Moldovan author and scholar Liliana Corobca’s 2017 novel Caiet de cenzor, published in English five years later as The Censor’s Notebook, is a striking exploration of the sinister extent and far-reaching consequences of censorship in Romania during the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu. The novel’s titular censor, Filofteia, mentions that one of the topics that must “definitely always” be removed from written materials is any mention of Greater Romania, referring to the country as it existed between the end of World War I and the onset of World War II, when Romania was larger geographically than at any point in its history, nearly twenty-five percent bigger than it is today. As the novel’s English-language translator, Monica Cure, explains in an endnote, this period is verboten because it is “popularly considered to be a golden age in Romania’s past culturally and economically.” It is also likely that Ceaușescu would not have wanted to remind his subjects of the circumstances surrounding the loss of Greater Romania, which was carved up by the major powers in an ostensible effort to avert or minimize aggression before all-out war became unavoidable.
In 1940, the Soviet Union annexed parts of Greater Romania under the terms of the prior year’s nonaggression treaty between Hitler and Stalin. One of these areas was Bessarabia, roughly contiguous today with Moldova and the small chunk of Ukraine west of Odessa; the other was a group of counties in and around the region of Bucovina, which lay west of Bessarabia and south of the Nistru River, now commonly known as the Dniester. This latter territory was disputed throughout World War II, with Romania trying to recover its lost lands, and its German allies trying to extend the Soviets’ defensive front. Two of the four counties at issue, Cernǎuți and Storojineț, became—and remain to this day—a part of Ukraine; the other two, Dorohoi and Rǎdǎuți, are still (largely) part of Romania.
Corobca’s subsequent novel, 2018’s Capătul drumului, opens in this contentious border region, before following the soon-to-be eleven-year-old Ana and her mother as they are rounded up by the Soviets in 1941, thrown into a crowded railcar, and deported to central Asia. The story is narrated mainly by Ana, nearing ninety and living in Moldova, as she tells her visiting granddaughter Eugenia about her harrowing journey, decade-long exile, and return to her homeland. Now Cure has delivered a truly astounding English-language translation of this noteworthy novel, titled Too Great a Sky. Her work—in passages of soaring beauty and breathtaking sorrow, haunting tragedy and delirious joy—captures the individual tones of the novel’s two generations in Ana and Eugenia; the rhythm and rhyme of both folk songs and aphorisms; and the agony and ecstasy of Ana’s devout prayers. Cure also used her collaborative relationship and friendship with Corobca, built while translating both The Censor’s Notebook and another novel, Kinderland, to ensure consistency and accuracy, which is particularly critical because so much of Too Great a Sky is informed by historical events that are less well-known, even in Romania, thanks partly to Ceauşescu’s censorship. And just as Corobca’s research on censorship informed the earlier novel, she used her work on a volume of oral history from survivors of the Soviet deportations from Bucovina to develop Too Great A Sky.
When the Russian troops first arrive in 1940, residents of Ana’s (fictional) village of Albina are initially more confused than afraid. “The most terrified actually seemed to be the Ukrainians who had come to Bucovina from the so-called communist paradise and knew better than we did what was in store for us.” The locals soon lose track of the border, with those in Albina believing they are still in Romania. They are not. “Suddenly, our Bucovina, which was so small, became two different territories that belonged to two countries.” Ana and her mother find themselves in Soviet territory, but her father, sister, and two brothers, who are all further south in Rǎdǎuți working on her sister’s house, are still in Romania. The Soviets set out to subjugate as well, and on June 13, 1941, they start rounding up so-called enemies of the people in Albina. On the third day at three o’clock in the morning, Ana and her mother are taken. She will never see her father again, and it will be decades before she reunites with her siblings.
The “hellish, godforsaken train” ride lasts for nearly a month. Most of the villagers “came from respectable families” and all of a sudden they are forced to use a hole in the floor of a crowded railcar as a toilet. “The railcar was alive, like a big animal, like a many-headed dragon that cries with all of its mouths, it sighed, it swayed. The howling of pain.” They are given a small piece of bread every couple of days. Water is often fetid or stagnant, having been drawn from ponds. Lice infests the railcar. A mother delivers a stillborn child then slowly sees her sanity slip away. The dead are thrown from the railcar when it stops, though their bodies are sometimes kept around for several days in order to swindle extra food from the guards.
