Feluri de a te întoarce acasă – amintiri, scrisori, fotografii, călătorii
Ways of Returning Home – Memories, Letters, Photographs, Journeys

Summary/Abstract: For each of us, home carries various meanings. For migrants, especially for those who decide to self-exile due to a degrading political regime from which they are forced to leave in order to live with dignity, home remains possible only in their memory. Some never manage to revisit their native places, others are saddened upon return to find that what could have evolved has regressed, and yet others choose to contribute in whatever way they can to progress, whenever possible. It is the case ofOpritsa Dragalina-Popa, whose returns home were meaningful each time. The most precious gift, dedicated to the memory of her ancestors, is her memoir volume My Past Is Just Beginning: The Memories of a General’s Granddaughter (Humanitas, 2024), that ends with a chapter displaying several letters. Family letters, friendly letters, letters of professional interest – important documents through which history comes alive. By re-reading them, Opritsa hears familiar, beloved voices. We, as readers, discover them as double mirrors, reflecting not only the way in which the world we live in shapes who we are, but also how we, by living, shape the world into what it is. Offered to the reader, these letters seem intended for us as well. In Bucharest, in 1911, a father writes a letter to his son on the occasion of the latter’s coming of age. A worried mother, disappointed with her eldest son, writes in 1926 to her younger son about the duty to carry forward the family’s efforts. A friend from the front, in Sinaia in October 1916, encourages another, wounded in the Jiu Gorge and on his deathbed. In December 1976, a son writes from the United Kingdom to his old father in Toledo, U.S.A., about the circumstances in which his beloved uncle, his father’s brother, died in Bucharest in 1949. In December 1969, the abbess of an Orthodox monastery in Ellwood City, Pennsylvania, writes to an old friend in Bucharest that “memories are imperishable; they are the only earthly possession that no one can take from us.” Even more than earthly, we might add. For certain readers, it does not matter who these people are – they are human, and that is enough. Yet for specialists, for those concerned with history, it matters that they include General Ioan Dragalina, Queen Maria of Romania, the poet Cincinat Pavelescu, Peter Dragalina (the firstborn of Commander Virgil Dragalina), General Corneliu Dragalina, and Princess Ileana. An identity model, a spiritual matrix that remains perpetually necessary, emerges through them.

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