Word: transylvania
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California is, of course, the new Transylvania. The mind does not boggle therefore at the news that a professor at California State University at San Francisco teaches an accredited course in vampirism. He also has written a book. A question arises. Is Professor Wolf for vampirism or against it? The answer remains murky. For what the professor has done is to invent a scholarly equivalent of the celebrated New Journalism, whose practitioners take their own temperatures every second paragraph and print the resultant fever charts as reportage...
...charge: by examining Rumanian, Russian, German and French folklore of the 15th century, in which Dracula figures vividly, it establishes that he was not a vampire. That was Bram Stoker's libel; needing a monstrous name and a far-off place for his fantasy, he chose Dracula and Transylvania. The real Dracula, son of Dracul (the name means dragon), was a Christian prince and mass murderer who lived in what is now Rumania, at the edge of the Turkish empire, from 1430 or '31 to 1476. He was known to his times as Vlad the Impaler, and with...
This was approximately 20% of the population of Wallachia, where he reigned (Transylvania was a neighboring province). What is fascinating about this tyrant is that he was universally acknowledged to have been an effective ruler. He savaged the Turks, whipped the landowning nobles into line, cowed the Saxons, and relieved the poor and the sick of their misery by burning large numbers of them. So perfect was his law and order that he was able to leave a rich golden goblet by a wayside spring in his domain for the refreshment of travelers. No one ever stole...
...borderlands that were now Poland, now Russia. He also describes what Hasidism is. No matter that the movement's founder, the Baal Shem Tov ("Master of the Good Name") is already lost in legend. As Wiesel demonstrates, telling his tales learned from his grandfather's knee in Transylvania, Hasidism did not derive from fact or reason but from love and faith...
...within the shadow of the Wailing Wall after the Six-Day War to tell tales. Some are mad, some are drunk, some are blind. But all of them are ostensibly seers. Among them is David, the book's narrator and central figure. Like Wiesel, David was born in Transylvania and has survived the Nazi death camps. Unwilling or unable to die, he seems doomed to live out the prediction of a Nazi lieutenant who tried and failed to execute him. "You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn...