Farewell, My Transylvania

Advocate staff photo by Patrick Dennis
Ella Veres revisited her native Transylvania earlier this year, using photographs and a lengthy journal to document her experiences.

She's also a teacher, photographer, mother, scholar and self-described "citizen of the world." Now in her last year as a student in LSU's master of fine arts creative writing program, Veres teaches composition and introduction to drama at the university, too.

Her work defies easy category, and that's just how Veres likes it. "Why should I be categorized?" asked Veres, mentioning Maya Angelou as an example of a talent who thrives in several art forms.

Veres' resistance to labels was perhaps deepened by her youth as a native of Communist-era Romania, where the government was fond of assigning people their identities.

Coming of age in the legendary Transylvania region of Romania during the 1960s, Veres pursued her career as an actress, despite numerous obstacles imposed by the regime of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

A state-run theater academy controlled Romania's most lucrative acting jobs, routinely allowing only eight admissions from among thousands of applicants. Those slots often went to friends or relatives of party officials, Veres said.

Frustrated, Veres eventually secured entry to the University of Bucharest, where she studied Romanian, English and Hungarian. Her scholarship would take her across the border to Budapest, Hungary, where she pursued American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University between 1993 and 1998, when she moved to Baton Rouge.

Meanwhile, Veres also began learning about media work at the American Journalism Center at Budapest. "In Budapest, I used a computer for the first time," she recalled. "I was so intimidated by the mouse."

But Veres' anxiety about computers quickly disappeared, and she became a big fan of the Internet. New York Times writer Michael Kaufman had befriended Veres, and he helped get her essay about the Internet published in The Times on April 30, 1998.

"It was amazing," Veres said. "I came home, and there were 200 messages from around the world."

Her Times debut was the high point in a fledgling journalism career that has also included a personal column on the Internet, reporting for numerous European publications, and an internship at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty in Prague.

It was in Prague that Veres first met Kaufman, who had taken a leave of absence from The Times to work on Transitions, a journal devoted to covering the shift from communism to democracy sweeping Eastern Europe.

As part of his unofficial duties, Kaufman occasionally lectured to visiting journalism students. He would often end his remarks by asking students to return to their homelands and submit stories for Transitions. In most cases, Kaufman's blanket invitation failed to produce takers. Veres, though, immediately accepted the challenge.

"She stayed behind after class, and she said, 'What can we do?'" said Kaufman, who was quickly impressed by her writing. Her stories "were remarkably good. She was part poet and part journalist. She has an instinct for a story. It may not be a journalistic story, but it will be interesting.

"I realized that she had a legitimate talent. I realized that she had the spark of something," said Kaufman, now retired from The Times and working as an author in New York. "I've told people that she's a singular creature. She's not like anyone else. In that combination of inspiration and perspiration, she has both. She rides, she falls, then she picks herself up and she goes again."

To express things she couldn't say through her reporting, Veres turned to writing poetry, fiction and plays. Recently, she won the Lillian Hellman Playwright Award.

After applying to writing programs in the United States, "I was accepted at Columbia University and LSU," said Veres. "I came to Baton Rouge, where, thanks to (faculty member) Andrei Codrescu and Moira Crone, the director of the MFA creative writing program, I got an assistantship."

Veres sought out Codrescu, another Romanian ŽmigrŽ and writer, at the suggestion of Kaufman, a mutual friend. Though Veres was initially reluctant to ask for Codrescu for help, Kaufman persuaded her, and after Codrescu saw samples of Veres' writing, he became an enthusiastic ally.

Jim Bennett, another member of LSU's creative writing faculty, was also impressed with Veres' work.

"She's a very talented, inventive writer who's hard to pigeonhole. She's someone whose work goes from journalism to poetry to essays to fiction. I would say the most remarkable thing about the woman is her facility with language," said Bennett, referring to Veres' command of Romanian, Hungarian, English and French.

"It's absolutely astonishing how she's picked up on English," he added. "Having tried my hand at French and having lived in France for a year, I can vouch for how difficult a task that is. But I'm sure it's doubly difficult coming from Transylvania to the States and having to pick up on English. But she's quite remarkable in her gifts with language -- and much of that she gets on the page."

Veres' family includes her 10-year-old son, Alex Bordei, a student at Baton Rouge Center for Visual & Performing Arts. Alex has been a running influence on his mother's creative life.

When Veres was pregnant with Alex, her disenchantment with the slowness of Romanian reforms after the 1989 revolution prompted her to seek distraction in the pages of E.M. Forster's "A Passage to India." The experience deepened her fascination with English language.

And in 1999, as Veres dealt with the death of her former husband, who is also Alex's father, she tried to cope by embarking on a series of fanciful stories, "Absurd Fairytales."

This year, Alex learned to share his mother with a darkroom as Veres began an ambitious project to document her native Transylvania in words and pictures.

