From “Under the Shadow of Death”: Choosing the Left as a Life Option
From “Under the Shadow of Death”: Choosing the Left as a Life Option

Summary/Abstract: Drawing on scholarship on transnationalism, this paper resorts to concepts such as “trans-ethnic identity” and “multiple social identities” for making sense of two autobiographical writings authored by scholars who articulated a leftist counter-memory in telling their life stories spanning before, during, and after Romanian socialism. The study compares and contrasts the memoirs of Andrei Roth and Ion Ianoși, arguing that their retrospective writings document the articulation of a different strand of memorialistic literature that challenges the hegemonic anti-communist politics of memory. By never recanting their leftist beliefs, their writings give voice to a Marxian counter-memorialistic account of the past that enriches the post-communist memoryscape shaped by what we suggest calling the carceral paradigm of Romanian communism.

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