longer a child, but even today Transylvania still chills me, or rather, a little corner of Transylvania does: Sighet, my native city. I live there no longer, yet it lives within me. It has been forty years since I left there for good, yet I am still a little fearful each time I see the place again. If I were a tourist seeking that perfect place to spend a holiday, to learn a little and to relax as well, I would go there without hesitation.
Why not, after all? Easily reachable, picturesque and inexpensive, Sighet has everything you could want: mountains, rivers, hotels, and memories.
You would take the plane or a train from Bucharest to Baia Mare, in Maramures, and from there a bus or a cab would take you to the other side of the mountain, into a valley. Yet another twisting road climbs over Satu Mare, wandering through villages, small towns and hamlets so bright and colorful and yet so apparently untouched by time, so nearly primitive, that they seem to belong to an earlier age.
Here, peasants look as they do in picture books, dressed as they have been through the ages, representing today as always that durable connection with their livelihood: the earth, trees, animals, flowers, the sky. For them, official communism is but an abstraction, and like their parents they feel most at home in church.
S IGHET , my birthplace, is a little city, so much like any other and so little like any other. Except for a few new apartment buildings, the houses are the same ones I used to pass on my way to school or on my way to my grandmother’s.
Back then, before the torment, it was a little Jewish city, a typical
shtetl
, rambunctious and vibrant with beauty and faith, with its yeshivas and its workshops, its madmen and its princes, its silent beggars and noisy big shots. We spoke Yiddish among ourselves, responded to others in Romanian or Hungarian or Ruthenian, and we prayed in Hebrew. In the Jewish streets the businessmen argued in the morning and made up by evening; in the
shtiblech
the Hasidim said their prayers, studied the Midrash, told wonderful stories about their miracle-working rabbis.
Immersed in Jewish life, following the rhythms of the Hebrew calendar, the city rested on the Sabbath, fasted on the Day of Atonement, danced on the eve of Simhat Torah. Even the Christians knew therewas no point in asking for bread in a Jewish bakery during Passover week, and that you should never offer to buy a glass of Tzuica for a Jewish bartender on the ninth day of the month of Av, for that day, marked by mourning, recalls the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem.
All that is now gone. The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some thirty synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.
I T HAS BEEN twenty years since I first returned. Maybe it was just out of simple curiosity. Others like
Yet you should not think that the Jewish children of Transylvania lived happily and without fear. Theylived happily, but not without fear. We were always worried, anxious, threatened from all sides. Bandits, we were told, were spying on us from high in the mountains. And there were the louts and cowards, steeped in some ancestral hatred, who would attack us and beat us; like Dracula, they apparently needed to draw some blood—Jewish blood—to feel proud of themselves.
I am no longer a child, but even today Transylvania still chills me, or rather, a little corner of Transylvania does: Sighet, my native city. I live there no longer, yet it lives within me. It has been forty years since I left there for good, yet I am still a little fearful each time I see the place again. If I were a tourist seeking that perfect place to spend a holiday, to learn a little and to relax as well, I would go there without hesitation.
Why not, after all? Easily reachable, picturesque and inexpensive, Sighet has everything you could want: mountains, rivers, hotels, and memories.
You would take the plane or a train from Bucharest to Baia Mare, in Maramures, and from there a bus or a cab would take you to the other side of the mountain, into a valley. Yet another twisting road climbs over Satu Mare, wandering through villages, small towns and hamlets so bright and colorful and yet so apparently untouched by time, so nearly primitive, that they seem to belong to an earlier age.
Here, peasants look as they do in picture books, dressed as they have been through the ages, representing today as always that durable connection with their livelihood: the earth, trees, animals, flowers, the sky. For them, official communism is but an abstraction, and like their parents they feel most at home in church.
S IGHET , my birthplace, is a little city, so much like any other and so little like any other. Except for a few new apartment buildings, the houses are the same ones I used to pass on my way to school or on my way to my grandmother’s.
Back then, before the torment, it was a little Jewish city, a typical
shtetl
, rambunctious and vibrant with beauty and faith, with its yeshivas and its workshops, its madmen and its princes, its silent beggars and noisy big shots. We spoke Yiddish among ourselves, responded to others in Romanian or Hungarian or Ruthenian, and we prayed in Hebrew. In the Jewish streets the businessmen argued in the morning and made up by evening; in the
shtiblech
the Hasidim said their prayers, studied the Midrash, told wonderful stories about their miracle-working rabbis.
Immersed in Jewish life, following the rhythms of the Hebrew calendar, the city rested on the Sabbath, fasted on the Day of Atonement, danced on the eve of Simhat Torah. Even the Christians knew therewas no point in asking for bread in a Jewish bakery during Passover week, and that you should never offer to buy a glass of Tzuica for a Jewish bartender on the ninth day of the month of Av, for that day, marked by mourning, recalls the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem.
All that is now gone. The Jews of my city are now forgotten, erased from its memory. Before, there were some thirty synagogues in Sighet; today, only one survives. The Jewish tailors, the Jewish cobblers, the Jewish watchmakers have vanished without a trace, and strangers have taken their place.
I T HAS BEEN twenty years since I first returned. Maybe it was just out of simple curiosity. Others like
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