Stelian Tănase’s Auntie Varvara’s Clients docudramatizes historical phenomena which are rather lateral on the American reader’s radar. Be warned—rather lateral American reader—that you are in for a bountiful story of the Romanian communist stooges of America’s ex-archenemy, the Soviet Union. The time for cute is gone—there aren’t any dolls on this savage puppet stage: the story of the communist take-over of Romania, pregnant with dark fascination, never delivered much beyond mercy- and hopelessness. Stelian Tănase’s volume scans the period leading to that take-over that left the country at the unfragrant feet of the Red Army; it focuses on events dating back to the 1920s-40s, but also follows their characters’ fates into the 1944-1989 period—when Romania was sucked into the world’s largest red district— and up until the early twenty-first century.

      Romania is one of the Eastern European countries whose capital is not Budapest. Unlike Hungary, Romania doesn’t border only on itself. Like Hungary and others, though, it fell into the Soviet lap at the Yalta early-1945 fire sale; like them, it doesn’t distinguish itself by its small yet variable size. Romania got repeatedly entangled in geo-ploys, where it figured as a buffer zone between empires (Ottoman, Austrian, and Russian), and as a provider of primary matters and excuses for invasions. A messy history, you would say; but that is the descriptive name for ‘history’ in accordion-like territories. Romania’s name and language strike a Roman chord in the syncopated music of slight means and high aims. Since the eighteenth century the three provinces (Wallachia to the South, Moldavia to the East, and Transylvania to the West) went on the ascending slopes of re-Romanization: they rediscovered their forgotten Latin heritage and used it as the non-negotiable bargaining chip in the process of nation building, which ended up in the lucky strike of 1918, when the country became known as Greater Romania. Latin was the fetish of self-righteous nostalgia, Italian was Morse to the late Romantic lovers and other operetta characters, but it was French which became the second language, air and flair of the local intelligentsia. Ironically, the tongue of Voltaire & comp. entered the Romanian provinces from the East, brought by the many, young and well groomed Russian officers stationed in Moldova’s barracks and boudoirs at the turn of the nineteenth century. A century and change later, red-dressed and -faced, the Russian officers and soldiers who had forgotten their ancestors’ linguistic propensities tried to impose on the Romanians—now a maneuverable mass of working guests in their own country—the truth that their language was mostly Slavic and that Rome was far away. Which was true: Sancta geographia!—for some 45 years, Bucharest was closer to Vladivostok than to Rome. It was so, one might argue, because the Eastern European city and the one on the Pacific coast of the USSR were sharing the same underground, of which Rome or the USSR unfriendly Vatican did not partake […]