Checkmate In The Carpathians

It's a deadly game . . . and every move could be their last!As Constantine Rea and his best friend, Hannah, sit across a chessboard from each other, a rickety train takes them from their Vienna home to a dream ski vacation in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. There, the sixteen-year-olds will be staying in style with Hannah's uncle-the American ambassador! But Con's VIP visions melt away when he opens a letter from his elderly friend Frau Maria Rozstoski describing a violent mystery from her Romanian youth and asking a rare favor: Could Con look into it on his vacation?This seemingly simple request leads Con and Hannah straight into the dark corners of Romania's anti-Jewish past, from a terrifying neo-Nazi rally to World War II secrets of the brutal Iron Guard. The closer they get to the truth, the greater the risk. And why does their search keep coming back to an orphan named Poppy?

This study explores the little-known history of the Hungarian Autonomous Region (HAR), a Soviet-style territorial autonomy that was granted in Romania on Stalin’s personal advice to the Hungarian Székely community in the summer of 1952. Since 1945, a complex mechanism of ethnic balance and power-sharing helped the Romanian Communist Party (RCP) to strengthen—with Soviet assistance—its political legitimacy among different national and social groups. The communist national policy followed an integrative approach toward most minority communities, with the relevant exception of Germans, who were declared collectively responsible for the German occupation and were denied political and even civil rights until 1948. The Hungarians of Transylvania were provided with full civil, political, cultural, and linguistic rights to encourage political integration. The ideological premises of the Hungarian Autonomous Region followed the Bolshevik pattern of territorial autonomy elaborated by Lenin and Stalin in the early 1920s. The Hungarians of Székely Land would become a “titular nationality” provided with extensive cultural rights. Yet, on the other hand, the Romanian central power used the region as an instrument of political and social integration for the Hungarian minority into the communist state. The management of ethnic conflicts increased the ability of the PCR to control the territory and, at the same time, provided the ruling party with a useful precedent for the far larger “nationalization” of the Romanian communist regime which, starting from the late 1950s, resulted in “ethnicized” communism, an aim achieved without making use of pre-war nationalist discourse. After the Hungarian revolution of 1956, repression affected a great number of Hungarian individuals accused of nationalism and irredentism. In 1960 the HAR also suffered territorial reshaping, its Hungarian-born political leadership being replaced by ethnic Romanian cadres. The decisive shift from a class dictatorship toward an ethnicized totalitarian regime was the product of the Gheorghiu-Dej era and, as such, it represented the logical outcome of a long-standing ideological fouling of Romanian communism and more traditional state-building ideologies.

An intimate, powerfully written, collection of stories featuring characters who seldom find themselves present in Canadian fiction - ordinary middle class people. A Feast of Longing presents a fourteen-course banquet of characters whose common thread is their own longing D for significance, for meaning in their lives, for their troubles to pass, for guilt to let them go. Inspired by a charismatic speaker to side with the poor, a woman volunteers at a charity soup kitchen and is intimidated by one of the patrons she tries to befriend. A man whose son has been arrested for several crimes tries to find some peace in regular visits to a church. A first year university student reluctantly befriends her aunt's neighbour, a mentally challenged woman. With a poet's eye, ear and heart, sharpened over the creation of five collections of verse, Sarah Klassen brings an insight into characters and a depth to her stories that is not often found in short fiction. In every story optimism is present, but is tempered by the presence, or at least the awareness, of life's cruel underside, adding an extra power to the work."