“What was intended for evil
was used for good”:

An active member of the Anglican congregation in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, Dr. Monica Cure is the granddaughter of Pastor Simion Cure [1914-90], a Baptist prisoner-of-conscience in Communist Romania. Raised in the United States, she earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California. She was subsequently an assistant professor at Biola University in Los Angeles, where she taught a curriculum including literature, theology, philosophy, and political thought, spanning Plato to Virginia Woolf. Monica is an internationally published poet and awardwinning translator [www.monicacure.com].

In mid-June 2024 the editor of the East-West Church Report interviewed Monica about her multifaceted experience of Romanian church life and culture. She spoke from Bucharest via Skype.

 Your grandfather, Simion Cure, seems key to your own life. Who was he?

My grandfather was born just before the First World War—Romania saw many changes in his time. Prior to the rise of Communism after the Second World War, Romania went through a period of fascism—this was an age of extremism. During the fascist period, it was still possible to be a pastor— there was a Baptist seminary in Bucharest—but the fascists were strongly opposed to Protestants as they were solely in favor of the Orthodox Church. I discovered in archival documents that my grandfather was beaten by members of the Iron Guard [Romanian fascist paramilitary movement]. After seminary he started off ministering to some smaller Baptist churches before eventually becoming pastor of a larger congregation in Reșița, an industrial city in southwestern Romania. That was where Communism found him.

Here too, a lot of my knowledge comes not from oral history, but from archival documents, as I was able to access my grandfather’s secret police files in 2017. In the early Communist years, the Securitate secret police were trying to recruit pastors as informants and to make them amenable to their policies. While my grandfather tried not to make them angry, he definitely did not give them anything that was of use. The Securitate started to put pressure on him, but he refused to do things such as close the church at certain times. Ultimately, through informants inside the church, the secret police were able to pin possession of illegal literature upon my grandfather, as well as the catch-all accusation of working against the regime. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, of which he served five. He was released under a general amnesty in 1964.

What was the illegal literature?

Bizarrely, it was a Romanian-American publication that I grew up reading and perhaps finding not so interesting! [Laughs.] Contact with Americans was considered subversive.

Was your grandfather able to continue his ministry after his release from prison?

Only unofficially. Like many former political prisoners, he could not find work except for the lowest kind, so he became a pest control worker. Ironically, that gave him the clearance to travel across the country, so he was able to speak to various church groups. That is why so many Romanians know about him. He also had a special ministry for younger people—he would take them out hiking in the mountains, where they would have time for fellowship.

Do you remember your grandfather?

Yes, but just childhood memories—I was 10 or 11 when he died in 1990. Actually, it was really interesting to get to know him through the eyes of the enemy by reading between the lines in the Securitate files. The secret police made several attempts to recruit him. At one point, they think things sound promising: They describe my grandfather as very smart and a good family man. The only thing is, he is not very punctual! [Laughs.] Reading that, I thought: “Yeah, I don’t think he would be in a hurry to pay a visit to you!”

Did your grandfather stay long in Romania after his release from prison?

Many more years, until 1980. My father, Mircea Cure, was raised there, and I was born there.

Why did your family decide to leave?

There are several narratives—this is what makes family history, as well as history in general, so fascinating. After she was widowed early, my maternal grandmother eventually married a Romanian American who already lived in the United States. I believe that family connection allowed Grandfather Simion to leave Romania. Another narrative thread is that my grandfather was called over to become a missionary in San Diego by Romanian Americans there; at some point he certainly became an official church worker among Romanian Americans in California. When I went to Los Angeles for grad school, I found an entire circle of people who knew my grandfather and had stories about him that they wanted to share with me.

As I Iearn more about Communism in Romania, my sense is that the 1980s were the worst period of all. In my grandfather’s letters, however—the secret police were still opening his mail, of course—I found one passage where he tells my parents that things are not easy in the States either: “When I think about how things are over there in Romania, I’m horrified, but when I see how things are over here, I’m also horrified, so I really don’t know what to tell you about making the choice about whether to leave.” My father was renowned for disapproving of Romanians who left the country, and would say: “If everyone leaves, who is going to hold down the fort?” Then at some point my mother apparently started feeling that God was telling her that they needed to go. She was reluctant to tell my father, but he was getting the same sense, and they finally told one another. They left for the States when I was two years old.

