More on citizenships and passports.
It's good to know that picking up Romanian citizenship again gives one an open gate to Europe. Many of us in the U.S. and Canada don't think in terms of separate citizenships and when I settled in New York I had my Green Card which, I suppose, gave me all rights except the right to vote and it hadn't occurred to me to get my U.S. citizenship. At one point, wanting to renew my Canadian passport, I went to Canada House on Fifth Avenue and was told that I couldn't have a passport because I had lost my Canadian citizenship since I'd been out of the country for over ten years.
It's a strange feeling to realize that you have no citizenship in any country. You are totally unaffiliated. In retrospect, the world might be better off if we were all so, but at the time I felt a bit lost. I recalled a Hungarian pastry chef at a very popular cafe on Herrengasse who was from Transylvania and who had failed to obtain his Romanian citizenship after Romania's annexation of Transylvania. I remember mother telling us that he was a man without a country. He gave a course in cake making, etc., and my mother had taken the course. She then made the most fantastic cakes in the world. But now, in New York, I felt like that pastry chef, a man without a country.
That same week, probably in 1964 or 65, I read in Time Magazine about an American GI with the occupation force who had married a German girl, brought her back to the U.S. where she became a citizen. Her folks had a business in Germany and offered their son-in-law a good job so they had moved to Germany. After three years, they discovered that she had lost her citizenship. Uncle Sam was rougher than Canada. Canadian naturalized citizens could be out of the country for ten years but American naturalized citizens lost their citizenship after only three years out of the country.
Well, apparently this couple had a bit of money and a strong sense of justice. They sued the U.S. Department of State on the basis of unconstitutionality. Is a naturalized citizen a second class citizen? And, by God, they won! That law was declared unconstitutional and had to be rewritten. Once you got American citizenship, they couldn't take it back. I loved that. I said to myself, yes, I want to be a citizen of a country that I can sue when they write illegal laws and I took out American citizenship.
Andy Halmay
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Received on 2011-03-01 06:58:32
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