The story of the grandmother who began to read at 80, escaped loneliness, traveled the world and became famous without fully understanding it

On the table are plates and bowls filled with meatballs, olives, and cheese. "Eat! Eat!" the old woman sitting on the bench commands us. "Why aren't they eating anymore?" she asks her grandson, who is leaning against the doorframe. "We're eating, we're eating!" we say quickly, taking a meatball and some olives.

Her grandson apologizes for not responding to my message. He hasn't seen it. Well, it's Easter. But, to be honest, he would have written that an interview with his grandmother wasn't possible. Now that we're already here—why not?

And so I sit with my photographer in this small house with white wooden shingles, in a valley in northern Romania, a few meters from the banks of the Viseu, which is still a stream here before it later flows into the Tisza and then disappears into the Danube, opposite my grandmother, and I can hardly believe that she actually exists.

She's like her TikTok videos, which have attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers. An old woman who observes her surroundings through narrow slits of her eyes, skeptical but also curious, and who loves to talk loudly.

"I don't know what you're going to ask me. If I don't know the answer, I won't answer, and if I say something I shouldn't have said—well, fine, then I've said it," the grandmother begins, and then waits until her grandson or my photographer translates for me. Most of the time, though, she just keeps talking. I absorb what she says. Sometimes I understand a sentence, a few words, and I have to laugh because she's laughing, loudly and from the gut.

I know that laugh. When she talks about the science fiction novel "Dune" and the sandworms on the desert planet in a TikTok video, she also laughs from her belly and says: "Three-kilometer-long worms! Like buses!"

Such videos have made her famous throughout the country. Romania's largest publishers send her book packages from Bucharest. Fans write postcards. Hundreds leave comments on her TikTok and YouTube accounts.

The videos make you happy. Because they appear unedited, honest, and real. Unscripted success in the post-truth age—does that still exist today?

And because she seems happy doing it. When I first saw her videos, I had found a treasure.

Now that I'm sitting across from my grandmother, it feels like I'm being swallowed up by a fairy tale book.

In the far east of Europe, where the continent slides into the Black Sea, something happened in the winter of 2024 that sounds like something out of a dark fairy tale of our time: A man no one had ever heard of before enchanted an entire nation with short messages that suddenly appeared on everyone's cell phones - like a curse that fell over the country.

His name was Calin Georgescu, and together with his wife, he shared videos on TikTok about treason and conspiracies, claiming that his country, Romania, was controlled by secret services and that only he could save it. His video messages reached millions, even people who didn't even follow his TikTok account and only wanted makeup and dance videos, but no political advertising. The TikTok algorithm had spread them en masse.

Then something incredible happened: people voted for Calin Georgescu in the presidential elections, even though they only knew him from the screen.

Unrest broke out in the country. A court ruled that Georgescu had cheated and been aided by foreign powers. The elections were annulled. People were angry, confused, and afraid. TikTok had bewitched an entire nation.

I read about Georgescu's magic on the internet. The story made me think. I thought back to the internet I grew up with. A place where people found like-minded people, shared knowledge, and helped each other. That seems like light years ago; perhaps it had always been an illusion. This spring, I'm traveling to Romania.

In a fairy tale, the roles are clearly defined: the wizard, the witch, the hero or heroine. In Bucharest, I meet the wise man, who knows more about the dark side of the world than we ordinary people.

Ionita Sorin is the head of an organization that studies how messages spread on TikTok and other social networks, and who is successful there and why. He has also studied Georgescu's tricks closely and says that Romanians were the perfect victims. "We were born for this app. For us, the spoken word has always been more important than the written word. The short videos are like rumors we can tell each other."

The wise man knows more, but that doesn't make him any happier. To Sorin, his knowledge seems banal, almost useless. At one point, he sighs and explains to me that there's no country in Europe where more people consume these videos. More than eight million people in Romania are on TikTok, which is almost half of all Romanians. "Romania has the highest proportion of TikTok users in Europe—almost half the population." He seems sad. As if he's lost faith in humanity.

As I leave, he casually mentions that older Romanians in rural areas are also active on TikTok. They use it to stay in touch with their children and grandchildren abroad. This surprises me. The app that has dumbed down young people and poisoned a nation is supposed to improve the lives of the elderly?

