Vasile Grunea and colleagues

I?m in the middle of the second row on this photo. I?m the only Jew here, all the others are Romanian. The photo was taken in the editorial office of the Tribuna in Kolozsvar in the 1980s. The man right on my left, wearing a tie is my best friend, the poet Negoita Irimie. The first person standing on the left is Ioan Dumitru Radu Popescu, who was editor-in-chief at that time. The Tribuna, just as the Korunk, was started again thanks to the atmosphere that developed in 1956. There was only one Romanian literary monthly, the Steaua, at that time in Kolozsvar, so they decided that a weekly was needed, and the Tribuna was founded. At the same time the Korunk, originally founded by Gabor Gaal was started again. It was published anew from 1957 and the two papers worked in this spirit. I was expelled from the Party in 1959 for the simple reason that I had been a member of a socialist-Zionist organization, the Hashomer Hatzair, between 1942 and 1945. They knew this because I put it down in all my CVs, I wasn't ashamed of it and I didn't hide it. And a resolution was passed, which stated that no one who had been a member of any other party could be a member of the Communist Party. That's when I started working for the Tribuna, at first as a proof-reader, and later as an editorial secretary, and of course, I published poems, translations, reports on theater and fine arts, and interviews. [Editor's note: At that time all papers were communist.] As I learnt afterwards I had been quite popular and the paper was rather well liked. Unfortunately, there was a period when the paper was published under very difficult circumstances; it wasn't published at all for several months in the 1990s. I left the paper in 1990. It has continued since then, but there was a period when they simply didn't have any money and couldn't print it. The editors looked for jobs and worked for this paper for free, but there wasn't any money to publish it. The situation has been back to normal for about three quarters of a year, since 2002, although it isn't published weekly any more, but twice a month.

Photos from this interviewee