My grandparents were born in the late 1920s into a world in which they would have continued their parents' lifestyle of farmers with enough resources to live prosperously with their family. The establishment of the communist regime in Romania in 1945 put an end to this natural course of life. My grandparents and their families were considered "chiaburi"; this word of Turkish origin was used by the communist propaganda to name the rich peasants, describing them as a selfish class who had acquired their wealth at the expense of the poor peasants. All my grandparents' land was confiscated and included in so-called agricultural production cooperatives; some family members who tried to protest ended up in prison. My maternal great-grandmother, who owned one of the largest and most beautiful gardens in the village, died of heartbreak shortly after the Communists confiscated it.
My grandparents were forced to work as employees at the cooperative for a pittance. Under these circumstances, my grandfathers managed to find other better-paid jobs, my maternal grandfather as a railway employee and my paternal one as a road maintenance worker. These jobs were insufficient, however, to ensure a good future there in the village for their children. My maternal grandparents had five children and my paternal grandparents had two. Left with no good prospects for the future in the village, my grandparents sent all their children to the city (Iași) to get an education that would enable them to get a better life. So my father became an army officer; my mother became an accountant, and my uncles and aunts had careers as magistrate, entrepreneur, chef or nurse. None of them returned to live in the village. All their descendants acquired university degrees.
From a formal point of view, it can be said that my family's move from the village to the city was definitely a step up the social ladder. However, this move was not a natural, organic one, but was caused by the destruction of a world, of an entire way of life. My parents' families were part of an elite there in the village; I remember how my grandmother knew how to do absolutely everything that was necessary for the smooth running of a prosperous peasant household: working the fields, raising animals, building a house, preparing food, weaving, making of clothes, even using plants to treat many diseases. In the logic and specifics of that rural civilization, my grandmother was as proficient and highly skilled as any college graduate from an urban civilization. The communist regime, however, destroyed the civilization in which this kind of skills had contributed, for hundreds of years, to the well-being of the family.
