This memoir follows our adventures in Nicolae Ceausescu's communist Romania, where I was an IREX Fellow during the 1974-1975 academic year, studying the survival of Byzantine culture there after the fall of Constantinople.
Elana brought her diary; I brought my Nikon camera and 30 rolls of film. She was 28; I was 27. We were both Princeton graduate students.
Our preconceived notion, born of wishful thinking, was that Bucharest would be a worthy...