Cheating Memory

by Gabriel Lanyi

What is the difference between the rhyming capitals of Budapest and Bucharest? And do we need them both? Is Transylvania an actual place or merely the fictional address of Dracula? Was Radio Erevan truly broadcasting from Siberia? Were Ceaușescu jokes created and disseminated by his secret police? Who were the Dada and where did they come from? These are only some of the questions readers didn’t even know they had that they will find answered in this book.
Cheating Memory is the story of what is remembered after everything marginal has been forgotten about growing up in communist Romania after the war, straddling the fault line of the Hungarian-Romanian divide. It is the non-sequential story of a rich childhood, adolescence, and youth in a poor country, of thriving under constraint, of making the most of little, of peeking through fences and sidestepping barriers, of finding one’s path despite, notwithstanding, even though, in the face of, and still... It is also a story about language and culture, and how they shape our thinking and our lives. Finally, it is a story about how our mind chooses the materials to remember and how it transforms these in the process.
It is not an autobiography in the customary, chronological sense, but rather a collection of recollections, vignettes that may have seemed commonplace at the time, but memory, for its own reasons, chose to preserve – and decades later they turned out to have a larger meaning than what the protagonists suspected.

282 pages, Paperback

Published May 27, 2023

About the author

Gabriel Lanyi is a writer living in Jerusalem. Early on he was booked as a passenger on a multilingual educational journey across three continents, which began in Romania, continued in Israel, and ended in the US. He eventually got off at the juncture of liberal arts and high-tech, where he set up shop as a writer slash editor slash translator of technical and academic literature, with occasional forays into fiction. All along, he continued to watch with fascination the itineraries our education systems devised for the younger generations, and every now and then inflicted his own teaching on unsuspecting students. Then he discovered Uscolia and became one of a handful of people to hear the first-hand account of the legendary Uscolian studios—where generations of creative youths have achieved effective learning without teaching—from one of the few outsiders who had the privilege of visiting them in person. He subsequently acquired hands-on experience applying some of the Uscolian principles, which he describes in some detail in his latest book.
In answer to the question, “Is Uscolia to be taken literally?” the author said, “Yes.” He then added: “Uscolian principles were born out of experience, not experiment or theory. Academic writing on education is busy fitting abstract, arbitrary models to the reality of the classroom. The models originate in the head of the writers, who then try to interpret experience according to these models. They squeeze reality into ill-fitting patterns, and with a straight face make up inane terms like commognitive, mediatization, agentic factors, and countless others; they create digital classifications in an analog world, categorizing, conceptualizing, and operationalizing that which should be fluid, continuous, natural. Uscolians make a point of not reading any of this drivel. Instead, they observe closely how their children develop since the time they are tiny babies, and try to infer from one area (the acquisition of their native language) to other areas (for example, music). In this process they reach some generalizations that, yes, I would take literally.”
Today, Uscolian insights are more important than ever. With self-learning machines poised to outlearn humans, every province of knowledge where we can retain an advantage becomes vital. It is unlikely that anyone alive today could beat Watson on the SATs. If SATs are going to be our guiding light, we are doomed. The last dominion of homo sapiens is creativity, the one mental faculty that is still difficult to define, and hence difficult for machines to master. To forestall becoming dispensable, we have only Uscolia to look to. Uscolian learning is aimed directly at nurturing creativity, and "Uscolia," the book, can give us a good idea how to go about it.