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One Foot in Each Culture: A Romanian Community in Ohio
| Article
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10523 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
4,105 Words |
| Author
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Sarah T. Carter
Sarah T. Carter is a free-lance writer interested in cross-
cultural issues. She has taught both English and French. Based
in Akron, Ohio, she has also lived in Europe and South
America. |
It has been said that Romanians do not make good immigrants because they never forget where they came from, but in fact as an immigrant group they have been unusually successful. For example, U.S. census records from 1900 to 1950 show that although most pre-World War II Romanian immigrants were uneducated country people, a higher than average proportion became managers and sales workers, and fewer worked as common laborers. By 1950, their children had entered professional fields in greater numbers, proportionately, than those of any other immigrant group, and that trend has continued among both men and women in Romanian communities around the country.
Fr. Ian Pac-Urar, formerly a Romanian Orthodox deacon in Canton, Ohio, and now a priest in nearby Akron, says this may be because the new immigrants regarded as profession as the one thing no one could take away. The most respected people in Romanian villages were the priest, the teacher, the doctor, and the lawyer. A town businessman or politician, on the other hand, was someone that peasants would not want to be, although he was to be reckoned with. For whatever reason, many Romanian Americans have become teachers, but very few have gone into politics.
In any case, many thousands of Romanian Americans now live in Ohio. They began coming around 1900, with the influx dropping sharply after immigration quotas were imposed in 1924. A smaller number came after World War II, still more after the 1989 revolution opened Romanian's doors for emigration, though this latest group is having difficulty getting permission to stay from the U.S. government.
Most of the early Romanian immigrants to Canton, Ohio, one of the oldest Romanian communities in America, came from a single area, the Fagaras region of southern Transylvania. (The parents of modern residents Filaret Barsan and George Musat, for example, although they did not know each other in Europe, came from villages less than ten miles apart.) Although the majority of ethnic Romanians in the United States were Transylvanian peasants, Barsan says no other American city received so many of them from one small area. On the other hand, Fr.Michael Botean of Canton's St.George Romanian Catholic Church recalls great diversity among the Romanians when he was growing up there a generation later.
Transylvania is rich in natural resources and was long a center of Romanian culture. From the breakup of the Ottoman Empire until the end of World War I, it was under Austro-Hungarian rule. The Hungarians, wishing to "Magyarize" Transylvania's Romanian
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