THE BOOK OF FAMINE

(Cartea foametei)

Larisa Turea
Publishers Review (From the Back Cover)

Soviet Moldova, 1946-1947: mother makes cakes of grass and earth and carefully divides them between her kids. Father goes

out to the city, looking for food, and, when he returns, he dies, drained by starvation, in the house threshold. Somebody stole their neighbours horse and slaughtered it for food. And a woman living next door is heard to have slain her younger child, a few months old, to feed her other kids. Meanwhile, the requisition detachments diligently continue their mission, to make sure that no wheat bean could have remained in anyones barn. On the 1932-1933 famine in Ukraine a lot has been written, but how many people know that there was another famine, as dreadful as this one, in Moldova, which was not the consequence of drought, as historical records had claimed at that moment, but of the Communist authorities eagerness, and which killed more than 200 000 people? This book aims to fill this historical gap with the touching testimonies of survivors, but also with files and photographs found in the archives. Although reading it is next to unbearable, the book is a page turner, since everything seems to be an excerpt from an awkwardly exaggerated horror novel. Only that it is perfectly genuine. Larisa Turea worked at this terrible book more than 20 years, she gathered testimonies from people who underwent famine, accounts from survivors, as well as archive materials, documents, photographs (a set of photographs from the forties, taken from the photo archive at National Archive of the Republic of Moldova, have been published in this volume). The Romanian press saw this book as an editorial event. There had already been published reviews and interviews with the author in notorious publications (for instance, in Observator cultural) even before its launch.

About the Author

Larisa Turea was born on February 29, 1952, at Calinestii Falestilor, in Bessarabia, into a family of schoolteachers. She graduated from University of State in Chisinau with a Journalism degree in 1974. Probation in France (1995, Paris, Courant dEst programme financed by the Romanian Ministry of Culture; Grenoble, the Cultural Politics Observer) and USA (University of New York, Remarque Institute). She is a journalist, art critic, member of The Writers Union of Moldova, President of the Moldovan section at the International Association of Theater

Critics, literary secretary at Mihai Eminescu National Theater, contributor to cultural reviews as Timpul, Contrafort, Sud-Est cultural, founder and editor-in-chief of National Theaters Review.

Press Reviews
Using the word famine was absolutely banned in public areas. I used to pick some things from my relatives whispered conversations and particularly in my granparents home, which was situated in a rural village on Prut Rivers side. In fact, it is even a longer story. My childhood was hunted by a skinny, hunchbacked womans figure, who, at that moment, seemed as old as the mountains to me. She used to watch me all the time, come meet me, hold me, slip candies and sweets in my hand. No one wanted to tell me who she was - only when I was seven years old, when I went to school, they told me that this miserable being had eaten, during the famine, her only child: a one year old little girl. My parents, schoolteachers continuously transferred from village to village like some nomads in order not to settle down anywhere, were looking for a nanny for me (I was, at that moment, only a few months old it was already the fifties) and accepted to employ her. Naturally, someone soon told them the whole story and... I got nannyless, but, during the period she had looked after me, she had become attached to me in a way... One day, she dissapeared and no one has ever heard from her since, they lost both her track and name. However, my mother had asked her how the whole thing happened and the woman had told her that her little girl was already dead when she cooked her and eaten her (what a horror!). Then, she put her little bones in her wedding shoes box and buried them in the churchyard. (excerpt from Observator culturals interview with Larisa Turea) A simple and touching book, which brings together the testimonies of those who faced Communisms most evil weapon of subjugating human bodies and souls: starvation. (Observator cultural)

It probably is the key-work to understanding what has happened to Bessarabia during these 68 years since it was uprooted from (Greater, for only a little longer than two decades) Romanias body. (Doina Jela, editor) Every sketch is gloomily colored, one of the witnesses saying that he sees everything as a black and white film. It is a film with people starving to death, a film in which life turns to death much too soon, everything starting with the traces of war, going further with the disaster of drought, reaching the highest point of calamity with the obligatory character of collections (the agricultural tax in kind, i.e. particularly in wheat), the terror of death, the struggle to survive, a film which eventually ends with the frame of overpopulated cemeteries for some or with more optimistic frames of recovering life for others, if one can call these deaths remains life. (Romania libera) This isnt a convenient book, a pleasant reading; it isnt an easy reading either, so dont think about taking it with you to the beach this summer. But if you want to find out more about recent history and boundaries of human grief, then Larisa Tureas The Book of Famine is a very suitable reading. (Gandul) A disturbing book on the atrocities borne by the Bessarabians during 1945-1947. (Jurnal de Chisinau) This book represents the most inclusive, complete and terrible account of Soviet occupation and food paucity which made a lot of victims among the Bessarabians during 1946-1947. (Ziua) An inconvenient, but necessary reading. (Gandul)