Veres had dabbled in photography for years. Before she revisited Transylvania for a month last summer, she sought advice from Thomas Neff, head of the photography program in LSU's Fine Arts Department.

Among other things, Neff helped her select and learn to use a digital camera. Because digital cameras display the picture on a small screen before it's recorded, Veres was able to use the new technology to earn the trust of her subjects.

Veres also carried a more conventional camera, shooting nearly 60 rolls of film.

After Veres returned from Romania with scores of images documenting life in her native community of Zalau, Neff "taught her, again in a brief session, how to make color prints. I was amazed at what a good eye she has, and the speed with which she learned many of our lab techniques," said Neff. "She is one of my best apprentices, relentlessly following her goals."

As she traveled throughout Zalau, one of the poorest areas in Romania, Veres kept a companion journal for her photography. This week, Baton Rougeans can sample both the text and pictures from Veres' journey at "Farewell, My Transylvania," an exhibit at Baton Rouge Center for Visual & Performing Arts.

Veres plans other exhibits in the coming months. In the meantime, some of her work can be seen at her Web site, http://www.ellaveres.com.

"Last May, I went back to my homeland in Transylvania, and I wanted to write something, but I knew that Americans here wanted to hear about cultural differences," Veres said. "I knew that the American people were eager to hear about Dracula, Ceausescu and other sad stories that we are famous for."

Even as she acknowledged Transylvania's troubled history, Veres wanted to move beyond the stereotype of her homeland as a drab diorama of powerless victims. Her pictures and prose also hint at the resilience and humor of the Romanian people.

In "Neighbors With Yellow Bucket," a bright yellow bucket shines like a rescue flare in the hands of an old woman wearing a shabby woolen wardrobe. In another picture, "Unfit for Life I Went to the Monastery," a delicate white lace cloth hangs from a makeshift clothesline in a primitive landscape.

Many of Veres' pictures are like that -- the bright spark of resistance in a seemingly indifferent cosmos.

Veres used only color film for her project -- a political reaction against the gray sensibility that Ceausescu imposed on Romania for years.

"Before 1989, we didn't have color there," Veres said. "I think the absence of color was politically induced to depress us. We had what you might call color starvation."

But Veres stresses that Romanian history entails more than the struggle against communism. "The situation is so complex that I can't describe it properly. We have quite a mix of people -- Romanians, Hungarians, Gypsy people and German people," she said. "They're quite intolerant of each other."

Veres, who describes herself as an "amalgam of Transylvanian ethnicities," found her camera a powerful tool in helping her subjects affirm their identities. In the days of Ceausescu, said Veres, Romanians were discouraged from standing out.

"I could give something back to them," Veres said. "It was very rewarding for me. Before, everything was leveled. You didn't have personalities. You didn't have individuals."

Veres' photography also satisfied a more personal ambition. In Romania, Veres said, several generations of a family often live under one roof, and parents make great sacrifices to give their children better lives. Given that reality, children can have difficulty establishing their independence from as they grow into adulthood, she said.

In showing her work to her mother during her summer visit to Romania, "I could show my mother that I was now a woman," Veres said.

Veres hopes to bring her photo exhibit back to Romania one day. "I'm really anxious about how they will react," Veres said.

Most of the Transylvanians in Veres' exhibit pictures are either very young or very old. Veres said she usually wasn't interested in photographing Romanian teen-agers because they dressed very much like Americans.

As Romania comes under the influence of the global economy, said Veres, more of its culture is becoming homogenized. "What's the use of photographing a McDonald's or a new bank ?" she asked.

Despite globalization, life in Veres' hometown of Zalau often seems unchanged. In a photo called "Weed Mower," a man cuts weeds not with a gas-powered weeder, but with a scythe. In other pictures, poor old men and women wear clothing long out of fashion in the West.

"Many of the people who saw the exhibit said it was like a history book," Veres said. "They didn't realize that such ways of life still exist."

But Veres has resigned herself to the likelihood that present-day Zalau will eventually vanish in the current of the new millennium. Hence the title of her photo exhibit, "Farewell, My Transylvania."

While cyberspace emerges as the new century's next frontier, Veres seems poised to take advantage of its opportunities. She sees the multiple options and layered dimensions of Internet Web pages as an ideal medium for her own work, which takes many forms.

At the moment, Veres is talking with a publisher about producing the text and pictures of "Farewell, My Transylvania" in book form. Short of that, there's always the Internet. Like many Internet enthusiasts, Veres sometimes wonders if cyberspace will ever become a paying proposition for the artists who use it.

"I would like to do the same things I'm doing now, but I can't see being penniless forever," Veres said. "I try not to plan too much."

"Farewell, My Transylvania," an exhibit of photographs and texts chronicling Romanian Ella Veres' recent visit to her homeland, will be on display Monday through Thursday at Baton Rouge Center for Visual & Performing Arts, 2040 South Acadian Thruway.

Exhibit hours will be 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. each day. Visitors should first report to the campus office to sign in and get directions to the exhibit area.