Memory and History: Annie Bentoiu

A young student in the 1940s, Annie Bentoiu, reconstructs retrospectively, fifty years later, the establishment of the communist regime in Romania, using a discourse that oscillates between the subjective experiences of her own history and the major events that took place in her country during the 20^th century. This paper discusses how Timpul ce ni s-a dat [The time we were given], as a consequence, becomes a feminine writing with a hybrid character, revisiting the past according to internal and external events, thus being located at the intersection of personal memory and collective history. Moreover, the study highlights the sociological accents, the philosophical meditations, the political reflections and the historical realities that these memoirs encompass, openings favoured by the author’s triple intellectual formation – in the fields of law, history and literature. Through this hermeneutic exercise, I try to show how a woman’s testimony about an epoch is superimposed over the testimony of her own life, resulting a process in which subjective sources (memories, letters and diaries) are supplemented by a major documentary effort (historical studies and journals of the time). Two different types of history meet inside this sample of feminine literature, bringing together intimate stories and significant national transformations, as an example of the strong and irreversible way in which these histories affect each other.

Full Text