Was your upbringing in the United States strongly culturally Romanian?

Yes—there is a large Romanian diaspora in Detroit, where we went. My maternal grandmother had already settled there, and the Detroit area had several Romanian Baptist and other kinds of Romanian Evangelical churches. Our family social circle consisted of other Romanian Americans.

Was your father also a pastor?

No. One of the really terrible corollaries of having a parent in prison was not just that you lost a parent for that period but that you were also blacklisted—your file was no 

mmediately. By the grace of God, a family friend learned that a music high school in a nearby city needed viola players and that they were not going to examine people’s files too closely. My father and this family friend then crammed to learn the viola—my grandfather was musical and music was always part of their family. When the question “Where is your father?” came up, he said that he did not know, which was true because they kept moving him from prison to prison. That is how my father was able to go to high school and then conservatory once things became less hardline after 1964. Playing and teaching viola also came in very handy when we moved to the States, as my father did not then speak English.

Growing up in the United States, did it feel like you existed in two separate cultures?

I was very conscious of my difference. The process of being transplanted from Romania to the States resulted in lightbulb memories at a very early age, as I sensed that something traumatic was happening. To be honest, for me the two cultures offered correctives to one another. What I loved about the Romanian church was the feeling of connection, family, and trust. In my American context, on the other hand—school, basically—there was a bigger world of possibility and, especially as I got older, the sense of what it meant to be an intellectual woman. The ambition that I was able to pursue came as a result of my American culture.

Was the émigré Romanian Baptist community rather traditional?

Definitely, and especially at that time. A subset had emigrated earlier, but it was still a rather new diaspora, with many newly there due to Communism. There was very much a “batten down the hatches” feeling.

Did the women tend to take inconspicuous roles?

Yes, except if they somehow managed to carve out a niche for themselves! [Laughs.]

How did you come to return to live in Romania?

I loved Romania ever since I first came back for a three-week trip with my mother and sister in 1994, aged 14. Many things suddenly made sense: the ways in which I was different, references my parents used to make. I spoke a language that no one else seemed to speak, and all of a sudden I was in a whole country of it, with its own literature and music. It just felt so healing. At first, I came back every other year, then in 2003 I came to Romania on the Fulbright Scholar Program. Later, being a professor at Biola University meant that I did not visit so often. Then, in 2017, I took an early sabbatical and came back on another Fulbright scholarship. By then, the situation in Romania had changed a lot since I first lived here in 2003—not only was I enjoying it as always, but it suddenly seemed like I could live here. But could I live here? I realized that, if I were to have a major life shift and leave academia, there would be no better place for me to live. So, after my Fulbright finished in 2019, I decided to move to Bucharest and focus on my writing.

You are a professional translator from Romanian to English.

Yes, I am one of a few professional Romanian to English literary translators. Perhaps you know of Nicolae Steinhardt? On my first Fulbright, I discovered his work, The Journal of Joy [Editor’s note: Also known in English as The Diary of Happiness, this is a compilation of reflections by Steinhardt, a Romanian intellectual and later monk who converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1960 in a Communist prison.] That is what started my journey into translation—I began to translate it as a devotional exercise. Thanks to my work as a professor, I became familiar with all the material that Steinhardt had read as well as a much better translator, so I realized that I would be able to translate it well. I went several times to Rohia Monastery where he became a monk—it is in a very remote part of Maramureș County in far northwestern Romania. The monastery holds the rights to his literary work, and I am now trying to secure a contract to publish it. I am obsessed with this book: It is a masterpiece, and I really want to get it into as many hands as possible. Parallels with [American Catholic monk and theologian] Thomas Merton keep coming to mind—I think it could have that kind of cross-over appeal.