I think about my grandmother, who never learned how to use her iPhone, and wonder if I'd think it would be a good idea for her to have a TikTok account. Then I Google something about old people on TikTok in Romania.

I actually find a few older TikTok influencers. For example, there's an old man who dances for the camera with his walking stick and has gained many fans who have now subscribed to his videos. It sounds kind of funny and innocent. Then I see that I can buy mugs and T-shirts printed with the old man's face. His family has transformed his grandfather into a kind of dancing bear with the help of TikTok.

At some point, I come across a profile of a grandmother who reviews books on TikTok and has become famous throughout the country. The story sounds so beautiful that I almost can't believe it. It's about 84-year-old Ileana Ivascu, who lives alone in a small house in the far north of the country, in a small valley at the edge of a village. She was lonely until she started reading. Her grandson filmed her talking about the books and posted these videos on TikTok. Grandma Ivascu became famous. Tens of thousands followed her, hundreds of thousands watched her videos. And just like that, she was no longer alone.

I'm suspicious. In a time when the internet can turn even a grandpa into a clown dancing for money, could a lonely old woman have become addicted to reading and, thanks to an app that sent an entire country into collective hysteria, become a source of inspiration for hundreds of thousands of Romanians? Simply because she enjoyed stories? All this, without anyone profiting from it?

I have to find the grandmother.

On TikTok and YouTube, I quickly click through to my grandmother's videos. She's wearing a headscarf and a white ruffle-trimmed vest. Behind her, you can see brown wardrobes and a tapestry. The camera films her from below. A wrinkled face with a large, bulbous nose and black eyes that absorb the light. In her hands, she holds a book up to the camera: "White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She tells the story of a lonely young man "who spent his nights as best he could. He was in St. Petersburg, and he went out into the street, and he walked and walked and walked." She laughs less than, for example, in the video in which she discusses the science fiction novel "Dune" and tells of the prince who must flee, of his mistress, and of spices that can be harvested in the desert on a distant planet. As unbelievable as this story seems to her, it makes her happy that someone has imagined such a strange world.

I watch her, the video calms me down, it's simple and beautiful.

I scroll through the comments below the videos on YouTube. On "Dune," viewer Darius writes: "Oh, 'Dune,' one of my favorite books. Grandma will live many lives with books like these. I wish her good health!"

SweetSeptember17 comments on Dostoyevsky: "I just discovered you, but I'll be checking out all your book reviews. You're wonderful! You inspire me to read."

And viewer Rick_and_Mortimer writes under the same video: "Wow, how much I love this book and how it broke my heart."

The videos look as if they were neither staged nor edited, but that could also be a scam. I write to the account and wait a few hours without much hope. The article stated that the grandmother lived in a village in the Maramures region, but the journalist didn't mention the name of the village.

And so, on Easter Sunday, I drive with my photographer through Maramures, in the far north of Romania, on the border with Ukraine. A sparsely populated, hilly landscape that resembles what Switzerland must have looked like before it was cultivated by high-voltage power lines, highways, and village bypasses. But just because the region is sparsely populated doesn't mean that Grandma's village would be easy to find. Maramures is empty, but large.

On Facebook and Instagram, I write to someone with the same name as the grandson mentioned in the article about the grandmother. He writes back, saying he's pleased about my inquiry, that literature is important, that he himself is studying and working at the theater in a nearby town, and that it would be a pleasure to talk to me about literature. Only, he's not the grandson of the grandmother I'm looking for.

I had absolutely no interest in talking about literature with a random Romanian—it had to be my grandmother! I wrote to other people, to no avail.

As we wind through the hills, I find a Facebook account bearing my grandmother's name. It shows an old woman wearing a headscarf. I'm not sure if this is really my bookish grandmother. The last post is several years old, a photo that several users liked. I open the Facebook profiles of the people who were happy to see the photo. Several are from the same place: a village in the Maramures region.

Moisei is a long line of houses, wedged between the hills on a main road, with little traffic, few people on the streets, and even the parking spaces in front of the shops are empty.

Four people are standing at an intersection. I hold out my phone with the photo from Facebook and ask if they know the woman. Three of them shake their heads. "No, but that name. The Ivascus all once lived back there," says a man, pointing toward the end of the village.

