Notes from the Other Side of Night

...The message Romanians get every day, however, immigration formalities himself Before he could, however, his mother and brother were dead in a French hospital, sorely neglected (according to the report he obtained later) by the descendants of the people who gave us liberty, equality, and fraternity...

...Old family friends are demoralized, former classmates are afraid to talk to her freely...

...Pilon relates, it is not permitted to be a Jewish father (or a Jewish child) in Romania...

...To let the victims of totalitarianism go unnamed, unremembered, is already to allow the enemy to define the terms of what is a battle for the survival of our civilization...

...professions for which they are qualified...

...One sign among many: the refugees...

...The strongest of these by far is Mr...

...Pilon's family has much in common with them: Continents apart, they are victims of an internationale that seeks to remake the human race...

...Geran could not do because, as he later told his daughter, "I couldn't say 'white' when I saw black...

...our crazy species fought its criminality...

...The sugar is dirty, as are the saucers, spoons, and tables, even the liquid in my cup seems slightly muddy, so I try to concentrate on the surroundings, the houses, and the passers-by whose gestures and inflections are familiar...

...Pilon's book is a close and vivid portrait of a small group of people-one family-who risked a lot for freedom...

...It is this man's story, contained in the memoir, contrasted with the drudgery of life in Romania, depicted in the journal, that gives the book its strength...

...One thinks of them because Mrs...

...This Mr...

...We should think of these people, described so tenderly by a loving niece and granddaughter, as we debate whether or not our rich and spacious land can take the refugees from Indochina...

...Sammler's Planet, Saul Bellow says that the times we live in may not be the worst, but they cannot be faulted for trying...

...After many months, he decided to take his daughters and wife to New York, from where he might take care of the And she adds: "Like it or not, I'm home...

...He leads his family to freedom, after keeping it intact during the long years of waiting...

...Instead, they block their access to higher education and to work in...

...We are an animal of genius...

...Pilon forces her memory to confront them bravely, but there has been much worse to endure than being forced to wait for permission to leave a Marxist dictatorship, leaving behind most of what one owned...

...The book is best when it deals with the strong characters, since only they can make credible its message of hope...

...Pilon's book-which interweaves memories of her childhood and her family's departure from Romania in the early 1960s with the journal of a brief visit back, some 15 years later-is that it shows us in some detail what it is like to be a refugee from Communism...

...Our weak species fought its fear...

...And then perhaps we may say with Saul Bellow, con-eluding the passage quoted above: There is still such a thing as a man-or there was...

...And in reading Notes from the Other Side of Night, the memoir of the young Romanian philosopher Juliana Geran Pilon, one thinks of the "boat people," desperate survivors of what Bayard Rustin refers to, in anguished speeches, as the second Holocaust of the century...

...it isn't possible...

...Geran learned that his relatives in America, afraid of the burden, refused to sign the affidavit of support for his mother and crippled brother...

...For of course the commissars in Indochina (and elsewhere) would like nothing better than to have us think only in terms of faceless statistics...

...There are still human qualities...

...But it is in the air now that things are falling apart, and I am affected by it...

...A steady stream has come out of the Communist East...

...the defeat of the Free World in Indochina has produced a flood...

...JLVlrs...

...There is one step in self-improvement that can be taken, joining the Communist Party...

...names and occupations of their co-citizens who are persecuted and taken away...

...He knew, without being (evidently) particularly religious, that a family that lets a militantly atheist state define its faith is doomed...

...I am not sure that this is the worst of all times...

...is that you cannot get somewhere else by your own efforts...

...Not that they suffered more than others: Sufferings there were, and Mrs...

...It may fairly be said that the author tells us perhaps too much about herself, compared to the people whom she sees and remembers...

...Without this strong, good man, there is little doubt the family would have succumbed to the numbing pressures of the dull and mean col-lectivist Romania which Mrs...

...It is a family which (unfortunately) is far from exceptional in its misfortune: Having survived quite by chance a holocaust that devoured most of their relatives, my parents persevered for another seventeen years to escape from a new dictatorship, no less repulsive for its ludicrous claim to represent the proletariat...

...This ironic observation reflects a quality Mrs...

...Similarly, the former NLF militant Doan Van Toai, thrown into a re-education camp after the fall of Saigon, compiles lists of compatriots who have disappeared...

...Although the Romanians are among the worst anti-Semites of Europe, having begun the Final Solution before the Nazis even asked them to collaborate in it, under socialism they have not been killing Jews as a matter of policy...

...was, although his children could not know it, a matter of crucial importance to the family's survival...

...The excuse is that they are 4'not of healthy social origin," a convenient euphemism for those members of Romanian society whom its Marxist masters feel they could do better without...

...In Romania even children have to applaud on demand " It is a country so defeated that there seems to be no incentive to do anything well: I sit in a cafe near the marketplace, drinking some coffee...

...What is exceptionally important about them...

...Choosing liberty is a long-term commitment, and reaping its benefits takes more than a train ride across an iron frontier...

...Forced migrations are not new to history, but by the United Nations' count some 70 million have had to find new homes since the end of World War II, whether because conditions became intolerable for them, or because their presence was found intolerable by a ruling elite...

...This is why Soviet-bloc dissidents are so scrupulous about obtaining and publishing the Roger Kaplan is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation in New York...

...In writing so closely about family and childhood, it is difficult to avoid a streak of sentimentality...

...It also can come as a rude shock to find out that people who are already free can be deficient in generosity...

...Pilon obtained from her father...

...The importance of Mrs...

...A million boat people, one chance in two of drowning-who can really comprehend that...

...Geran's clandestine celebration of Passover ("My family used to celebrate our special dinner most unobtrusively...

...When the family reached Paris, Mr...

...No special claims are made on our sympathy, and yet she so badly wants us to know who these people are that we cannot avoid a strong sense of their exceptional importance...

...For it would be a hopeless tale indeed without the saving example of his bravery and perseverance...

...He refused to surrender, unlike so many of the people she sees in Bucharest...

...At the same time that a child is led to resent his "unhealthy social origin," he is deprived of an opportunity to find out for himself what this origin really consists of...

...Wherever he was, he never wavered in his determination to get somewhere else...

...And so we have another irony that Karl Marx with all his cunning probably never dreamed of: In trying to impose some order on history, it is far easier to create a refugee internationale ihan a proletarian one...

...What was exceptional was this: The Gerans were able not merely to survive the two great life-denying ideologies of the twentieth century, but to keep alive the memories of their lost ones and the values they lived for...

...Pilon observes sadly on her brief trip back...

...This is no small feat, for, as Mrs...