The Return - Hardcover

Popescu, Petru

3.22

9 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802116132 ISBN 13: 9780802116130

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1997

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Romania's most famous literary ex-patriate traces the story of his family's escape from communism, his marriage to the Jewish daughter of survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his and his wife's eventual return to their homelands.

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From the Inside Flap:

In 1989, Romania exploded in revolution. Suddenly the borders were open and those who had fled Nicolae Ceausescu's tyranny could now revisit their roots. Among them was Petru Popescu, once Romania's most famous opposition writer, now a best-selling American author and successful Hollywood filmmaker.

This book is the story of his journey. It is also a fascinating historical account of growing up under "ordinary Communism." Witnessing political killings, coming of age in a regime where even sex was state-regulated, finally tricking Ceausescu himself into giving him the chance to defect, Popescu's odyssey encapsulates many of the major events of the late twentieth century. Popescu's American wife, Iris, is the daughter of Holocaust survivors; thus within one American family are combined two powerful immigrant sagas: survival of Nazism and flight from Communism.

Traveling back with his wife to Bucharest, Prague, and other Eastern European cities, the author faces his greatest revelation: the key to understanding the past lies not within the political horror, but within his own childhood and youth. Personal ties reveal themselves as life's most lasting bonds; it is love that provides the material of experience and growth, love between parents and children, within families, and across generations. The secrets of the past are the secrets of what we have loved and how we have protected what we loved.

"Petru Popescu has written a gripping tale of self-revelation told against the background of a return visit to Romania, his native country. Having spent two halves of a publicly successful life in both Romania and the United States, Popescu reveals the tortured conflicts that lie just beneath appearances. In the process, he makes visible the complicated links between Psyche and history and his longing for wholeness and sanity. This is a troubling meditation on the mystery of being a Hybrid Man, a species to which I also belong, and which is, paradoxically and uniquely, American."--Andrei Codrescu, author of The Hole in the Flag: An Exile's Story of Return and Revolution

"The Return teems with life and unforgettable characters.... It is a book about history and personal history, and the way the two have twisted together throughout one life. It is a book about survival, about memory, about love across and within generations."-The Boston Globe

"Popescu's insights are politically pertinent as well as emotionally stirring."--Booklist

"A remarkable and fascinating book."--Library Journal

"A book to make you change your mind about the past. The Return put me in mind of Kapuscinski's The Shah of Shahs. So much you thought you understood about the past and didn't. The political turns out to be personal, not just in feminism but in world affairs too, and riveting, hair-raising reading it makes."--Fay Weldon

"In this compelling memoir of one man's search for truth and freedom, Petru Popescu brilliantly conveys the pain of remembrance. His journey from life in Communist Romania to defection to America, and ultimately the emotional return to his homeland with his wife, represents a triumph of the human spirit."--Tommy P. Baer, International President, B'nai B'rith

"Petru Popescu fled Ceausescu's Romania with little more than his sense of humor, only to find himself caught between the rock of Hollywood, where he eventually became a successful novelist and screenwriter, and the hard place of childhood memories of the repressive Communist state. Then history intervened, the regime fell, and Popescu made the unthinkable voyage home with his American wife. The Return is the savagely funny and ultimately hopeful account of that journey."--John Ashbery

Petru Popescu is the best-selling author of Amazon Beaming and Almost Adam. He directed the feature film Death of an Angel.

From Kirkus Reviews:

An ‚migr‚'s account of his return to post-Communist Romania exudes his own and his native land's irrepressible personality. Despite achieving personal and professional success in America after defecting from Romania, novelist and screenwriter Popescu (Amazon Beaming, 1991) continued to be plagued by his past, his defection, and a sense of having betrayed his Romanian readers. More private ghosts include his late twin brother, stricken by polio as a teenager; his writer-father, who walked out on the family after the brother's death; and a selfish mother who dictated the terms of her remaining son's life. With Ceauescu's downfall, Popescu made the fraught decision to travel to Romania as a journalist. The trip proved to be an emotional roller coaster, plunging both Popescu and his wife, Iris, into moments of dread, joy, despair, and reconciliation. From its opening line, ``Listen to me. Listen to me,'' the reader is plunged into Popescu's urgent and energetic confessional style. Seemingly little has been omitted from his story, which at times meanders off track to touch on: the saga of the Popescu family; his marriage to Iris, a child of Holocaust survivors; Romanian history; the intricacies of post-Ceauescu politics; his wife's return to her parents' native Czechoslovakia; and finally, a self-indulgent glimpse of the machinations of Hollywood movie executives. The Return is inseparable from Popescu's unique literary voice and from his overpowering but compelling personality. But his wife also is a central figure. A rare subject of joy and hope in a book otherwise laden with family tensions and disappointments, Iris supplies an uplifting counterargument to The Return's pessimistic thesis: that ``patriotism . . . comes from family, and if it's tortured and incomplete, it means that the family was tortured and incomplete.'' A moving, albeit verbose, very East European testimony about roots, the writer's life, and personal discovery. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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