Description
Romanian Summer is a journey through a land and a testament to its rebirth. Jack Lindsay and Maurice Cornforth, visiting in 1952 as part of a cultural delegation, record the transformation of a people who had risen against fascist rule, torn the landlords from their estates and placed power in the hands of workers and peasants. From the jubilant Liberation Day parades in Bucharest, where armed factory groups and red-scarved children exclaim for a government with no fear of its people, to the Patriarch Justinian insisting that church lands, too, be nationalized, the book shines of a nation remade. Gone is the cosmopolitan rottenness of the Romanian kings Carol and Michael, the night-clubs and palaces with their rotten scent, replaced by a capital owned and loved by its people, where the Athénée Palace hosts factory workers, poets, philosophers and peasant women.
Lindsay and Cornforth carry the reader through the Dobruja, where tens of thousands carve out the Danube-Black Sea Canal, a work that educates as it builds, turning barefoot peasants into literate engineers, raising up not only a waterway but a new kind of man. They move through hospitals, schools, housing estates and the Palace of Pioneers, where women once condemned now open their doors with dignity and children play under the sun with a sense of being future adult citizens of a free society. They set Romania’s present against the centuries of pillage by British bankers, oil magnates and usurers who left behind only destruction, and contrast that misery with the electrification of villages, the spread of science and culture, the first Five-Year Plan and the enthusiasm of a people who vowed to never again bow to foreign masters.
This is book is, as expected, a form of travel writing, but more importantly, it is the voice of witnesses to a revolution in motion, a portrait of a society whose generosity cast away the filth of the old order, whose hospitals, schools and collective farms embodied the will of a people building the socialist order. In its pages are recorded the voices of workers and peasants, priests and scientists, children and old men, all speaking of a new life begun, and of a future that at that time seemed it could never be undone.