What do you think?
Rate this book
Cheating Memory
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.
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.
284 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 27, 2023
About the author
Gabriel Lanyi
11 books1 followerGabriel 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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
February 20, 2025
I am currently re-reading Cheating Memory, and I cannot say enough in praise of it. Yes, it is a memoir by an “ordinary” person — not a movie star, nor a presidential candidate, nor a former, highly-paid commentator from Fox News. But as a memoir, it stands out on its own merits as a first-class set of fascinating, hilarious and moving recollections, from an early life in Hungary and Rumania behind the Iron Curtain to a professional life ranging from New England to Scandinavia, all related with aplomb and unassuming grace. It is that genre of Bildungsroman narrated in the first person, but without any of the self-pity or self-glorification. But in addition, it is a memoir framed by a reflection on memoir — not, I hasten to add, a critical memoir theory (CMT), but a living reflection on remembering and preserving memories that confides confidences in the reader — if you’ll excuse the tautology.
But that is this memoir’s distillate, its evaporated quintessence. The meat of the memoir and by far its overriding presence is the detailed and fresh stories and anecdotes of his youth, parents and friends. I offer the following two excerpts as appetizers, but they are only two among the countless.
Living under the communist regime in Rumania, his friend’s simple wondering whether life was better under the king (vs. the unspoken alternative of living under Stalin) leads to a reflection on reverse irony.
Romanians like to congratulate themselves on their ability to laugh at their sorrows (haz de necaz, which may be reasonably translated as making merry out of misery), and point to the countless jokes that have come out of the Ceaușescu Golden Era. Alas, the reverse irony was at work here too, this time truly in reverse direction, as many of these jokes appear to have been conceived and placed in circulation by the Securitate to track their dissemination and identify the propagators, not unlike the coronavirus tracking apps of recent vintage. Ceaușescu tells his wife: “Someone mentioned the law of gravitation today, but I can’t remember giving it. Do you have any idea when I may have enacted it?” Elena answers: “I told you not to pester me with politics. I’m a scientist, remember?” Not so funny when it is dispensed by the Securitate unless you imagine the perverse pleasure Securitate officers may have had coming up with these jokes and testing them on one another for a twist on twist.
And reminiscences of his father.
In the first months after completing his military service, [the author’s father] set an alarm every morning for 5 am to fully savor not having to get out of bed at that hour. He was intended to take over the family store, but was in no hurry. It was the late 1920s, and living was easy, though not for long. He found a job with a Swiss forestry company and took to the mountains. It was not a demanding job, and there were frequent visits to Arad. There was the cosmopolitan Hellas rowing club, where Hungarians, Romanians, and Jews mixed freely. There were tennis courts that became skating rinks in the winter. There was skiing. And there was a fiery redhead from a well-to-do family, possibly a few years older, who appeared to have had several other relationships in town, enough to get a reputation. She decided to start afresh elsewhere, but needed a more respectable status. One such status was that of a divorced woman. She proposed a short marriage and a fully paid five-star honeymoon at her parents’ expense. My father accepted. This was one of many astonishing things that I learned about my father only after his death, when my mother told me that he had been married for three months or so at age twenty-one.
But that is this memoir’s distillate, its evaporated quintessence. The meat of the memoir and by far its overriding presence is the detailed and fresh stories and anecdotes of his youth, parents and friends. I offer the following two excerpts as appetizers, but they are only two among the countless.
Living under the communist regime in Rumania, his friend’s simple wondering whether life was better under the king (vs. the unspoken alternative of living under Stalin) leads to a reflection on reverse irony.
Romanians like to congratulate themselves on their ability to laugh at their sorrows (haz de necaz, which may be reasonably translated as making merry out of misery), and point to the countless jokes that have come out of the Ceaușescu Golden Era. Alas, the reverse irony was at work here too, this time truly in reverse direction, as many of these jokes appear to have been conceived and placed in circulation by the Securitate to track their dissemination and identify the propagators, not unlike the coronavirus tracking apps of recent vintage. Ceaușescu tells his wife: “Someone mentioned the law of gravitation today, but I can’t remember giving it. Do you have any idea when I may have enacted it?” Elena answers: “I told you not to pester me with politics. I’m a scientist, remember?” Not so funny when it is dispensed by the Securitate unless you imagine the perverse pleasure Securitate officers may have had coming up with these jokes and testing them on one another for a twist on twist.
And reminiscences of his father.
In the first months after completing his military service, [the author’s father] set an alarm every morning for 5 am to fully savor not having to get out of bed at that hour. He was intended to take over the family store, but was in no hurry. It was the late 1920s, and living was easy, though not for long. He found a job with a Swiss forestry company and took to the mountains. It was not a demanding job, and there were frequent visits to Arad. There was the cosmopolitan Hellas rowing club, where Hungarians, Romanians, and Jews mixed freely. There were tennis courts that became skating rinks in the winter. There was skiing. And there was a fiery redhead from a well-to-do family, possibly a few years older, who appeared to have had several other relationships in town, enough to get a reputation. She decided to start afresh elsewhere, but needed a more respectable status. One such status was that of a divorced woman. She proposed a short marriage and a fully paid five-star honeymoon at her parents’ expense. My father accepted. This was one of many astonishing things that I learned about my father only after his death, when my mother told me that he had been married for three months or so at age twenty-one.
Displaying 1 of 1 review