Currently, I work especially closely with a Romanian-Moldovan writer, Liliana Corobca—I have translated all three of her novels into English. For the first novel, The Censor’s Notebook, I won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2023. We will soon launch her third novel, Too Great A Sky [https://www.sevenstories.com/books/4650-too-great-a-sky]. All three of Liliana’s novels  are wonderful—she has a brilliant way of writing that is both profound and funny—but this third one is especially relevant. It is about the Soviet deportation to Kazakhstan of Romanians from Northern Bucovina, a region which is now part of Ukraine. In it, the narrator—an Orthodox Christian—describes how she survived the experience of Kazakhstan because of her faith: God is present throughout the entire novel. Liliana is perhaps better known in Romania as a researcher at the The Institute for the Investigation of the Crimes of Communism and the Memory of the Romanian Exile, which was founded in Bucharest in 2009.

Also in Bucharest, you are active in the Anglican Church of the Resurrection?

Yes, I am now one of the churchwardens there. When I moved to Romania, I was open to any and all church recommendations that people gave me. They often had something beautiful about them, but I am both joking and serious when I say that the Anglican Church was the only one where nothing made me mad! [Laughs.] For me it was a very non-coercive church, while friendly enough.

Does the Anglican parish have a long presence in Bucharest?

Yes, since the middle of the 19th century. It was neither confiscated nor converted for another purpose during the Communist period, thanks to diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom. I think now is the best time in its history—we have a full-time priest, Fr. Nevsky Everett, who is supported by the church as a Romanian employee and is also the official Anglican apocrisiarios, or representative, to the Romanian Orthodox Patriarchate. Previously, full-time priests came for very limited terms and were more or less based in the U.K. The congregation of around 50 is growing—it is an international group, and includes quite a few Romanians.

You are also an internationally published poet. One of your translations is of a Christmas carol written by your grandfather, Simion—do you follow a similar poetic tradition?

My grandfather wrote religious poetry—a volume of his verse was published by the Romanian Missionary Society, which was greatly appreciated by the Baptist community. When he wrote it, he couldn’t publish in Romania legally—he would recite his verses at gatherings. His poetry is very different from the kind that I write, in that it has rhyme and meter. Also, while Romanian is making its way into my poetry, I write in English.

Your grandfather’s Christmas carol was set to music by Nicolae Moldoveanu, a member of the Lord’s Army Orthodox renewal movement who was in prison during the same years [www.anglicanchurchbucharest. org/blog/a-special-carol]. While they did not meet in prison, were any of your grandfather’s fellow prisoners also Christian?

Yes. My second visit to Romania, when I was 16, was with my father—it was the first time that he had been back since the 1989 Revolution. We met with Fr. Silvestru Augustin Prunduș, a Greek Catholic priest who was probably my grandfather’s closest friend in prison—that was why my father was so keen to  seek him out. During the Communist era, the Greek Catholic Church was completely outlawed in Romania, but Fr. Prunduș became quite senior in the Greek Catholic hierarchy following the 1989 Revolution.

Are the Communist-era files of the Securitate secret police open to the general public?

They are if you are a researcher with the right credentials—you have to make an application. The first time I applied to see my grandfather’s file was in 2003, during my first Fulbright visit to Romania. I knew he had to have a file because he was in prison, but the response I received was that he didn’t have one. Some of the files did get lost, so there could have been extenuating circumstances. Then, in around 2013, a letter addressed to me arrived at my uncle’s house in the city where I did my Fulbright, granting me access to my grandfather’s files! Being a professor in Los Angeles, I could not just hop onto a plane and go into the archives. When I received my second Fulbright in 2017, however, that was priority.

When I finally saw the files, there had been a couple of other researchers who had been able to see them. Unfortunately, one of them had written a book that slashed through everything without understanding nuance. In my grandfather’s files there are around three pages where the Securitate tried to recruit him, and he says nothing. Due to that, this researcher had concluded that my grandfather was an informant. If that is your conclusion, on the basis of those few pages within a thick stack of files, then you are ultimately not telling the truth. I later met with that researcher to try to understand—I found him to be a limited black-and-white thinker for whom I felt rather sorry.

Have you written anything about the content of the files yourself ?

