Hello, I'm Dr. Anadale and I teach philosophy at Mount St. Mary's University and Seminary
in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
Today I want to talk about an article titled “Frivolous Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive
in Communist Romania.”
It was published on Zocalo Public Square, May 25th, 2016, by Irina Dumitrescu, a Romanian
immigrant to Canada who now teaches medieval literature at the University of Bonn.
A link is below.
Even after she fell in love with English literature in college, Dumitrescu couldn't shake the
view that the humanities were still somehow superfluous.
Then when she was 20 she spent a summer working at the Canadian embassy in Bucharest.
She learned there the story of a co-worker’s father-in-law, a literature student who was
imprisoned and tortured by the communist regime in the late 40s and early 50s.
She writes: "In order to maintain his sanity, the young man turned to his education.
He knew French, his cellmate knew English, so they spent their captivity teaching one
another their foreign languages.
After his release, the student was forced to work in a factory, where he met a woman
who had also studied literature and been imprisoned as a result.
Neither could marry people with clean records for fear of ruining their ‘files’ with
the government, so they married each other.
Their apartment in Bucharest became a kind of salon, with artists and writers always
coming and going.
This man, who had learned English in a jail cell, ultimately became a literary translator
of English poetry."
"When I heard this story,” Dumitrescu writes, “I understood that the stereotype of the
fluffy, useless liberal arts was a lie.
If the study of literature or history were really that pointless, a government trying
to control the minds of its subjects would not go to the trouble of putting humanities
students and professors in jail.
For educated prisoners, the love of language, art, and scholarship was no mere hobby.
It was a lifeline, sometimes the only thread tying them to their identities, their dignity,
their shredded sense of humanity.
Nothing could be more practical."
Years later, Dumitrescu read various Romanian prison memoirs published after the 1989 revolution.
They told stories of how prisoners taught each other languages, composed and memorized
poetry, as ways of holding on to their sanity and their connection with the past.
These stories from Romania helped her to understand the true value of the liberal arts, which
goes far beyond job preparation and skills building.
She concludes: "We have been taught to think of the liberal arts as unnecessary and wasteful….
Memoirs of the Romanian gulag showed me what a dangerous lie this is.
Educated political prisoners drew on rich inner resources to preserve their sanity and
their spirits.
They used their knowledge to help their fellow inmates survive as well.
Their experiences reveal what the attack on the humanities really is.
It is an attack on the ability to think, criticize, and endure in crisis, and its virulence betrays
how vital the liberal arts are.
The political rhetoric against the humanities exposes what is most important in our education,
even as it attempts to destroy it."
That's from Irina Dumitrescu’s article “Frivolous Humanities Helped Prisoners Survive in Communist
Romania,” on Zocalo Public Square dot org.
Please follow the link to read the whole thing, and please share this article with anyone
you think would like to read it.
Thanks very much for watching; goodbye.