|
TATTOOS ON MARBLE
Scrisul Romanesc Press, Romania
2006 |
OVER THE LIFE LINE,
poems, cover and illustrations by St. Munteanu, Spuyten Duyvil Press, NYC
2003
About OVER THE
LIFE LINE
Adrian Sangeorzan's poems, in all their associative verve - somehow in the
orbit of surrealism, combined with an acute sense of the concrete - address
the reader with strong attitudes and moral principles. The title of his
first Romanian book, PE VIU - which means, approximately " Without
Anesthesia" - is a perfect metaphor for his thirst for the real world, even
if it hurts.
It's a joy for me to say: "Welcome to the Feast of Poetry!"
Nina Cassian
"I
think of these poems as astonished watchers of the extraordinary gymnastics
of a river that is nothing less than our time. They watch, they tell
themselves the stories of what they see now and stay ironically and
hopefully at their posts as true poems always have. The river goes on, the
poet shakes his head, now there is an epiphanic epitaph."
Andrei Codrescu
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
– TALES OF A WOMEN’S DOCTOR, memoirs
Scrisul Romanesc
Press, Romania 2005; Foreword by Dumitru Radu Popa
The book brings
memorable aspects of the immigration and a doctor’s life back in communist
Romania and in New York.
The book is also
related with the documentary CHILDREN OF THE DECREE recently released in
Germany.
CHILDREN OF THE DECREE
Deutschland / Rumänien / Belgien, ZDF; Duitsland, 2004, 52 min.
Editing: Wolfgang Lehmann; Photography: Carlos Fuchs, P. Reuther
Producer: Razvan Georgescu; Directed by: Florin Iepan;
Screenplay: Razvan Georgescu, Florin Iepan
“Procreation is the
social duty of all fertile women,” was the political thinking during the
1960s and 1970s in Romania. In 1966, Ceausescu issued Decree 770, in which
he forbade abortion for all women unless they were over forty or were
already taking care of four children. All forms of contraception were
totally banned. The New Romanian Man was born. By 1969, the country had a
million babies more than the previous average. Thousands of kindergartens
were built overnight. Children had to participate in sports and cultural
activities. Romanian society was rapidly changing. By using very
interesting archival footage and excerpts from old fiction films and by
interviewing personalities from that time – gynecologists (main consultant
is dr. Adrian Sângeorzan) or mothers who were part of the new society – the
director revives this period of tremendous oppression of personal freedom.
Many deaths were caused by the mere fact that women, including wives of
secret Romanian agents, famous TV presenters and actresses, had to undergo
illegal abortions. Many women were jailed for having them. Ten thousand
women died by using awkward abortion methods. Sex life was no fun anymore.
But still, Romania had a demographic boom and hosted a world conference on
population in 1974.
Dumitru
Radu Popa about Between Two Worlds – Tales of a Women Doctor
Adrian Sangeorzan is one of the most
outstanding contemporary Romanian writers. He was not a wonder-child, as
we are somehow accustomed in this kind of “performing art”. Adrian’s
recourse to literature happened at an older age and spiritual maturity,
and it was determined by at least two major reasons, both mentioned in
the title of his book. One of them is the experience of living between
two worlds. The other one is being a women doctor. His
literary style is as abrupt as refined: a man who does not have
apparently the time or the taste for elaborated allegories or metaphors.
For literature is for him, being it poetry or prose, just another way of
coming to terms with his own interior design of the soul. Or, in other
words, it is an attempt to witness the adventure of a “clean” character –
he himself is the main character of his writings – in worlds that are so
different from each other. Communist Romania, on one side, where the
craziness of a dictator transformed the whole country in a nightmare;
America, the realm of all dreams, on the other side, that sometimes
reduces the individual to the object of a terrible kafkianesque journey
(see the story titled Canada).
