Reading List for Summer

Every summer our Marxist teachers, prompted by the Communist Party’s Ministry of Education, sent us home with a reading list of classical literature titles as well as the dear leader’s latest propaganda and “enlightened” writings and speeches by the infamous Marxist “revolutionaries” such as Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.

One of the items missing from the dear leader’s list was accurate information about their real biographies, not the lies about their “amazing” ideologies and bloody struggles.

These Marxists left in their social activist wake, in their effort to bring about communism to the masses, a false and miserable equality that killed people’s spirit, their freedom, their pride, their humanity, robbed them of their wealth, and put so many in gulags and mass graves while the “revolutionaries” prospered with confiscated wealth from the millions they killed.

There was no way to research through communist archives and few people were given access to any documents that might reveal embarrassing histories about their Marxist “heroes” and bloody psychopathic social activists.

I did not bother reading the dear leader’s latest propaganda, but I certainly enjoyed the classics. Many books were banned and forbidden reading, and could not be found in the local library I visited but other red-bound tomes that promoted the “class struggle” and other communist propaganda were on the shelves in multiple copies.

The local librarian was a dull and ignorant communist apparatchik who fashioned herself as a learned person. She attended night school because her days were busy with propaganda and snitching on her fellow citizens, friends, and family. Her decaying and yellowed teeth from excessive cheap Carpați cigarette smoking made her look much older than she was. She wore an ugly grey suit with permanent food stains and a lapel bejeweled with a communist red star insignia.

Dry cleaners were hardly accessible or affordable to the oppressed masses and even to government informers like her. She pretended to be my friend to get information on innocent people that she could then turn in for extra cash or other rewards. But I had her number while pretending to be naïve.

I borrowed so many books, four at a time, from my summer list and read insatiably. I wanted to know as much as I could about the real world outside of our heavily guarded borders with menacing soldiers told to shoot anybody on site if they tried to cross without authority or in the dead of night. Our communist world was a prison that kept us locked in.

I found a cool place to read, away from noise and interference with my daydreaming. That place was under a lone small apple tree at the edge of a wheat field, not far from our concrete apartment complex. I could stop reading for a moment, raise my eyes to the clear blue sky and imagine my journey to a fascinating place, an impossibility over time, space, or tightly guarded and latched borders. Freedom existed only in my imagination which could carry me anywhere if I read the right kind of book, the magical carpet to amazing places.

At Maita’s house in the mountainous village, in the green grass in her orchard, under the plum or quince trees, I could lose myself in the pages of amazing books and fly away on imaginary trips to faraway places. At lunchtime her voice and the smell of cooking from the outdoor summer wood-burning stove brought me back to reality.

Surrounded by buzzing bees, the occasional chirping birds, the gentle breeze, sunshine, and the blue and green mountains, I was in my own garden of Eden. And I learned that freedom existed outside of our heavily guarded borders and people were happy, and the “evil” and “dangerous” capitalism allowed people to live much better lives than we did under the socialist boot of the Communist Party who filled our heads with daily propaganda and lies. I knew then that I had to escape.