In a slightly older text, partially quoted in a recent one, the latter was included in a bestseller anthology God is not dead (Publishing house Polisher, Bucharest, 2022), Christian Tudor Popescu declares his opposition to the journal. Especially that magazine as a kind of literature, which was conducted by the writers. Such a diary would be “a fat transvestite, a useless and tasteless mask, a respectable whore who pretends to be flawless, like a white sheet of paper.”

Needless to say, I am far from sharing CTP’s opinion. Rather, what he testified in an article published in May 2021 in Iasi newspaper, teacher, literary critic and essayist Alexandru Kelinescu. “I don’t keep a diary, I will never write a memoir, but I read with pleasure and interest – when it’s worth it – diaries and memoirs.” As a teacher from Iasi who reads diaries and memoirs, I also owe it to myself to look at the volume. From the Rhine to the Danube and back by Jan Willem Bos, published in 2022 by the Bucharest Publishing House Humanitas. That I do not know how it escaped me until the moment I read the plaque dedicated to him Mr. Kalisku in Iasi newspaper.

Jan Willem Bos is, above all, a great friend, a true friend, a lover of Romania. He was not an uncritical lover, and he was fine, neither before nor after 1989. After reading his book, I am also on the side of those friends of his lordship who told him that “I have a Romanian soul and that Romania is his second homeland.”

Dutch, that is, Dutch, as they used to say, born in 1954, Jan Willem Bos ended up learning the Romanian language rather because of a game of chance, which only a little later became a game of love. Among his first teachers was Sorin Alexandrescu, at a time when the famous teacher was a lecturer sent by the Romanian state to the University of Amsterdam. Jan Willem Bos also attended Romanian studies courses in the USA. He visited the country whose language he will study in 1974. His first visit was one of the adventures described in detail and with humor in the book. He met Cornelia, an American of Romanian origin, whom he married and had a daughter with. He then periodically returned several times until December 1989. There were adventures about these periodic returns, but they became less and less funny. Pleasant even less. Between 1982 and 1984, he was a teacher of the Dutch language at the University of Bucharest.

He met the famous, dignified ambassador of his country in Bucharest, Cohen Stork, whose suddenness caused so many headaches for the communist authorities in Bucharest, during his last visit to Bucharest before the fall of communism. Jan Willem Bos was in the Romanian capital in March 1989. A month that bodes ill for Nicolae Ceausescu’s regime. All details can be found in the book.

Since 1990, visits have become more frequent. By his own admission, Jan Willem Bos discovered the joy of reading by browsing important books on Romanian literature. He translated some of them into Dutch. He chose different titles, volumes, by no means easy to interpret. From the works of Matei Caragiale to Mircea Carterescu. He accomplished the feat of translating the trilogy dazzling and the Dutch version of the complex is obtained Solenoid. He periodically returned to Creange, but did not get too close to Eminescu. The reasons are convincingly detailed in the book. He has already written and published several books in which he talked about his varied Romanian experience, and I would consider the current one a synthesis. Read the entire article on Contributors.ro