Out of the Transylvania Night

by Imbarus, Aura

• ISBN13: 9780984308125
• ISBN10: 0984308121
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-09-01
• Publisher: Bettie Youngs Books
• More Book Details

Summary

This deftly woven narrative chronicles a young woman's experience as she grows up inside Communist Romania, and then flees to the U.S. in search of the American Dream, only to discover that freedom--in both free and closed societies--is an innovation of self.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Foreword	p. ix
The Transylvania Night
The Eyes of Sibiu	p. 3
Heirlooms	p. 15
Boot Prints	p. 29
Up for Grabs	p. 37
A Hole in the Flag	p. 45
The Mercenary	p. 51
The Alienated Ones	p. 59
Christmas Eve at the Morgue	p. 65
Crossfire	p. 75
Meet Me Tonight	p. 83
The Pool	p. 89
Red Christmas	p. 95
Whatever It Takes	p. 101
After the Bleakest Night
The Old Imbarus	p. 113
Fata Morgana	p. 121
The Return of the Rebel	p. 127
A Man of Sophistication	p. 133
Green Power	p. 139
The Proposal	p. 143
Jazz Festival	p. 149
The Twin Sisters	p. 155
Palm Trees	p. 161
The Bureaucratic Procedures	p. 173
And Now, I Leave You	p. 181
Wings	p. 189
Dawn
New Day Dawning	p. 195
The Reality of Paradise	p. 201
The Hoop-Jumper	p. 215
Teaching in a War Zone	p. 223
The Last Glorious Summer	p. 235
Diandra (or Eliazar)	p. 241
A Year in the Navel of the Universe	p. 249
The Family Jewels	p. 255
Losses on Paper	p. 261
Three to Six Months	p. 267
Rivulets	p. 275
Out of the Transylvania Night	p. 281
Epilogue: Los Angeles-Summer 2010	p. 289
Book Group Discussion Questions	p. 291
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Out of the Transylvania Night Aura ImbarusPart I: The Transylvania Night'Then you shall live up there where the stench shall not reach you.' -Prince Vlad II Draculea, to a servant made ill by the stench of thousands of impaled men, women and children. (The servant was subsequently impaled.)1 The Eyes of SibiuThe trees on my street had grown microphones, among the ten million microphones that bloomed in the whole of Romania-one for every two and a third people. The sense of constant scrutiny pervaded us like a ghost of old Vlad Draculea, Vlad the Impaler, whose castle still stood on the other side of the Carpathian Mountains from my town of Sibiu.Perhaps that was why, on the gray morning of December 21, 1989, I had no sense that everything, literally everything, was about to change. The fortunes of my family had gone through considerable changes in the past, especially after the Communists took over, but in my eighteen years of life, change had come to mean little more than the plunge from one Five Year Plan to the next. Other kinds of change were not encouraged, at least not by the government. Other kinds of change were what the microphones were listening for.As for me, on that morning, all I wanted to do was eke out a little Christmas-a holiday that had officially ceased to exist over forty years before. My parents and I were getting ready to go shopping in the Piata Mare and Piata Mica-plazas great and small-and Balcescu Street. The word 'shopping' meant both more and less than it says. It did not mean 'go out and buy what you want.' It did not even mean 'go out and buy what you can afford.' But it did mean 'go out and get in line early, or get nothing.' As a result, my mom had taken a day off from her job as a lab technician in a sweets factory, and Dad would be leaving afterward for his job as an electronics technician at the Sibiu Airport. I was going because this was my first day of winter break from school, and I wanted to find a pretty new dress to cheer my buni, my father's mother, on the coming illicit holiday. I also wanted to look nice myself that day, because an interesting 'someone' might be out shopping, and I hoped to draw an admiring gaze.But should I risk wearing my red faux Coco Chanel jacket? I admired the garment made of material smuggled in from our German relatives. Perhaps it would be wiser to play it safe with the black sweater Buni had knitted for me. She and I had worked out the design together, and she'd managed to turn