Two Years After the Refusal
In June 1992 I left for New York with my son, Alti. Only two years earlier, the United States had refused me an immigrant visa. At that time, after leaving Romania, I had regarded Italy as a temporary stage, a waiting room before America. The interview at the consulate, however, had put an end to that plan.
Now I was no longer asking to be admitted forever. I only wanted to spend a few weeks with my aunt and reach the publisher that was going to publish my book. To obtain the visa, it was practically enough to provide Anca’s New York address. What had been impossible two years earlier had suddenly become a mere formality.
I could not help feeling the irony of the situation. When I had wanted to settle in America, the gate had closed before me. Now, as my life was beginning to take root in Italy, the same gate opened without resistance.
The Beginning of a Book
The story of the book did not begin in New York, nor at Prentice Hall headquarters. It began in 1987, when I submitted the paper INTERFORM: A CAD System for Program Development to the Ninth International Conference on Software Engineering, held in Monterey, California. In it, I tried to bring together the ideas I had developed in previous years about systematic program design, the interform, and the construction of an integrated working environment. The paper was accepted, but I could not attend the conference; under the conditions of the time, leaving the country was not possible for me.
The paper attracted the attention of Meir Lehman and Ed Yourdon. For me, living in a country where contact with the Western scientific world was difficult and subject to so many constraints, their interest had a special significance. It was not merely appreciation for a paper accepted at an international conference, but confirmation that the ideas on which I had worked for years could interest the scientific community beyond Romania.
On 17 August 1987 I received a letter from Ed Yourdon. He proposed that I develop the paper into a book to be published in his series at Prentice Hall. That letter changed the scale of the project. It was no longer a matter of gathering several articles under the same cover, but of building a coherent presentation of a conception of software development: the process, the evolving product, the tools, the people, and the rules that bind them together.
The Years of Writing
Almost two years of work followed. My days were devoted to the team and the INTERFORM project. I worked with my younger collaborators on the system that was meant to transform the theoretical ideas into a real design environment. In the evenings I returned to the manuscript. I had to extract from articles, contracts, courses, and laboratory experience a unified construction, intelligible to a reader unfamiliar with our path.
I wrote the book in Romania during the final years of the communist regime. Winters brought frequent power cuts, and some pages were written by candlelight. The image may seem overly symbolic today, but for me it was a concrete reality: I was trying to describe an integrated software environment intended for a technology of the future, in a cold room where the lights could go out without warning.
By the spring of 1989, the manuscript was complete. Even sending it abroad was not a simple act. Despite the difficulties and surveillance surrounding such contacts, it managed to reach the publisher through Adrian Davidoviciu. Once it had been sent, I felt that my essential part had been completed. The book had departed for a world I did not know whether I would ever reach.
A Book Left Behind
A few months later I left Romania. In the haste and tension of emigration, I left behind the laboratory, the young team that had worked beside me, and the INTERFORM project. In a sense, I also left the book behind.
My first years in Italy had none of the calm required to follow an editorial process. I was trying to obtain documents, find work, and rebuild my life in Rome. Contact with Prentice Hall was broken. For almost two years, the publisher searched for me without finding me. My old addresses were no longer valid, and I had disappeared from the places where an American editor might have thought to look for me. I was not hiding; I had simply fallen off their map.
Finding the Publisher Again
When contact was re-established in Italy, I learned how hard they had tried to find me. The editor with whom I corresponded was Paul W. Becker, an acquisitions editor at Prentice Hall, a pleasant and exceptionally helpful man. He did not turn my disappearance into a reproach. On the contrary, he did everything possible to bring matters back to normal.
They sent the page proofs to Rome. I read and corrected them in a life entirely different from the one in which I had written the manuscript. Those pages came from Bucharest, from the laboratory, from evenings without electricity, and from a world I had left behind.
The text was ready. Only the final documents and the choice of cover remained. The publisher had prepared several alternatives, and I had to decide. Today, a few images would appear on a screen in an instant, and the documents could be signed remotely. In 1992 that world did not yet exist. Prentice Hall wanted me there in person. After two years in which they had been unable to find me, the people at the publishing house were waiting for the author to finally appear before them.
Luca Dan Șerbănați,
Integrating Tools for Software Development,
Yourdon Computing Series, Prentice Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1992,
ISBN 0-13-468471-0.