For many of the villagers, especially Ana and her mother, their Eastern Orthodox faith is critical to survival. Throughout the novel, Cure translates dozens of prayers from the devout Ana. “To You, Lord, I call with great sorrow, oh holy God, come and help me! May the voice of my prayer reach your ears, may I not suffer this punishment beyond measure!” Their faith helps them find comfort in terrestrial trivialities as well. “It didn’t take much to make us happy. A person doesn’t need a lot, a person who has God in their heart.” Beneath the railcar’s lone, grated window, Ana carves a hole between two wooden slats, allowing a sunbeam to play across the floor, a diversion and a reminder, “as if God Himself were revealing his presence to us, coming and greeting us.” When bales of straw are thrown into the railcar, the children make dolls from it. In a village where the train stops briefly, Ana is given a kitten that she continues to call Kot, unaware that it is simply the Russian word for cat. A book of poetry is monetized as soldiers are willing to trade food for pages they can use to roll cigarettes.
The real currency is storytelling, however, a way out of the stifling confinement and nightmarish reality of the railcar. “We loved the stories, we, us children, sat and listened with our mouths open wide, everyone sat and listened, we made up new stories too, we passed the time with something, so we wouldn’t go crazy. We told stories nonstop. Those who didn’t tell stories died.” When Ana goes back west long after the end of the war, the power of stories is all that remains. And in the novel’s present day, the relationship between Ana and her mother only remains in stories as well, though their dynamic is echoed in Eugenia’s Skype calls with her own mother.
The train stops in Kazakhstan. It’s “the end of the road,” which is the literal translation of the novel’s Romanian title, and the “handful” of survivors are dazzled by the new liminal space. Gone is the border between Romania and Soviet-occupied Ukraine, the wall between the railcar and the sunlit world racing past. Here they confront the vast two-dimensional Kazakh steppe and the awe-inspiring, overarching “heavenly sky.” They begin to dance and sing in order to stave off the cold when the sun sets, to distract themselves again from impending death. It is one of the many instances of Cure’s sublime translation of song lyrics, upon which she imposes perfect meter and rhyme. “If we knew before our birth, all the pain we’d feel on earth / We’d no longer take the breast, we’d go straight to heaven blessed!”
Ana and her mother are thrown into a loose-knit community of Kazakhs, Tatars, Uyghurs, Kyrgyz, Uzbeks, and “who knows what other peoples.” Ana’s ordeal continues. Cure’s choices throughout this section are a master class in how a translator can help to ensconce a reader in an unfamiliar environment, vividly conveying the dislocation of waking up in an utterly foreign land, as with this breakdown of Kazakh society:
Their word for city was abad, a bigger village or even a district center was a kishlak. We had arrived in a kishtak, a small village, and Eugen and his family lived in a yurt, not far from our kolkhoz. A kolkhoz was composed of a few smaller kishtaks or one big aul. So, a kishtak was a small village, ail—also a kind of small village, aul—a big village, and a yurt was a large wooden house insulated with felt made out of sheep’s wool.
Throughout, Cure retains and subtly elaborates on words in Romanian, transliterated Russian, and other languages that enmesh the reader, as when Jeni, whom Ana becomes close friends with in the railcar, explains that she came to be on the train “because her mother had made sarmale and sent her to take the warm cabbage rolls to her grandmother.” When Ana later starts school, Cure uses the presence of so many different languages to show how the children learned by comparison: “When you got good news, you had to give a suyunshi, a present, so it would go well for you, a kind of adălmaş of ours.” And she rewards readers who pay close attention as well, highlighting that a mǎmǎligǎ is a little watermelon, and then returning to the word later in the novel without repeating its meaning.
