he Parkway Grille
-
2001 Thanksgiving Holiday Buffet
Autumn Harvest Salads and Ice Display
ASHES
from page 85
Carilled C:4' Marinated Shrimp and Pasta Saha!
Harvest Fresh Crudite and Herb Dip
Autipasto Salad
Exotic Fresh Fruit Display
Fresh Garden cireen Salad with conclimcnts
Seafood display with Salmon, Crab Claws, Shrimp
Carving Station
Hot Entrees
Chicken Picatta with Capers
Baked Salmon with Lobster Sauce
Sweet Candied Yams
Redskin Garlic Potatoes
Mixed Seasonal Vegetables
Cream Style Corn
Virginia Baked Hum
Chef Jerry's Roasted Turkey with giblet Gravy
Dessert
A X'ast assortment of desserts prepared
by our pastry Chef, Patricia /very
including her homemade White
Chocolate Cherry Bread Pudding
in the November, 2001 issue
of Chocolatier Magazine
Adults: 531.95
Children: S 15.95
11 ctm
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Spin
3600 Centerpoint Parkway, Pontiac
Located inside The Marriott at Centerpoint
For Reservations
call 248.648.6034
Once the war was over, Mirek
worked with the American Army's
de-Nazification program in Frankfurt
for six months and was then drafted
into the Czech army. Eventually he
and Blanka reunited in Prague and
married.
"I was stunned that we were
together again because I had thought
he was dead," Blanka said. "I don't
know how to describe it. It was both
extraordinary and utterly normal.
After we were married, we were sud-
denly the masters of a little world of
our own. No matter how small, it
was ours."
They stayed in Prague until 1948,
when it began to look as if Russia
might turn Czechoslovakia into what
Germany had been. With their infant
son Yon, they relocated to Israel just
after it was declared a state. They left
during the Suez Crisis in 1956 to set-
tle in the United States, where Mirek
became an electrical contractor.
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Popescu is not Jewish, a fact which
he feels gave him the needed distance
from his subject matter.
'As an outsider, I could write with
sympathy and yet without falling
into the trap of self-pity, doubts
about how the book would be
received or fear of misinterpretation,"
he said.
But his not being Jewish caused
Mirek and Blanka some anxiety
when he told them he wanted to
marry their daughter.
"I married into a family that is
Jewish in the strongest possible way,"
he said. "They were the ones who
were supposed to be obliterated.
There's a real strength of identity
when you're under the onus of histo-
ry to stop existing."
He said Iris' parents, like other
camp survivors, "have a very visible
tendency not to trust others. They
trust other survivors first and then all
other human categories. The distrust
grows progressively the further they
go from people they know."
But Popescu is no stranger to dan-
ger, cruelty and discrimination. He
grew up in Communist Romania,
where his twin brother died at age 13
because of poor sanitation, and sever-
al members of his family were
detained in Soviet prison camps.
He was a successful novelist and
screenplay writer, but when he
defected during the Ceaucescu
regime, he was blacklisted and tried
and sentenced in absentia. It became
a misdemeanor to own his books.
When his father later died of a
stroke, he was forbidden to go back
for the funeral. A year after leaving
Romania, he came to Los Angeles.
"I came with a sackful of painful
stuff," he said. "I had a sense that I
had a very heavy karma that might
become literary material in the
future.
"I wasn't as much thinking as a
writer as I was as a survivor. When I
met my wife, I realized she came
from a family with karma even heav-
ier than mine. We were ready for
each other. We courted and married
relatively quickly."
He said he felt like someone who
had finally gotten off a raft that had
been adrift at sea.
"My most important, immediate
desire and obligation was to start to
live my life in a more normal fash-
ion," he said. "It's the immigrant's
dream: 'Hey, I'll go to America
where it's so new and simple and I
can leave everything behind.'
"But you don't leave anything
behind. You take it with you. At one
time or another it reveals itself and
reconnects with the new milieu."
Since he's been in the United
States, Popescu has written two nov-
els, Amazon Beaming and Almost
Adam, as well as an autobiography
titled The Return.
He and Iris live with their two
children, Adam and Chloe, in
Beverly Hills, not far from the
Friedmans, who have read The Oasis
and given it their approval.
"At first I didn't want to tape my
memories," Blanka said. "But Petru
made the process easier than I
thought, and his interest in the sub-
ject made me dig deep inside and
bring up so many things I thought
I'd forgotten forever.
"Sometimes when I read the pages,
I would nod and say, 'Yes, this is
what it was like.' Other times I felt
that no book, no matter how faithful,
could ever portray what happened as
it did. I never thought I'd be the hero
of a book, especially a book written
so caringly and patiently."
Adds Mirek, laughing, "I don't
read love stories. How could it be
that one of the first I would ever
read would be about my wife and
me?"
❑
Petru Popescu speaks at the
Jewish Book Fair 3 p.m. Sunday,
Nov. 18, at the West Bloomfield
Jewish Community Center.