THIS TRANSCRIPT IS STILL in DRAFT FORM Paul Neagu

Paul Neagu C466/27/01 F4529A Page 1 IMPORTANT Every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this transcript, however no transcript is an exact translation of the spoken word, and this document is intended to be a guide to the original recording, not replace it. THIS TRANSCRIPT IS STILL IN DRAFT FORM Paul Neagu interviewed by Mel Gooding F4529 Side A This is an Artists' Lives recording made with Paul Neagu at his home in Jackson Road on October the 4th 1994. Paul I want to start by asking you about your childhood in Romania, where you were born, and about your family. Right. I was born in Bucharest, the capital of Romania, two years before the Second World War, in other words in 1938. My family was a very young one, I'm the second out of six children, the second of the third, of three boys, which means before me, two years before me there was my first brother, called Edward, I am the second, Paul, followed by Anthony two years after me, followed by three sisters in the same kind of schedule, with two years in between. So my family constituted a few years later six children. My two parents I realised soon, once I was four and five, were very young. My father came from Moldavia, which is a northern, eastern province of actual Romania, from a small village called...the region was called Vaslui, the village was called Boloshesht[ph]. He came down to Bucharest via Galatz where he was an apprentice learning to make shoes. Apparently in his apprenticeship my father had for a master, he had a Greek chap, so during those years he even learned some Greek. He came down to Bucharest and the only place where he found enough warmth and social relationships happened to be - he was a young man at the time and quite naive, without much education, he only managed four classes of school - he kind of visited quite a lot, I don't know how it happened, how he was invited for the first time, to the Baptist church which at the time was, supposedly was evidently of American import. Spiritually my father therefore found a good house in a good warm society there, and Paul Neagu C466/27/01 F4529A Page 2 it is in that church that he met my mother. She was even younger apparently, I think she was sixteen when they met, and very soon, by the time my father was eighteen they got married. So out of these very pure kind of simple, two very little education people, but with all their hearts in the right place, I mean the church took care of that, we started arriving in the world. He was by then qualified to run his own workshop, he had enough courage and support from the friends he had to start his own business as a shoemaker, and soon he specialised I believe in making shoes only for ladies. So this was briefly as much as I knew by the time I was a schoolboy. So my schooling started in Bucharest by the time I was six. Because I was born in February I went to school half a year early, therefore I was altogether one year younger than the rest of my colleagues at the time. By the time I finished my third class the war had started, which of course brought havoc to the whole industry of my father and the situation of my parents. But somehow strangely enough, if we look retrospectively, it looks like the war didn't interrupt the rhythmicity with which we were brought into the world. By that obviously, later on I realised there was something to do with the fact that they were religiously Baptist, meaning things like abortion wasn't envisaged or even allowed within the Baptist folk, so this explains why the war didn't interrupt if you like the periodicity with which we were brought into this strange world. As you could imagine, before the war and during the war and immediately after my childhood, along with the other children, was surrounded by this tense situation, in spite of which my father continued to be a progressive person, he was always a very courageous character, and as I said first of all, he continued to have children, partly because of the religious faith, partly because he was a go-ahead kind of guy. My mother on the other hand was a very tense kind of woman and very much in complementarity with my father. He was, I believe, a Scorpio; I'm saying that with humour because of course no one paid any importance to the zodiac at the time, but in retrospect, we've been kind of having funny discussion in the family, realising that my father was the aggressive character and the courageous one, wanting to go ahead and build this thing, move there, invent things and so on. He was therefore an inventive and a very creative person, while my mother was accommodating all these things, this attitude of his, they the two of them being all the time, as far as I realised, together and kind of working as an incumbent[??]. So the war came around, my father at the time had to shut down his little shop where he had, by the time the war had started in '42 he had a Paul Neagu C466/27/01 F4529A Page 3 couple of people working for him, therefore soon after that he was considered by the Communists to be an exploiter, simply because he wasn't just alone in his work as a freelance shoemaker, he was considered an exploiter by the simple fact that he had a good enough business to employ some other people. So he was called an exploiter. Of course I am saying this with a bit of cynicism, looking back on what happened, but such things have marked all my childhood, particularly when I started going to school, because my going to school after being moved, the whole family, to the province of Banat, which is west of Romania, in other words immediately after the war, after two years or so being sent in the country to save us from the bombardment of Bucharest, we, the whole family, because my father's decision was to move to the west of Romania, which was quite a courageous move at the time, therefore he had given up Bucharest where his three boys were born, of course my third brother, the smaller one of the three, was very young at the time, in '42 he must have been two years of age. So with three boys, they moved to Timisoara, giving up house, shop and all the friends they had within the church and outside the church, because my circle, or rather my parents' circle of friends was always constituted around the church, the church was very magnetic to them and their socialising and their relationship with the world went through the church. I remember as a very young boy how important for instance was the Christmas. Christmas-time around this church in Bucharest meant not only a gathering of the warmest hearts they knew, but it also meant the time when, you know, gifts would arrive, chocolates and little toys from the United States, which is just as well I mention it to explain why later my father as a Baptist when they moved to Timisoara, the town in Banat, had spent some days in prison because all the Baptists of Romania were considered illegal as soon as the Communists took over, took power after the election in '47. Once the King of Romania, Michael, was pushed out, was pushed to abdicate, which happened about the same year when we moved to Timisoara, the Baptists became a kind of illegal religion in the sense that the Communists didn't accept something which they knew came as a spread from America. At the time, I'm not quite sure about the time in which Truman was the President of the United States, he was a Baptist, and several other personalities of political ranking in the Western world, particularly on the American side, and as you could imagine, together with the coming of the Allies, such things were immediately marked as being anti-Communist and so on. Paul Neagu C466/27/01 F4529A Page 4 Were the Communists tolerant of the predominant religion of Romania which I think is Orthodox? It's true, they are Greek Orthodox, and they were tolerant because they had not much choice, they couldn't go against it from the very beginning. They were tolerant but without being very friendly, which is what happened for the rest of the Communist time, meaning forty years to go since then. It came to the point where, say ten years ago, meaning in the early Eighties, there were very important Communist guys in certain towns and villages which were able to be important members of the Communist parties, as well as church builders for instance, they were supporting building new churches, which is to do with the double faced kind of role the church has played during the Communist years in Romania, which to some extent now, after the collapse of Communism has been taken against them, in other words they've been accused of being Jewlass[ph] as it were of the Romanian faith, of the Romanian... Their accommodation with the Communists has now... To an extent... Has rebounded on them.

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