We cross a small bridge, drive past wooden garden fences and low houses. At some point, we don't know what to do next. There are dozens of houses here, scattered across a large hillside. The path forks. In both directions, there are countless places where the old woman could be.

In front of a garden gate, I pull out my phone again and show the photo. "Ah, yes, I know her!" says the homeowner. His wife looks at him in surprise: What? Really? "Yes, I've seen a video of her on TikTok."

I'm getting nervous. This close, can it really be true?

"You have to follow the road up the slope until you come to a house that has three floors but no roof. Then you leave the car and continue on foot. Turn left down the slope, through the grove of trees, until you reach a small house."

We follow the road, looking for a house without a roof. Everywhere we see only modern houses with shutters, telling of absent owners. No people, just roofs. Then, suddenly, a ruined building appears before us. Three stories. No roof. We park the car. To our left is an embankment, tall trees, and a path between them, which we follow until, far below, among the bushes, we see a small house. The door is open, and a shadow moves slowly from left to right and then, after a while, from right to left again. Then we are standing in her kitchen.

She had never read before. They didn't have any books at home, but whenever she found a newspaper, in the oven, under the stove, or when she was clearing the table and came across a piece of paper, she would read. She would read anything she could find. Just never a book.

There were no books in her own house either. Only the Bible. A Jehovah's Witness had brought it to her. He had approached her in the field and asked her if she knew the Bible. She had said no. The next day, he came back with the book under his arm.

She and her husband had built the house with their own hands. They were farmers, had cows, and raised turkeys. "Sometimes I worked and forgot to eat. Would you like some juice? A beer, perhaps?"

No, Grandma, go on.

She speaks of the child and then points to her grandson. "No one comes here, no one visits me. Not anymore. The child has his own life." No regrets, that's just how it is. That's how it should be.

And finally, there it is: the child, standing in the doorway, has come to visit for Easter. And it comes regularly; someone uploads the videos to the internet, after all; it's not the grandmother. But what are visits every two weeks when you live alone in a little house at the end of a village, tucked away among the trees? The days stretch into infinity, time becomes indefinite.

Five or six years ago, the time became too much. Her husband had died long ago, as had her only son, the father of her grandson, twelve years ago. At some point, her grandson brought her a few books, and she simply began reading. "To pass the time, then it became more than that. A path through silence, a therapy, a prayer."

She says she's read 360 books. In five years. I calculate: more than 60 per year, more than one book per week. That's a lot, a lot. Last year I managed two books per month. My friend thinks I read a lot, but I always say, no, not at all. How often do I mindlessly scroll through Instagram on my phone, watch videos like the one from my grandmother who actually read? So much time when I'm not reading. Or as my grandmother says: "I read in the kitchen, I read in the yard, I read in the garden, I read when the silence becomes unbearable. When a book grabs me, I stop eating, I stop sleeping. I read."

And if you don't like the book, Grandma?

"I finish it anyway. There isn't a book I haven't finished. That's just me. And then I take a pen and write the date on the first page. Then I put it on the shelf."

Next to the kitchen is a room, and next to that is another room, and there on the wall is a small shelf, as tall as Grandma's, containing the 360 books, each dated. Not a single book remains unread; these are stored on another shelf in another room.

Here you'll find "Dune," "Harry Potter," even a manga, "I read it backwards!", Kafka and Hesse, and crime novels. And the Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, who interviewed many elderly women and men in her books, just as I'm interviewing my grandmother now. The book catches my attention because it was the first book my grandmother discussed in her videos. An unusual choice, I thought at the time, also because it's about the Holocaust.

"The Holocaust book . . ." She seems lost in thought. "It touched me deeply. I always felt a connection to the Jews. They suffered so much. Too much. I never understood why. I still don't. The book helped me understand it a little better. The Bible helped me even more, explaining where the suffering began, in Egypt. The Bible itself says that they will suffer again. That the pain will never leave them. Perhaps they are still suffering today, perhaps even here."

She remains silent. I don't ask. It doesn't need me. Not as a questioner, perhaps not even as a listener.

