Brain Drain and Cultural Traumas in Avalon: The Secrets of the Happy Émigrés (2018) by Bogdan Suceavă (II)

Despite its impact on the education, research and health system, Romanian brain drain is still neglected in both the political agendas and cultural debates. Furthermore, the theme is almost absent within contemporary literature starting with the writings anchored in the transition period, which is precisely that of the first significant waves of labor and high-skilled emigration, but also that of some major social and cultural traumas. In this context, Avalon: The Secrets of the Happy Émigrés (2018) by Bogdan Suceavă fill up a main cultural gap as far as it individualize the social-historical traumatic experience of brain exodus by means of an autobiographical narrative which offers at the same time a realistic image of the so called “happiness” of émigré scholars, comprising their big efforts for achieving the highest performances in their field of research. Revealing the differences between the American and Romanian academic systems, which are condensed in the illustrative story of the hero-narrator, Avalon… incorporates, as Bildungsroman, a “cultural pedagogy” shaped especially under the guiding of one of the leading mathematicians on the world, Professor Bang Yen-Chen, but which is also grounded into the significant previous formative experience. In the same time, Avalon… offers a lesson of cosmopolitanism, which integrates, by means of literary memory, the cultural values of the post-communist East, especially those of Romanian recent pasts. Our analysis of the novel is focused on the “cultural-pedagogical” dimension of its multilayered architecture, in which the intertwined autobiographical, historical, and sociological levels are mobilized for converting the personal and collective traumas in a project of identity revision and rebuilding.