Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Despite the dangers closing in from all sides, Sebastian continued to dwell romantically on the “spiritual autonomy” that Jewish suffering conferred upon the Jews. Judaism was a strict and tragic position in the face of existence. “No people has more ruthlessly confessed to its real or imagined sins; no one has kept stricter watch on himself or punished himself more severely. The biblical prophets are the fieriest voices ever to have sounded on earth.” Sebastian locates the “open wound” of Judaism, its “tragic nerve,” in the tension between “a tumultuous sensitivity and a ruthlessly critical sense,” between “intelligence in its coldest forms and passion in its most untrammeled forms.”

Sebastian liked to refer to himself as a “Danube Jew,” and defined his identity as follows: “I am not a partisan, but always a dissident. I have confidence only in the single individual, but in him I have a great deal of confidence.” He was adamantly opposed to the idea (it was all around him) that the collective has priority. “The death of the individual is the death of the critical spirit,” and ultimately “the death of man.” Sebastian’s enemy is man in uniform: “Is it religion you want? Here’s a membership card. Or a metaphysic? Here’s an anthem. Or a commitment? Here’s a leader.” He thirsts for dialogue and friendship, but he clings to his faith in solitude: “We can never pay too high a price for the right to be alone, without half-memories, without half-loves, without half-truths.”

As for the country that he never ceased to love for its paradoxes, its contradictions, and its eccentricities, Sebastian was not inclined to flatter it. “Nothing is serious, nothing is grave, nothing is true in this culture of smiling lampooners. Above all, nothing is incompatible …. Compromise is the blossom of violence. We therefore have a culture of brutality and horse-trading.” The formulation profoundly describes a time when collusion and compromise were preparing a future of violence. Sebastian recalls the surprise that a Frenchman visiting Bucharest in 1933 felt at the intellectual “cohabitation” prevalent in the country. A notorious Iron Guardist, “caught in the act of intellectual tenderness” with a notorious Marxist, explained that “we are just friends — which doesn’t involve commitment.” Just friends: this, for Sebastian, is a “summing up of Bucharest psychology,” a psychology of stupefying mélanges and metamorphoses. “Incompatibility: a concept completely lacking at every level of our public life.” The formulation recurs in the Journal: “Incompatibility is something unknown on the Danube.”

This and other statements appeared even more prophetic as the situation in Romania became more and more extreme. In 1937 the Iron Guard (supported by Sebastian’s friend Eliade) scored a major success at the polls. Finally there were no illusions. “All is lost,” Sebastian noted on February 21. The anti-Semitic government led by the poet Octavian Goga introduced into official discourse the evil “energy” of a language attuned to new imperatives: jidan (kike), jidánime (a horde of kikes). The official review of Jewish citizenship, and the elimination of Jews from the bar and the press, was followed by further restrictions and humiliations.

The danger grew. Officially inspired anti-Semitism gradually became a cheap entertainment within the reach of more and more people. The Iron Guard “rebellion” in January 1941 unleashed the predictable horrors in a city terrorized by armed street clashes and murderers chanting religious hymns. “A large number of Jews have been killed in Báneasa Forest and thrown there (most of them naked).” Sebastian noted on January 29. “But it seems that another lot have been executed at the slaughterhouse, at Stráulesti.” A few days later, when he was reading about anti-Semitic persecutions in the Middle Ages in Simon Dubnow’s History of the Jews, he turned again to what had happened. “What stuns you most about the Bucharest massacre is the absolutely bestial ferocity with which things were done … the Jews slaughtered at Stráulesti were hung up on abattoir hooks, in the place of split-open cattle. Stuck to each corpse was a piece of paper with the words: ‘kosher meat’ …. I cannot find more terrible events in Dubnow.”

The worst fears were coming true. Even before the horrors, Sebastian had recorded premonitions. “An uneasy evening — without my realizing why. I feel obscure threats: as if the door isn’t shut properly, as if the window shutters are transparent, as if the walls themselves are becoming translucent. Everywhere, at any moment, it is possible that some unspecified dangers will pounce from outside — dangers I know to have always been there …. You feel like shouting for help — but to whom?” This was written, as if in a state of siege, on January 14, 1941.

Many of Sebastian’s friends were now in the enemy camp. The failure of the Iron Guard revolt infuriated and embittered them. “The Legion wipes its ass with this country,” said Cioran immediately after the Iron Guard was defeated. Eliade expressed the same reaction more professorially: “Romania doesn’t deserve a legionary movement.” In 1941, General Ion Antonescu, a former ally of the Legion who was obsessed with “law and order,” established a military dictatorship with the support of the Führer. This did not put a stop to anti-Semitic murders. The summer of 1941 brought not only Romania’s entry into the war, but also a fresh round of atrocities. Massacres took place at Ia i; and long before the Nazi gas chambers were established — also in Ia i — the sinister experiment of a “death train” killed hundred and thousands of Jews by asphyxiation in sealed wagons on a journey heading nowhere.

“A simple account of what is reported about the Jews killed in Ia i or transported by train … is beyond any words, feelings or attitudes. A bleak, pitch-black, crazy nightmare.” Thus Sebastian in his diary on July 12, 1941. A few months earlier, in April 1941, the military dictator Antonescu told his ministers: “I’ll retreat into my fortress and let the crowd massacre the Jews. After the massacre, I’ll make order.” And in September 1941, after the Ia i massacre, and after Romania entered the war on Germany’s side, Antonescu explained that the fight was not against the Slavs, it was against the Jews. “It’s a mortal combat. Either we win and the world will be purified, or they win and we become their slaves.”

In the autumn of 1941, the Jewish population of Bukovina began to be deported to Transnistria. On October 20, Sebastian writes: “An anti-Semitic dementia that nobody can stop. Nowhere are there any restraints, any reason …. I see pallor and fear on Jewish faces. Their smile, their atavistic optimism freeze up. Their old consoling irony dwindles away.” The Journal goes on to record the census of residents with “Jewish blood,” the “carnage in Bukovina and Bessarabia,” the obligation of Jews to give clothing to the state and of the Jewish community to pay a huge sum of money to the authorities, the ban on Jews selling goods in markets, the confiscation of skis and bicycles from Jews. “There is something diabolical in anti-Semitism,” we read in the entry on November 12, 1941. “When we are not drowning in blood, we are wading through muck.” For a rationalist such as Sebastian to use the word “diabolical” is a measure of the bestiality provoked by the “vulgar” anti-Semitism of his time.