Passage to Romania: American Literature in Romania by Thomas Amherst PerryReview by: Lidia VianiuSlavic Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 144-145Published by:Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2697000 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 20:59

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserveand extend access to Slavic Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:59:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

144 Slavic Review

1867 compromise. The end result, it seems, is a sort of potpourri of what from time to time might be understood by nationalism as viewed through the perceptions of the crowd in lib- eral Hungary throughout the reign of King Franz Joseph I.

Freifeld does not make too much of a distinction between Magyars and Hungarians. This makes light of the fact that although all Magyars were "Hungarian," not all "Hungar- ians" were Magyars. Nor were all these non-Magyars by any stretch of the imagination Magyarphiles. Indeed, for them, Vienna signified at least the possibility of some sort of na- tional liberation, whereas Budapest did not signify such liberation under any circum- stances. Because the Magyars and the "Hungarians" are conflated, in the discussion of various wrongs and oppressions heaped upon the "Hungarians," one receives the impres- sion that the unfortunate population occupying the breadth of the lands belonging to the Crown of St. Stephen is a single people. This synthesis may be due to the fact that the Magyars, as part of the policy of Magyarization, possessed and commanded an iron grip on the media as well as on the sinews of Hungary's political and cultural infrastructure. Hence, the potpourri derived from the sources used in this work may give the impression of a liberal crowd in a liberal Hungary. But is it an accurate impression or is it, rather, one that the Magyars themselves have composed? This question then leads to another: What in the world is meant by "liberal Hungary"?

King Franz Joseph (in fact he was always the Kaiser to most citizens living within both halves of the dual monarchy) appears as a kind of ghostly and obedient shadow of himself playing various roles evidently forced upon him by the Magyar leadership. His wife, on the other hand, appears, at least some of the time, to have been made of real blood and (beau- tiful) flesh. Much credit is given to Elizabeth for manipulating her husband, and indeed, the entire Austrian government apparatus, so as to bring about the Ausgleich. This role of the queen as such has long been part of the oral political tradition of post-1867 Hungary. She therefore appears once again as a staunch Magyarphile if only, it is implied, out of her love for Count Gyula Andrassy. Here, documentation, as against conjecture, is lacking. Moreover, little is said about Elizabeth's chronic mental instability, which, in reality, kept her from doing much of anything throughout her tragedy-marked life. One wonders if she could have loved Andrassy. Indeed, could she have loved anyone? Certainly she was not made of the political stuff that accomplishes political transformations over the opposition of centers of power like both the court and government in Vienna and, in this case, in Berlin as well. Analysis will show that the emperor was made of, if not sterner, more ob- durate stuff.

Freifeld paints a interesting picture of the growth of Budapest from a small Magyar outpost on the Danube to a large, sprawling, and vibrant Weltstadt; a city that many Hun- garians took pride in as a veritable "Paris" of southeast central Europe. The question of the city's inhabitants as cosmopolites aside, without doubt Budapest came to rank, in size and scope, as one of Europe's larger metropolitan cities during the reign of Franz Joseph and Elizabeth. But was this growth generated by the genius of Hungarian nationalism or was it the result of more prosaic if powerful factors like the spread of capital and industry within the dynamic of the Ausgleich? A worthwhile discussion of nineteenth-century Budapest within the framework of the dual monarchy is found in Peter Hanak's, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (1998). Here, one sees that neither Hungary nor Austria, Budapest nor Vienna, stood alone. Indeed, they stood to- gether, within the larger framework of Europe.

GEORGE V. STRONG College of William and Mary

Passage to Romania: American Literature in Romania. By Thomas Amherst Perry. Portland, Ore.: The Center for Romanian Studies, 2001. 212 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Maps. $39.95, hard bound.

Thomas Perry's Passage to Romania is an excursion into the evolution of Romania's cultural awareness of America, in parallel with the influence of American intellectuals on the evo-

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:59:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 145

lution of Romanian minds. The point of view is original and challenging. The major idea underlined by the author is the difference in chronology between east and west, particu- larly Romania and the rest of the world. Romania created her own time. It took her far longer than France, Germany, and America to come of age. History was not kind to Ro- manians. Between the Turks, the numerous invasions, and then communism, what was built by day was demolished by night, as a beautiful Romanian ballad says. Perry under- stands that the predicament of this country has implications for the destiny of Europe (if Romania had not existed, the Turks and other invaders might have reached Paris, Berlin, and other spared centers of light).

The history of American incursions into Romanian thought is traced clearly and with a sensitivity that catches the reader's eye. The methods used are those of rigorous histori- cal and critical research, with a special focus on beginnings, sources. Perry undertakes writing this book as a real adventure in the opposite direction from the Wild West. He sets forth for the east, no less wilder and far sadder. The author's sympathy for Romanians, who are seen as history's slaves, for their indomitable thirst for culture and education, is obvi- ous and illuminating.

Perry was the second Fulbright scholar to visit Romania, in 1963, and he writes this book both for and off the record, as both a document and a novel. As a document, it has its natural weaknesses, its inevitable occasional superficiality, its failures to decode the communist understatements. As a novel, Perry's book relies on agreeable memories of in- tellectual bonds, on the Romanians' great love for the "soon to arrive Americans."

With Passage to Romania, it might seem that America has at last found Romania on the map, and we notice from the story Perry unfurls that Romania has been waiting long and patiently, for centuries. As we come closer to the present, Romanian intellectuals become more and more actively involved in making America known to their compatriots. Perry no- tices the importance of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which, to my mind, cannot be stressed enough, and which is actually bearing fruit in the present generation of poets. We live in an age when information travels fast, so Romania is now marching at the pace of the west. In the face of this relaxed feeling that the sky is the limit and that even Romanians can know the world without becoming exiles (many reputed Romanian exiles are mentioned), Perry is aware of the Romanian intellectuals' struggle to be part of the wide world and not lag behind. Perry is a fine and tactful observer who uses the history of Romanian- American cultural relations as a pretext to philosophize in understatements about the general passage of the modern eastern mind. His research is more than history. It delves into patterns of thought and creation, into soul and mind alike. It reveals the core of a na- tion. His book is an affectionate and at the same time rigorously scientific ambassador.

LIDIA VIANIU University of Bucharest, Romania

Romanian Policy towards Germany, 1936-40. By Rebecca Haynes. Studies in Russia and East Europe. New York: St. Martin's Press, in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2000. viii, 205 pp. Notes. Bibliog- raphy. Index. $65.00, hard bound.

The blurbs on the jacket of Rebecca Haynes's study emphasize the revisionist character of her work. Thus, Dennis Deletant affirms the validity of the author's thesis that "Romania's drift toward the Axis was based on an assessment by King Carol and his ministers of the shifting balance of power in Europe during the late 1930s and was not due, as some Ro- manian scholars have argued, to the weakness of the West." Martyn Rady, in turn, praises the book as a major contribution to the understanding of interwar diplomacy in eastern Europe because it demonstrates "that Romanian politicians actively promoted rapproche- ment with Nazi Germany" and challenges "the assumption that Romania was only a pawn in Great Power diplomacy."

Indeed, this work, based on diligent but limited research in German and Romanian archives and on a plethora of published and unpublished primary and secondary sources,

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.34 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 20:59:12 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions