Saturday, May 28, 2022

2022, book 4: My life as a spy, Katherine Verdery

American anthropologist goes to communist Romania in the 1970s and 1980s, blunders her way through her research, and writes a memoir bizarrely sympathetic to the Securitate.

You can almost forgive Verdery for being naive on her first trips. She was a young postdoc and had, apparently, been too busy to read anything about the world outside the US. Her later trips, however, paint her as someone who still doesn't get it. She spent years studying the habits of Romanians, but has not managed to actually understand her subjects, colleagues, and friends. She manages to offend many of them, and I predict this book isn't going to help.

She's not 100% blind to the problems of informants, since she takes it very personally that her friends and hosts reported on her activities to the Securitate, speaking of "betrayal" and the "pain" she experienced because she "thought they loved" her. Verdery appears to have been (and shockingly perhaps still is) unaware that any Romanian citizen who had contact with a foreigner (let alone an American) was required to file a report, whether they wanted to or not. She then proceeds to paint the Securitate officers as just your average OK guys like you and me, because apparently the torture and terror are just fine as long as she's not the one experiencing them directly. So her friends are backstabbers. But the Securitate were just patriots doing their job. Sure, Katherine.

The best parts of the book are her account of "sneaking into" a parade (surprised people tell her that everyone tries to get out of having to march in these things, and she must be crazy for joining one voluntarily) and some Romanian jokes she recounts ("What did we use to light our homes before gas lamps? Electricity.").

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