Page devoted to the book
A Fortunate Combination
The journey, however, was not only an editorial obligation. Alti was turning twelve in June. My aunt Anca and her husband, Tibi, were his godparents. I therefore had a family reason just as strong for going to New York. We were to celebrate his birthday together, and he would come to know the city he had until then seen only in pictures.
It was, as I would later say, a fortunate combination. I was going to complete the journey of a book, while my son celebrated his twelfth birthday with his godparents. A trip that might have remained strictly professional was becoming a journey we made together.
At Anca and Tibi’s
In New York we stayed with Anca and Tibi, on the fourteenth floor of an apartment building on Second Avenue, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. From the apartment window the view stretched as far as the Empire State Building and Central Park. Anca and Tibi gave us their bedroom, while they moved into the living room. Aunt Itu was still alive and had her own room. Their home became our point of departure into the city, but also the place where, in the evening, the journey recovered its family dimension. After my unstable years in Italy, their life seemed settled and well ordered, built around habits preserved with consistency.
Among those habits was tennis. I watched them go to practice and photographed them on the court. Anca played energetically, focused on every ball, and Tibi shared the same discipline. It was a simple detail of their daily life, but precisely such details gave substance to our stay: we were not merely tourists in a huge city, but guests of people close to us, integrated for a few weeks into their rhythm.
The Road to New Jersey
One day, my cousin picked us up by car and we set off for New Jersey. I no longer remember every detail of the route, but I clearly remember the destination: Prentice Hall, in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey 07632.
I took no photographs at the publisher’s headquarters. I had the camera with me during our outings, but there I did not think about photographs. I was preoccupied with the meeting, the documents I had to sign, and the cover I had to choose. After the long silence between us, the mere fact that I was inside the publisher’s building felt almost unreal.
The manuscript had left for America while my life still had a predictable framework. In the meantime, I had gone through leaving the country, the American refusal, and the uncertain beginnings in Italy. The book had remained somewhere along the way, like an object from an earlier life, waiting for me to be found again.
I signed the documents and chose the cover from among the prepared alternatives. These were the things the publisher had been waiting for. From that moment on, printing proceeded very quickly, and the book appeared that same year.
The City We Saw Together
After the meeting at Prentice Hall, New York did not become the backdrop of an organized excursion, but the city that Alti and I were discovering together. We walked the streets of Manhattan, among buildings I knew from films, watching the continuous flow of people and cars. The photographs from that time show the great avenues, but also corners of no tourist importance, preserved only because we had stopped there on a particular day.
The city changed when we looked at it from the water. Manhattan became a compact mass of buildings, above which the World Trade Center towers rose as a natural landmark. We could not have imagined that only nine years later they would disappear. In my photographs, they still stand quietly, simple elements of the skyline.
We also reached the base of the towers. Seen from close by, their scale almost exceeded the camera’s capacity. In the plaza we met Dragoș and Kathy. At the time, it was simply one of the days of our journey; the photographs later acquired a weight they could not have had in 1992.
A Museum for Alti
The visit to the naval museum aboard the aircraft carrier Intrepid was chosen for Alti. At twelve, the proximity of a huge ship, aircraft displayed on deck, helicopters, and artillery installations had a power of attraction that a conventional museum could not offer.
I too was drawn into the spectacle of technology. The aircraft carrier was not presented through drawings and models; one could walk through it. In one of the photographs, Alti appears only as a distant silhouette on the deck. That is enough to preserve the truth of the memory without making him the public subject of the page.
Anca’s Advice
Anca advised me to visit a Manhattan gallery about which I knew very little: The Frick Collection. I followed her recommendation and discovered a jewel. European paintings of great value, sculptures, furniture, and works of decorative art were housed in the collector’s former residence, in a space that had preserved the character of a home.
It was not a museum in which one walked through miles of galleries until fatigue began to settle between the visitor and the works. Everything had human proportions and an intimate elegance. It reminded me of the Galleria Borghese in Rome: not because the collections were alike, but because of that rare harmony between the value of the works and the beauty of the place that houses them.
I have no photographs from the Frick. Some of the most powerful images of the journey remained only in memory.
What Remained
The journey of June 1992 brought together things that, viewed separately, seemed to belong to different lives. Alti celebrated his twelfth birthday with his godparents and discovered New York. I found again a publishing house that had searched for me for almost two years, and I completed the journey of a book begun before emigration.
I returned to Italy after signing the documents and choosing the cover. From that point on, printing was rapid. America, which had refused me as an immigrant, received my book that same year. It was not the destination I had imagined when I left Romania, but it had become the place where an important part of my work finally found its definitive form.