Annotations for Personal Life: Pilgrimage

Well, yeah, your trip back five years after your parents died, you went back. You went to Romania.

Yes, I went to Romania. My friend Sylvia Plachy, the photographer, had an assignment in Romania. I don't know if it was an assignment. She's doing a book on Eastern Europe. And she's Hungarian and she knows that - And she goes back to Budapest very often and to Romania, especially to Transylvania, where they're Hungarian-speaking, quite a bit. And she said, "do you want to come with me?" And I said, "sure." And we went to Romania. Her mother was born in the Ukraine, not too far from where my mother was born, and we had this notion that we would somehow from Romania get to go to Ukraine. Turned out to be impossible. We just couldn't cross that border. Without- And also, everybody said, "don't go to the Ukraine. They'll steal your car. They'll rape you. They'll," you know, "bury you in the fields." So, and that was the year that the, while we were in Romania, the Ruble collapsed. So, things were really desperate. But, yes, we went to Romania and it was a revelation for me. And I would like to go back. I'd very much like to go back to Eastern Europe.

But you didn't actually go to where your mother was from.

No, never got there. Nor did Sylvia. But, you know, close enough somehow.