"I was three when they took them—the Jews. We had a lot of us here. Good people. They lived in the village center. We lived out here. They were the strong ones, the wise ones. They owned the shops and worked hard. They built this place, in many ways. Then the soldiers came. My mother worked for the Jewish families back then. She and two of her sisters worked for the Jews. That's how it was back then. When they were eight, they went to live with the Jewish families; at sixteen, they were married. The soldiers took the Jews while they were still sitting at the dinner table. The food was still warm. I remember my mother's pain when she told us about it. She heard that the soldiers had taken the Jews to Viseu. In railway carriages. She rushed home, got what she could find in the kitchen—onions, flour—and ran to Viseu and brought them what she had. After that, she became ill. She had seen too much. After the war, a few came back. Three lived with us. They spent the first Christmases after the war with us. My mother knew what they ate, what they liked. Only one in a hundred returned.

"Why aren't they eating anymore?" she asks her grandson again. He shrugs. So I eagerly take an olive.

All these books on a small shelf, in one head, in just a few years, so many stories condensed – where from, why? He, standing there in the doorway, the grandson, smiles. He brought her the books. Always new ones. Following no plan. She reads them all anyway, no matter what he brings. In the past, the elderly sent their children out into the world. Now the grandson had sent his grandmother out into the world. "I've never traveled," says the grandmother. "Once to Bucharest, but only to the train station. Today I travel with the books to places I've never set foot on. Who knows where I'll end up. And what they'll do to me."

That sounds like she's lost in the books. But that's not what she means. Quite the opposite.

"When you read a book, a real book, you find yourself in the book. Maybe only in a sentence or two, but you find a piece of yourself there, and you stop and say to yourself: That's me, that's exactly what happened to me. It's quite impossible for you to read and not find yourself there."

I'm amazed by this fairytale character. The grandson smiles apologetically. I think I understand the moment when he decided to film her. Of course he had to film her. She must have told him about the books, and he thought to himself: It's incredible what the books do to this old woman. How they transform her.

She saw him filming her. She thought it was just for him. "Something for later, to remember me by. Look, that was my grandmother. I didn't know he would share me with the world."

She claims she wouldn't have continued speaking if she'd known. "Whatever the young people think, maybe they'll laugh at me, maybe they won't know what to think. But I say to them, to all those who don't read: Throw your cell phone down the well! Leave it to the devil. And pick up a book. It will prepare you for life, for trials, for disappointments, for joy. Everything is in the books—and not in the screen you hold in your hands as if it were your only god."

I laugh, of course I laugh, who talks like that anyway? My photographer, who's translating, laughs too.

"You laugh, you probably think I'm lying. But it's true!" Grandmother is now speaking very loudly. "I want to read so many more books. I read many at once. Not because I can't decide. I'm greedy for them all. That's the only thing I regret: that I started reading so late. At my age, everything is just 'until tomorrow.' The bookmark in my book, maybe it will stay there forever. Maybe one day someone will find me, book under my arm, the bookmark where I put it the day before, and they'll know: I never left that page."

After almost two hours, we leave the grandmother and grandson. He shows us book packages sent by publishers from Bucharest. And cards from viewers with congratulations. "Keep reading, Grandma," the fans, of whom she doesn't even know how many, wish her.

I walk through the grove, past the grave in the grass. Was it my son's? The trees are blooming white. I am happy. My grandmother wasn't an influencer who did something because it brought her attention and money. She read and discussed the books because it gave her joy, without knowing who was listening. Those who followed my grandmother on TikTok experienced stories the way they used to—as consolation, not as deception. Her videos showed what the internet once was, what it could be again. Perhaps sometimes, for a few seconds, it still is.

A few weeks later, I'm sitting in a retirement home. My grandma lives there now. She used to give us books, stacks upon stacks, every Christmas, every birthday, and every other day. When I was little, I read more than I'll ever be able to read again in my entire life.

Grandma can hardly read anymore. Her world has become smaller. She does have her magnifying glass, but once she's finished reading a page, she no longer remembers what was written on the first few lines. Grandma has been reading all her life. She read to us grandchildren and whisked us away to Kyburg Castle, to the land of milk and honey, or to Canada to see the silver foxes.

We're sitting in the retirement home's café, and I tell her about my trip through Romania, taking her to Ceausescu's palace and the villages of Maramures. About Grandma? I don't tell Grandma. I'm afraid she'd realize that Grandma's reading adventures are no longer possible for her. Instead, I show her more photos of Romania on my phone. And I travel with her out of the retirement home's cafeteria.