Three Romanian-American Musicians

Three Romanian-American instrumentalists are profiled. There is no doubt that this group of symphony instrumentalists, conservatory educated in socialist Romania and endowed with more status and privilege than most, is at a distance from the desperate immigrant laborer searching for a better life. As a European, Christian community from a nation barely registering in American politics or popular culture, Romanians slip easily into the mainstream, perhaps even half blind to the regular barriers those immigrants endowed with the wrong national origin or the wrong relationship with God may face in the US. Yet, placed in another light, these musicians illustrate the very ideals of the archetypal immigrants conjured by American consciousness. Feeling stifled by the economic and political realities of Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu's draconian version of state socialism in the 1970s and 1980s, they dreamed of a place that would support them in reaching the full potential of their artistic capabilities. The author offers these stories not as an example of immigrant drive and talent, but as a testament to the American goodwill that encourages immigrant drive and talent to flourish.