When I bought this book I was in serious depression mode. I felt I belonged so in glee I pressed ok, buy. I live in a so called ‘foreign’ land and I ache for my ‘motherland’. The attraction was mutual. Then. Time passed.

I was vulnerable. So I forked the bucks through my Kindle tablet. Do I regret it? Sort of kinda of, not really. I really liked it. It’s juicy in details which makes my mouth water for stuff such as this. I understand the longing, the constant battle of identities because of the languages, I get it. The exasperation of the Cold War stuff as well. In my younger years there was nothing to consume but intricacies of the Cold War and the ‘Liberation’ of the nations from the yoke of the USSR. I wasn’t there with them but I saw in it on the tv and read it in the Californian papers like the very lightweight San Jose Mercury News which seemed a baby compared to the San Francisco Chronicle and a few others like the NYT or WSJ. I lived it through the lenses of the many white men who spoke on those behalfs back then, Foreign Affairs whatnot. Not to say its the same.

Although seeing live on the tv news of the fall of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu and the drama that ensued his downfall, as we in America felt a glorious feeling of liberation that we helped the world rid itself of the commie scums, well, one can’t help but not remember their ill fate as they faced the firing squad as we felt pitty for his wife, Elena Ceausescu. It isn’t until these last years that we get a slight glimpse of those last seconds of the Socialist Republic of Romania. Paratrooper Ionel Boeru, the couple’s executioner, has come out to tell us those last seconds of that republic.

Boeru says it was the 29 bullets from his AK-47 rifle that killed the evil president and his ruthless wife Elena when they were lined up against a courtyard wall and executed by firing squad. Then an army captain, Boeru remembers how the 71-year-old tyrant was smartly dressed and smelled heavily of aftershave.

“Ceausescu’s last words were, ‘Long Live the Socialist Republic of Romania, ­independent and free’,” says Boeru. In contrast Elena Ceausescu smelled badly of body odour. And her last words were far from statesmanlike. “She yelled at a soldier, ‘You motherf****er’,” he says. Boeru, now 56, rarely talks about what happened on Christmas Day 1989.

We were told by Cold War propaganda what occurred there but not through Jewish eyes. They seem to somehow be in the wrong side of history on this side of the planet, that is, Europe. No matter where or how, place of time, it ails the Jewish lot. So to hear their voices of those persecuted by communism and the Soviet aftermath tell it, well it offers a window into the many hows which otherwise remain locked up in the silence or the few circles which roam said stories.

Where does the mesh occur indeed. Where does memory begin and where does makeup land start worst yet where does the nostalgia begin which if not careful can turn into romanticism? I do not know. But I understand their plight. Their moves. America though in its infancy is yet to suffer the lot of Europe. Not that America as a continent hasn’t suffered persecution for ideas or thinking or mass deportation, ethnic cleansing whatnot. One ought to be thankful for it not becoming a preferable habit of sorts as in much of European history would indicate it. We Americans long for Europe because it was the hell of the many.

We long to bathe in its past yet the shore is long away. Still, when we wet our feet we question the father. I, for example, wonder why does the European lot need to compare their linguistic achievements to us? We are not the same there. We are a lot that abhors the language imposed upon us. There, the European Jew has lost touch or sensibility. It, does not know, our lot. We did not ask for English, nor Spanish, nor Portuguese. We had our own languages. We still have our own languages by the miracle of persistent and rebellious attitudes towards the imposer who punishes us by infringing our rights to think and develop in those languages. And if money is poured unto said languages it is only to ‘rescue’ them from extinction though they be only left 5 old speakers whose fate and moribund souls must suffer the hell of reviving their languages through he insistence of the speech recorders. I was particularly peeved  by Ephemeridae.

I first read Borrowed Time, with that jacket, yes, in the late summer of 1996. My first and only term at SDSU which is to this day, I feel, my true Alma mater. Such was the impact of it that one April the 8th of a 2015 I decided to buy it again in digital form far fetched notion indeed from the days I curled up to the book in paper format in the corridors of SDSU that 96. The memories it brings, yes, they last. So I bought it again. Only to finish it again in February 2016. The math says 22 months to read. So I took my time. Loads more than what it took in 1996. Why? What happened? There is a pain so deep which transpires time as the very breath I take now, it feels here and now. Though I fail to recollect my exact emotions when I first read the book I can recollect being taken by it in a way palpable today as then. Suffice to say, Mr. Monette weaved a tale that drew on the past as well as the now and the future which entangles one to this day. So am repetitive, only because I went against the grain towards my own myself, I do not reread for the most part. Yet I did for this volume. It is not easy to describe the aforementioned. What is it that makes a person reread a book? Take good old Virgina Woolf. She suggested to read a book ‘several’ times. But for the sake of memory? To relive? So I did it. I feel like when I got off the metro Piazza del Popolo in Rome, confronted with a past only I know because I knew where I was since I had been there before and I could imagine its world anew. A past I built on bits and pieces; facts and sheer fantasy. So I walked it alone. Admiring its beauty. Although I was more critical of Monette this time. The emotional fluctuations of the passage of time as he went through the pangs of pain and love for his dear Roger.

A reading of Monette is a delight because this is a good wordsmith. Not to mention that he weaves a series of interrelated events with the emotional load which tends to obligue one to side with the narrator on the injustices suffered by those who ended up guinea pigs for the conservative agenda of the Reagen years which linger on to this very day like a bad fart. Again, the second reading made me see a different Monette though, perhaps because so much time has passed by and am more cynical than when I was younger and more prone to the references to Greek and Roman history alluded in the text, stretched out like a thin silk line to the present, ah, yes, what imagination doesn’t fall for that? Yet the emotional decrying seems so exaggerated at times, viewed from what we now know with what we knew then, it is easy to lay blame on Paul.

Over and out.