"The Sponge Diver" features the young Romanian vagabond Adrien Zograffi, this time in Greece, as he listens to the harrowing tale of a fellow Romanian drifter's season of forced labor aboard a small ship plying the Eastern Mediterranean in search ...

_The Thüringer House_ is the first of a cycle of novels, "Life of Adrien Zograffi," written by the Romanian Panait Istrati in the early 1930's, shortly after his return, bitterly disillusioned, from a long stay in the Soviet Union. Adrien, serv...

In Panait Istrati's 1929 novella, now translated into English, fourteen-year-old Adrien Zograffi begins an apprenticeship in a toolmaking workshop on the docks of the Danube River port in Brăila, Romania. Progress, in the form of floating grain e...

The Romanian writer Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was once among the most popular writers in Europe. He and his work fell out of favor after he published an early denunciation (written with Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine) of the Soviet regime. _M...

Panait Istrati's _The Haiduks_ is a tale of cruelty and injustice (and of those who would combat these scourges) set in a Romania bled white by the ferocity of an occupying power and the greed of its native aristocracy. "The marvelous storytellin...