Book launch and discussion featuring writer Claudia Moscovici:
The Role of Cultural Memory: Readings from Velvet Totalitarianism

The book launch series presented by RCINY at the Carturesti book exhibition continues in May with a special event featuring Claudia Moscovici's "Velvet Totalitarianism. Post-Stalinist Romania," published at University Press of America. The author will be introduced by Professor and writer Radu D. Popa.

The book is a novel about a Romanian family's survival in an oppressive communist regime due to the strength of their love. Claudia Moscovici also published several scholarly books on political philosophy and the Romantic movement. Her publications include Romanticism and Postromanticism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), Gender and Citizenship (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000) and Double Dialectics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002). She taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Born in Bucharest, Romania, she writes from her experience of life in a totalitarian regime, which marked her deeply. She immigrated to the United States where she has gone on to obtain a B.A. from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University. Claudia lives in Ann Arbor, with her husband Dan and two children, Sophie and Alex.


"A deeply felt, deftly rendered novel of the utmost importance to any reader interested in understanding totalitarianism and its terrible human cost. Urgent, evocative, and utterly convincing, Velvet Totalitarianism is a book to treasure, and Claudia Moscovici is indeed a writer to watch, now and into the future." - Travis Holland, author of the critically acclaimed novel, "The Archivist's Story," a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.

"Claudia Moscovici's first novel, Velvet Totalitarianism, triumphs on several levels: as a taut political thriller, as a meditation on totalitarianism, as an expose of the Ceausescu regime, and as a moving fictionalized memoir of one family's quest for freedom." - Ken Kalfus, author of the novel "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" (2006 National Book Award nominee), of "The Commissariat of Enlightenment" (2003) and of "PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies" (1999).

"Moving between extraordinary and ordinary lives, between Romania and the United States, velvet totalitarianism and relative freedom, dire need and consumerism, evoking her Romanian experience in the seventies, the emigration to the U.S. of her family in the eighties, and the 1989 uprising in Timisoara and Bucharest that marked the end of Ceausescu's regime, Claudia Moscovici offers her readers a multifaceted book, Velvet Totalitarianism that is at once a love story, a political novel and a mystery. Love is the last resort left to people in order to counter totalitarianism under Ceausescu's rule. It keeps families united, allowing them to resist indoctrination and hardship and to make sure their children enjoy the carefree beautiful years that are their due. Love gives the protagonist of the novel the strength to overcome cultural differences between Romania and the U.S. and to invent in turn a form of personal happiness in a context that, while far from being as harsh as her initial one, does not lack its own problems." -  Sanda Golopentia, Professor of French, Brown University