Thanks, Roger, for this post about Monica.
As a Romanian refugee from Ceausescu’s upside-down, Orwellian world, in which the Party proclaimed it was warm and cozy when it was freezing and people were dying from lack of everything, Monica and her husband, Virgil Ierunca, kept us sane on the radio by reaffirming what we knew to be the truth and by bringing light into the murky waters of literature and society in Romania under the rule of the sacred Communist Party.
Both of them were immensely literate and insightful, of modest means, though both could have pursued careers that would have been much more lucrative than working for Radio Free Europe. They were fierce and uncompromising to the end, though the neo-communists and oligarchs issued from the ranks of Ceausescu’s Securitate sang their siren songs to them after December ’89 in an effort to have them give their blessing to the scam of the “Revolution”.

It’s a sad and pathetic testimony to the Left’s guilty silence about the horrors of communism and totalitarianism that a friend of mine asked me yesterday, upon reading the news, “Who was Monica Lovinescu, and why haven’t I heard about her until now?”
He’s in love with celebrities of any kind, but he also has a sense of value and justice. Brittney Spears no, Monica Lovinescu yes.