The Borgo Post: Book Review

The Borgo Post BOOK REVIEWS Page 3 Out of the Transylvania Night, by Aura Imbarus (Bettie Youngs Books, 2010). First of all, this is not a book about Dracula (though Vlad's name crops up a couple of times). Nor is it about vam­pires (except the metaphorical type). The Transylvania of the title is the real place, not Bram Stoker's imaginative construct. Yet the book should be of in­terest to anyone with even just a passing interest in that part of the world. A memoir, Out of the Transylvania Night takes us along on a journey that begins on 21 December 1989, the day that a mass demonstration in Bucharest turned against Nicolae Ceausescu, one of the 20th century's mast repressive and brutal dictators. We follow 18-year- old Aura Imbarus through the revolu­tionary days that followed (culminating in the execution of Ceausescu and his wife in Targoviste on Christmas Day), the disillusionment of Romania's new­found freedom and her emigration to the United States. With poignancy and at time with brutal honesty, Imbarus explores the shared immigrant experience: how to embrace the new country while retaining close ties to the original homeland. This does not come easily to her, as she becomes entrapped by the crass materialism of California. It is only when she tempers this with acceptance of (and apprecia­tion for) her past that she finds true hap­piness. I give the last word to Nadia Comaneci, the 14-year-old Romanian gymnast who was the sensation of the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal (the first to ever score a perfect "10" in an Olympic gymnastic event): "Aura's courage shows the degree to which we are all willing to live lives centered on free­dom, hope, and an authentic sense of self. Truly a love story." Elizabeth Miller