Almost all of us,
immigrants in this country, legally or illegally, went through the
syndrome of being suspended between two worlds. Adrian, in my opinion got
the best out of it, by illustrating, in a kind of fascinating
vivisection, the following theme: how and to what extent, you can
survive and eventually make a sense of this painful transition. Some of
his stories, as crazy as a common reader could find them, are the
expression of a genuine complexity of feelings, between the concept of
total interdiction and the one of an endlessly freedom that, at least in
the beginning, results to be rather puzzling than liberating. Adrian does
not label anything or anybody; nor does he praise or reprove his
experiences. It is just a testimony, full of a very peculiar sense of
humor, of all his journeys in this “New World” that he tries to
understand. And from the “New World perspective” he recuperates sometimes
with a very special sense of humor experiences from the old country (the
stories titled Circumcisions and Tattoos Collection are
especially relevant). As a women doctor, in the end he takes all
this transition as another birth. Only, this time, he is both the doctor
who presides over the miracle of birth and the new creature who has to be
born: “my second birth, he says, was the most difficult one I had to
attend”. And then, in another place: “When I say I’ve been born for a
second time, I really mean it. You should give me a bit of credit about
it, as I’ve been for over 20 years in this business. It was, as I
said, the most difficult birth that I’ve ever attended; my own rebirth in
America, when I was 36.”
When it comes to Adrian’s
capacity to recollect his former life, as a women doctor in
Romania, we are called to testify, on a first hand basis, one of the most
terrifying experiences of the past century. The movie “Children of the
Decree” that follows will give you an even better image of this. Adrian
offers a very vivid and accurate account of what happened in that country
where a crazy dictator decided that, if he couldn’t expend his territory,
at least he would have an ever-growing population. Contraceptives were
illegal, and abortion was a crime. In the name of the respect for life,
in 25 years Romania has had one of the highest mortality rates among
infants and pregnant women. “I chose to be a women doctor, Adrian says,
because it was something about life, but in Communist Romania it was in
fact mostly about death and lies”. When the productivity of children is
put together with the productivity in all the other branches of the
economy, one can easily understand what kind of happiness Romania was
going through. As the quality of life went down day by day, the
newspapers and the television heralded great victories in all the fields,
accomplishments unheard of before. Everything was Orwellian and,
reading Adrian’s stories, one could ask himself whether the reality
inspired the fiction or was it the other way around . . . In a bitter
joke of those times someone asked: What is the ultimate degree of
endurance? And the answer was the ultimate degree of endurance is to
be Romanian!
In this context, Adrian
does see himself neither as a hero nor as a dissident. He is, and this is
very important, a true and reliable witness, an intelligent, full of
compassion and sensitivity one. And, moreover, one who knows how to write
and incorporate reality into literature. To such an extent that, in the
final of this second edition of his remarkable book, after seeing his own
image in the movie “Children of the Decree”, he has a reaction absolutely
in the line with my previous statement about the competition between
reality and fiction. Let’s see what he has to say. “After I saw myself on
that screen, in New York, witnessing in English about a time that my
memory couldn’t neither block-out nor clean up of its tragic and horrible
features, I reiterated all the feelings I had when writing the chapters
of this book. I revisited that world of my first life, the way it was, in
a heavy black-and-white, with some touches of colors as they would have
been added artificially, by an unskilled or demented painter. I, myself,
the one who was speaking, turned in a gray color recalling those times.
Did I have a nightmare, was it a grotesque and surreal illusion, or maybe
I was just part of an experiment?” So, what a great peace of literary
reading and God, what a life!
Adrian Sangeorzan
is an unusual writer, first of all because he is an unusual man with an
unusual life. With his first collection of stories he walks into American
literature of memoirs as confidently as he walks into the operation room
next morning in order to stop patient’s bleeding. One has to be bold and
independent in order to be a writer and to be a surgeon. Incidentally,
boldness and independence from everybody (but not from everything, which is
a big difference!) is what creativity is all about. Adrian Sangeorzan
understands intuitively with his heart and talent and that is what he tells
his reader in every story. His voice is very strong and genuine. This is
not a belle lettre but a real voice talking about real things.
Andrey
Gritsman
This memoir presents us
with a new Candide, a young, optimistic and often naďve gynecologist,
adrift in a Communist nightmare, and then suddenly face to face with the
doubtful “paradise” of a New World. Whether it comes to performing
abortions for desperate women in Romania, who’ve been forced to have
unwanted pregnancies by a tyrannical dictator, dealing with right-to-life
fanatics in New York or navigating the bewildering bureaucracy of a
Manhattan hospital, Sangeorzan always maintains a refreshing sense of
irony, a courageous compassion and a knee-slapping spirit of humor. He
embodies something that’s been missing from the American scene since
William Carlos Williams: the poet-doctor—a person who works to heal our
all-too-impermanent bodies without sacrificing the sensitivity, intellect
and humor that nourish our minds and souls.
Bruce Benderson
The Anatomy of the Moon, Scrisul Romanesc, Foundation-Publishing House, Craiova, Romania, 2010
