ROUMANIA AND ITS RUBICON 



201 



are not allowed to be bankers, druggists, 

 tobacconists ; they have no standing in 

 court, no right to employ counsel, no 

 right to send their children to school ex- 

 cept they pay for the privilege, which is 

 free to all others. They cannot own 

 farm land, are denied the right of holding 

 government positions, and are prohibited 

 from organizing or controlling stock 

 companies or corporations. Further- 

 more, although some of them for forty 

 generations have lived in Roumania, they 

 are aliens still, under Roumanian law. 



THE UND OF HER DESIRE 



When the Powers assented to the crea- 

 tion of Roumania, one of the terms of 

 the agreement was that all of her subjects 

 should stand equal before the law. But 

 later Roumania decided that she would 

 consider the Jew an alien, and so the 

 agreement was nullified, with no hand 

 raised in an effective protest. 



The. persecution, however, is economic 

 rather than religious, for the experience 

 of all eastern Europe has been that the 

 Jew, under a free competition, manages 

 to prosper where others barely exist, and 

 so the attempt is made to handicap him 

 as an equalizing process. Yet in spite of 

 all his tribulations, in spite of govern- 

 mental processes which would seem to 

 leave nothing to the Jew but to emigrate, 

 he manages to keep the noose from 

 strangling him and to survive the fierce 

 struggle. 



While Roumania thus makes the Jew 

 an alien, she does not regard him so when 

 she needs men for her army. Then he is 

 Roumanian from the crown of his head 

 to the sole of his foot, although even in 

 the army he cannot become an officer or 

 escape the menial jobs that military op- 

 erations always involve. 



Having thus far considered the Rou- 

 mania of today, let us now turn to the 

 Roumanian lands of a possible tomor- 

 row — Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bu- 

 kowina (see also pages 185 and 186). 



Transylvania has a geographical rather 

 than a political existence. It is a part of 

 Hungary, although it is almost as much 

 separated from geographical Hungary as 

 the great plateau west of the Rockies is 

 separated from the Mississippi Valley. 



It is the great highland region which 

 forms the western slope of the Transyl- 

 vanian Alps and the southern slope of 

 the southeastern Carpathians. "The 

 mountains cradled and brought our race 

 to the manhood of its existence," say the 

 Roumanians, and this applies both to the 

 gradual western slope of the eastern Alps 

 as well as to the sharper eastern slope. 



In this territory one may find every 

 form of scenic beauty from the idyllic 

 pastoral picture to the majestically rugged 

 mountain and the frenzy-churned waters 

 of torrential rivers. The region's popular 

 customs, language, and costumes are pre- 

 served in all their primitive originality, 

 amid sharply defined boundaries created 

 by nature and a sternly cold climate born 

 of the high Alps. 



A POTPOURRI OF PEOPLES 



Those who travel through it look with 

 bated breath upon the fabulous coloring 

 of the bewitching pictures which water, 

 rocks, forests, sheltered valleys, and 

 white, glistening peaks, together with 

 striking people, conspire to make. It is 

 a veritable treasure-house of contrasting 

 costumes : here those of the Wallachian, 

 here those of the Moldavian, here those 

 of the Saxon, here those of the Hunga- 

 rian, and here all of them in a gay pot- 

 pourri, with a sprinkling of Greek, Bul- 

 gar, and Serb, of Gypsy and of Slovak, 

 thrown in. There are a million and a half 

 Wallachians in Transylvania, 700,000 

 Hungarians, and 200,000 Saxons. 



In the heart of Transylvania there is a 

 district known as the Kalateszag, which 

 has been strikingly described as a Hun- 

 garian island in the sea of Transylvanian 

 Wallachia. Banffy-Hunyad is its center, 

 and it is a place famed for its beautiful 

 women. With their steely black hair, 

 their rainbow-hued ribbons, their pearl 

 fillets, and their tight-fitting, art-embroi- 

 dered jackets, they present a picture that 

 can never be forgotten. 



There are many salt mines in Transyl- 

 vania. The ones at Marosujvar produce 

 a hundred million pounds of salt a year. 

 In the one at Tordo there is a gallery 

 known as the Joseph gallery, where one 

 may hear his voice echoed and re-echoed 

 sixteen times. 



