Romanian Roots: Junior Alex Meiners takes pride in his Romanian heritage and the Romanian culture that his family holds onto in daily life

Walking around Romanian cities, junior Alex Meiners blends in. Not a single Romanian citizen would have guessed that this kid from the United States — with more than the typical knowledge of Romanian cities — was a tourist and not a full Romanian. 

Alex has never kept his Romanian descent a secret, always being proud to tell whoever would listen about his family’s heritage. 

Even though they live halfway around the world from their home country, the Meiners family still brings little pieces of Romania to their day-to-day lives. For dinner, Alex’s mother Amalia Meiners cooks Romanian dishes, including cabbage rolls, chicken dumpling soup and mamaliga, and Alex’s music of choice is often ’80s and ’90s Romanian rock or pop. 

“My culture is a big part of who I am,” Alex said. “There’s very few Romanians [here] and because of that, I don’t get to speak [Romanian] a lot outside from my mom. We don’t get to celebrate the culture as much. We don’t have that [prominent of a community], and so we have to fight to keep our culture alive here in America.”

After his family brought Alex’s great-grandmother Buni to the U.S., she nannied him throughout his childhood, so as a kid, he had to accommodate to her being monolingual and learn the Romanian language. 

On Nov. 1-2 each year, the Meiners celebrate the Romanian Day of the Dead by visiting Buni’s graveside, who passed away when Alex was 8. They lay candles and flowers by her grave. 

“It was kind of a traumatic event because the last thing that she did [was] she came into my room and she actually held me cause I was asleep,” Alex said. “She held me and then she started to pass away. She had a heart attack.”

Though the loss of Buni was difficult, Alex’s love for his culture grew stronger. Much of his time goes into research on Romanian cities and life.  

“He’s really knowledgeable, he reads a lot,” Amalia said. “And actually, when I took them to all those medieval cities, he had so much knowledge that it actually impressed the people in that country, in that city. You hear him talking in Paris [and] was the same way. Everybody was like, ‘Are you French?’ He loves it and he’s very proud.”

His friends are often confused when sitting in the car with Alex and his mother and trying to follow their conversations that switch from English to Romanian. 

“He talks about [being Romanian] literally 24-7, he never stops,” Alex’s friend and junior Gigi Smith said. “Every single day there’s something new I learn, or he says some word in another language that I don’t know.” 

At school, many of Alex’s art projects have featured Romanian culture and Romanian Orthodox symbols. He talks about his mother often and takes pride in Amalia’s story of coming to America after living in a communist country during a rebellion at 16 years old.  

Amalia came to the U.S. from Romania when she was 25 with $20 in her pocket and a one-year-old daughter back in Romania — Alex’s older half-sister and East alum Denisa Butas — who didn’t come to America until she was 3. Struggling while living out of other’s basements and re-watching “The Little Mermaid” to learn English, Amalia met Alex’s father at the grocery store and he was the one who helped her bring Denisa to the U.S. as a citizen.  

Alex grew up hearing story after story about his great-grandmother’s beloved orchard that was once filled with grapes, peaches and apples in her home in the village of Rascruci — nothing that compared to the state of ruin that he was looking at through a window on his trip to Romania. 

Alex and his family returned from their two-and-a-half-week long trip on Oct. 6. It had been a dream of his family — especially for Alex and his mother — to visit the birthplace of their heritage for as long as they can remember. Back when Buni was still living in Romania, her stepfather kicked her out of the house she owned and sold it to a procurer for a bottle of vodka — all of which happened over 15 years ago. And after a three-year legal battle to regain their land ending in 2019, they were finally able to travel to Romania. 

What used to be a beautifully soulful place had become a ghost of itself — the broken windows and weeding vegetation growing from cracks in the ground had gone untouched for a decade and a half. Alex’s eyes filled with tears when he saw the condition of his family’s land. As he turned to his mother standing beside him, he saw that her eyes were wet too. Though he’d never before visited the house, Alex felt a deep connection to his great-grandmother and her home — a home he’s heard countless stories about. 

“It was nostalgic,” Amalia said. “I look at the house where I grew up when I was a kid, but it looks like that. I mean, in my memory it is still the same house, [but] it was very different. It was like visiting somebody else’s house, like you’ve never seen before.”

Many of Amalia’s old things didn’t even come to the U.S., but Alex and his family are still receiving old family heirlooms from different relatives and friends in Romania, like turquoise earrings and head scarfs. Included in that list was a pristine, stained glass vase belonging to Alex’s grandmother that he shattered by accident when he was 4 years old. Though he was reprimanded then, it’s now a running joke for the family. 

These physical memories serve as a close connection for Alex and his family, but nothing is as special as his real life connections with his family members. 

“At the end of the day, everything fades away,” Alex said. “[We’re] going to turn to ash one of these days and dust and everything we hold dear is going to go away and it’s better to hold close family connections and memories. It holds more importance than any family heirloom, doesn’t matter if it’s like the hope diamond or something, family is really important.”