Paul Goma

PAUL GOMA was born in 1935 in Basarabia, a Romanian province annexed in the 1940s by the Soviet Union and at its collapse forming the independent country of Moldova with a breakaway area further east beyond the Dniester River called Transnistria where Russian Federation troops have been based since a ceasefire in 1992. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest evokes the writer's wartime memories of this much-disputed territory. From 1956 to 1962, Goma spent two years in a Romanian prison and five...See more

PAUL GOMA was born in 1935 in Basarabia, a Romanian province annexed in the 1940s by the Soviet Union and at its collapse forming the independent country of Moldova with a breakaway area further east beyond the Dniester River called Transnistria where Russian Federation troops have been based since a ceasefire in 1992. My Childhood at the Gate of Unrest evokes the writer's wartime memories of this much-disputed territory. From 1956 to 1962, Goma spent two years in a Romanian prison and five years in "obligatory residence" in a remote village as punishment for his student protests and literary activities. He nevertheless came to prominence at home in the Romanian "thaw" of the 1960s, becoming an influential novelist by the end of that decade. In the late 1970s Paul Goma was the courageous single spokesperson publicly advocating human rights in Romania. He was sent into exile in France in 1977 and lived and wrote in Paris until his death in March 2020 in the Covid pandemic. See less