Abstract
'I was sitting on the calidor and I could see...' From this vantage point exiled Romanian writer Paul Goma's first English novel My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest surveys the events in his native Bessarabia, a part of Romanian Moldavia annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940. From the Calidor (a type of verandah, but also a corrupted Greco-Romanian word meaning 'sublime longing' — a feeling often encountered among Goma's Stalinised Bessarabians) of his father's village schoolhouse, young Paul observes the movements and machinations of the Second World War's Eastern front — particularly those of the oncoming Russians, about to swarm into his village instead of the long-hoped-for Romanian patriots ...