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“There are scenes in this book that the reader will never forget.”—Mircea Eliade
With a new Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by bestselling historian Wilfred M. McClay
In Notes from the Other Side of Night, Juliana Geran Pilon provides a beautiful memoir of a return to her native Romania in 1975, which she left with her family when she was just fourteen. Poetically weaving together hard-won adult insights with her childhood perceptions, Pilon tells the haunting stories of her parents, grandparents, neighbors, and friends. She recounts the chilling realities of anti-Semitism, political imprisonment, and judicial execution under Romania’s ruthless communist authorities. And she remembers those few who managed to retain their humanity despite the horrors that surrounded them.
Told with detached melancholy, the result is a book full of political and spiritual wisdom. At a time when the totalitarian crimes of the last century are being minimized, if not entirely ignored, Pilon’s meditation on evil, hope, and love is profoundly moving.
“A grim indictment of [a] communist state, the drab, fear-ridden existence of its inhabitants, the poverty and repression. . . . Despite all this, Pilon shows, the embers of hope, compassion, and religious faith somehow survive beneath the suffocating mantle of totalitarianism. . . . An impressive writing talent.”—M. Stanton Evans, National Review
“A moving, if ever so melancholy, set of reminiscences.”—Irving Louis Horowitz, Rutgers University