In 1985 I was a "rojita," or so I was called. My boyfriend, let's call him "Doug," and I were activists, volunteers for CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador; we met at the Marxist School (aka, "Four Parts of the Movement") Chorus in Manhattan. We were both students at Hunter College; actually Doug had encouraged me to return to school after I'd taken a few years off while living in Vermont. Doug organized a program at school focusing on the plight of minority Hungarians living in Ceausescu's Romania. The main speaker was a Hungarian who had suffered repression under his regime. Old Hungarian villages had been bulldozed and many Romanians were forcibly moved to Transylvania to dilute the Hungarian population. It was said that the Romanian-Hungarian border was harder to cross than the Berlin Wall; Hungarians who visited family in Romania were held up for days to make sure they were not transporting Hungarian books or music. Hungarian children were not allowed to speak their language in school and were punished for doing so. Doug took this to heart, having a Romanian grandma, "Bubby," who lived on the Lower East Side and made us wonderful blintzes and other specialty foods.

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