I’m planning to do more. What I have done so far was for the centenary of the founding of the Baptist church in Reșița where my grandfather served. They had invited all the children of former pastors to say a few words. My father wanted me to come, and I agreed as long as I could have a few minutes of his time to talk about what I had found in the secret police files. He—and the organizers—agreed, so I spoke for around 10 minutes about what I had found, as well as how my grandfather’s imprisonment had affected me and my family. I then offered forgiveness and hope that the church would lead a process of reconciliation, redemption, and truth. It  was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. There were over 300 people at the church that day, and everyone thanked me afterwards and commented that what I had said was really necessary for healing. [In Romanian, the church’s recording of the event is available at: www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3AmqHk39bLo. Monica’s speech is approximately 41 minutes in.]

What was your impression of how the congregation regards that past?

They don’t talk about it—Romanians, including Romanian Christians, prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. That is what people thanked me for—they said that this was stuff that was always there under the surface and had caused a lot of heartache, even leading some people away from the church because it had not been dealt with well. To be able to bring it out into the open and to offer forgiveness…

…Specifically for the fact that your grandfather had ended up going to prison?

Yes, and everything that meant afterwards, because something like that has a ripple effect upon many things later on. I was able to talk about how God redeemed that. He also used it for good—what was intended for evil was used for good.

Did the members of the Reșița church who preferred not to talk about this  feel some responsibility for not having defended your grandfather?

I think that’s part of it.

Did they also dismiss it as something that happened a long time ago?

This was a fear other people had expressed to me when I told them of my plans, but the church in Reșița completely understood what I was doing. The whole “long time ago” thing doesn’t really hold for me. I feel like that is an excuse because it is painful and there is a collective sense of guilt. When I gave my address, I was very careful to give a complete picture of what I had found in the investigative police files—to say that there were also people in the church who helped my grandfather, even though that was a risk for them.

Were there also people in the church who actively denounced him?

Yes, denounced him and did so for their own gain. There is a spectrum when it comes to informing, and that is close to the worst end.

When you addressed the church, were there therefore people in attendance who had been on that spectrum of behavior, but who just carried on after the 1989 Revolution without addressing the issue?

Yes, and what this other researcher wrote did not help.  especially over the past few decades—has been absolutely astronomical. From having periodic visits starting in the 1990s to living here today, I have seen change in the course of a single lifetime to the point where Romania has become a very cosmopolitan place, even while still relatively homogenous in certain demographic ways. Yet now, for instance, there are migrant workers coming to Romania—that used to be something unheard of. The young people, especially in the cities, are really quite sophisticated.

Do you find significant differences in attitude towards the Communist past, depending upon generation?

Even among the older generation, there is a split. Sadly, for me, there is quite a sizeable subset that is nostalgic for Communist times. There are people who never really opposed the regime and who lived fairly comfortable lives—except for the 1980s, when nobody was that comfortable. Or perhaps they were comfortable because their family was in a higher position in the Communist Party. Still, the majority now feels that it is better to be free and not to live in fear.

As for the younger generation: I don’t think that they are particularly knowledgeable—again, because there is so much that has not been said. However, there are various people and organizations that are passionate about wanting to pass on that knowledge to the next generation, and to do so in a balanced way—not simply to vilify the past, because that, ironically, can serve to

How does your experience of Romanian émigré culture contrast generally with what you have encountered now that you are living in Bucharest?

It is quite, quite different. Change in Romania—perpetuate some elements of it.

Opened as a museum in 2016, the extravagant mansion in Bucharest that belonged to Nicolae Ceaușescu [Romania’s last Communist dictator] is presented to the public without any negative evaluation of his rule.

The first time I went there, the tour guide was dryly sarcastic, but the second time I went I ended up stopping the tour! I said to the guide, “Could you please tell people that this is ugly, and what happened back then was not okay?” He replied, “Well, that is a matter of taste,” so I said, “No, it is not.” Politically, Romania is what American anthropologist Katherine Verdery has called “an incomplete transition.” There are so many continuities between those who held power during Communism and those who hold it today, although the fact that people who have lived abroad are coming back means that there is a degree of genuine change.

Is there now a wave of people returning from Western Europe?

Yes, I’m certainly seeing it. Many people came back during the Covid pandemic. I was recently with Romanian friends raised in the same Baptist tradition—our parents knew each other. They live in London, where they have high-powered positions in different spheres. They are now keen to create a Christian spiritual retreat center here in Romania—there is something about Romania that keeps calling them back. ♦