While the war continues, there is never enough food, or as Ana indelibly puts it, “we were being cornered by our hunger.” For almost a decade, she does whatever she has to do to survive. She weeds fields, pulls plows, milks cows. She and her mother embroider linens to get additional food. She is taken to work on a commercial fishing boat in the north, and in the face of the persistent peril of bears and whirlpools, builds a cross on the hillside and leans increasingly on her faith. She goes to seamstress school, is sent to build railroads, and eventually finds herself utterly alone after her mother dies. It is then that Ana starts to see crosses where people have died, a “burden of knowing” that she bears alone because others around her see nothing.
When Ana leaves the steppe at age twenty, she goes to Troița de Sus, a (fictional) village in Bessarabia, which by then has become the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. Cure explains in her translator’s note that in the Romanian version of the novel this third section is titled with the village’s name, which derives from troițǎ, meaning “a large wooden or stone cross set up at a crossroads or to mark an event” and de sus, which metaphorically means “from above.” Cure and Corobca opted to name the third section of the English version of the novel “Roadside Crosses,” to highlight the denotation that would otherwise elude English readers. It is yet another edifying decision because a critical theme of this section is Ana seeking to memorialize, via her recollections, all those who died during deportation, in exile, or after returning to their homes.
The third section has a few repetitive or muddled bits, which could be intentional because “the baba remembers everything” and Ana’s recollections jump around chronologically. She revisits the distant past, as when she and her aunt traveled across the steppe searching for her cousin. She recalls her marriage to a teacher she met in a church and the birth of their two children. She recounts when, in 1990, the USSR gave survivors rehabilitation certificates saying “that they deported us for nothing, they tortured us for no fault of our own, everything was a mistake.” And she is dazzled by Eugenia’s computer, “the machine” that can endlessly repeat the poems she memorized on the train when she was a teen.
Toward the end of the novel, Ana recalls when she and her mother-in-law were summoned to the deathbed of a village woman, a purported friend who reveals herself to be evil incarnate, though she is seeking forgiveness before she dies. The woman’s confession is as horrifying as anything that has come before it, displaying yet another dimension of humanity’s depravity. From this point forward, the narrative gathers momentum, partly by switching more frequently between registers—Ana prays and sermonizes on the differences between the past and the present, Eugenia shares songs with her mother, Ana delivers a homily about faithlessness and punishment, Eugenia laments the lack of peace in her heart, Ana tells her stories. During several of these passages, Cure’s translation relies on subtle rhetorical devices to impel the story. Paragraphs begin with the same phrasing: “People are the same . . . ” and “People are divided . . . ”; “The steppe had entered my soul . . . ” and “The steppe hooks you in . . .” A paragraph opening with the statement “Here, a good deed, a nice gesture, is praiseworthy, but it doesn’t seem to have the same weight as there,” continues to bounce between characteristics of people “here” and people “there.” As Corobca melds the themes of storytelling, faith, and piety, she demonstrates how Ana has succeeded in transferring these values to the younger generation, with Eugenia slowly revealing herself to be a believer, too, someone with faith that it will all work out.
Another lesson Ana tries to impart to her granddaughter is how to appreciate what you have, a familiar refrain from older generations, but one which in Ana’s case is particularly powerful. Even in the darkest parts of her memory, Ana’s stories reveal that people used to be more united. “We helped each other out. Wealth divides people, makes them strangers. Times are different now. Supposedly you shouldn’t eat potatoes, because they’re fattening. I think stupidity is the most fattening thing there is . . .” She can sound overly pious or didactic, but nearly everything she says is hard to argue with, particularly in light of what she went through in exile.
It was hard living there, but we knew how to enjoy every moment, little things. But now, when we have it all and things are going well for us, it’s as if something were missing. Little pleasures, a simple life, don’t give us the satisfaction they once did. I feel this weight on my heart sometimes.
I think many of us sympathize with these sentiments, though hopefully our frame of reference for hard living is much more trivial. Novels like Too Great a Sky are one way to ease that weight, one of the little pleasures that satisfy immensely—pleasure in admiring the talent that went into writing and translating this novel, and wonder at the lives of those who inspired it.
Copyright © 2024 by Cory Oldweiler. All rights reserved.
