The old Jebeleanu family lived in the largest and most beautiful house on Grigore Mora Street, number 8 — a street that, despite every regime change, remained reserved for those who had turned opportunism into a method of political survival.

Comrade Vasea Jebeleanu. Quiet. Efficient. Always half a doctrinal step ahead of the party line. And, of course, never entirely alone. Behind every survivor of an ideological purge stands someone sharper. In his case, it was his wife — Comrade Olga Baruch, a Komintern loyalist rebranded by circumstance as headmistress of School No. 20. She was often described, even decades later, with that familiar blend of fear and admiration: “a dangerous Jewess with an unmistakable Moscow accent.”

In 1945, when the Romanian Communist Party (PCdR) still had two heads — one led by the local cadre around Gheorghiu-Dej, the other by the Muscovite exiles gathered around Ana Pauker — my grandfather quietly bet on the domestic faction. Alongside Petre Borilă, Leonte Răutu, and Alexandru Bârlădeanu, he moved into Dej’s orbit just early enough to matter, and just late enough not to seem eager.

Then, in May 1952, when Ana Pauker, Vasile Luca, and Teohari Georgescu were publicly condemned for “factionalism, conciliationism, lack of class vigilance, cosmopolitanism, and deviationism both left and right”, he remained untouched.

Political foresight? Not quite.
Just a life built on the discipline of invisibility.

His particular form of genius:
never standing out.