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

Perfectly aware of the abyss between himself and Eliade (an ideological abyss that was already filling with corpses), Sebastian nevertheless records the surprising moments of affection that linger in their moribund friendship. He cannot help being concerned by the risks that his friend faced in his ugly adventure, though he himself every day feels the cold and the darkness of the threat from the uniforms of Eliade’s “comrades.” Sebastian’s portraits of Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and other Romanian intellectuals in the grip of the nationalist delirium are devastating precisely because of their calm, patient, affectionate tone, their mingling of horror and candor.

In its historical context, the Sebastian — Eliade friendship stands as a symbol of everything that signified terror and hope, ambiguity and fear, cowardice and chance, in the Jewish-Christian relationship in Europe in the obscene decade between 1935 and 1945. These staggering and shocking Romanian “compatibilities,” their double-dealing and triple-dealing with complicity and compromise, played a role in the dissipation of moral (and not only moral) certainties, offering terrible, or generous, surprises. This might explain both the horrific persecution and the eventual salvation of a large part of the Jewish population of Romania. Sebastian’s Journal records, with growing weariness and bitterness, the precise forms of disguise and fakery.

After the Legionary revolt was defeated in 1941. Sebastian watches some of its ex-fanatics hurry to accommodate themselves to the new situation: “From one day to the next they renege, modify, attenuate, explain, agree on a line, justify themselves, forget what displeases and remember what suits them.” He discovers in horror how his friend Eliade — who had presented himself at the Romanian embassy in London as a future dignitary of the Legion — sums up this year in which the most dreadful anti-Jewish massacres were carried out in Ia i and Bucharest. “There have been two extraordinary things for me this year,” Eliade wrote from London to a mutual friend: “the astonishing weakness of the Soviet air force, and my reading of Camoëns.”

And yet, even in this nightmarish atmosphere, a few figures brighten the pages of the Journal. First and foremost among them is Eugen Ionescu. In Ci smigiu Park in Bucharest, as one of Hitler’s speeches was being broadcast on the radio, Ionescu stood up choking at what he heard. “He was pale, white in the face. ‘I can’t take it. I can’t.’ He said this with a kind of physical desperation ….” Sebastian records on October 3, 1941. “I felt like hugging him.” He also notes a message from another friend: “You make me feel ashamed, Mihai — ashamed that you suffer and I do not.” And after the anti-Semitic massacres in Ia si, he recalls the reaction of two university professors in the Moldovan capital. One covered his face with “a gesture of impotence, fear and disgust”: the other uttered just a few words: “The most bestial day in the history of mankind.”

Finally, in 1944, when the Red Army entered Bucharest, not a few people changed sides in a flash. “Everyone is rushing to fill posts,” Sebastian records, “to make use of titles, to establish rights. … A taste for lampooning alternates in me with a kind of helpless loathing [for] all the imposture, all the effrontery, all the sinister play-acting.”

This, then, was Sebastian’s odyssey, which he experienced all in the same place. In 1934, declaring himself to be a “Danube Jew,” the hero of Sebastian’s novel For Two Thousand Years movingly states on the author’s behalf: “I should like to know what anti-Semitic laws could cancel the irrevocable fact that I was born on the Danube and love this land …. Against my Jewish taste for inner catastrophe, the river raised the example of its regal indifference.” In 1943, he was asking, “Shall I go back to those people? Will the war have passed without breaking anything — without anything irrevocable, anything irreducible, between my life ‘before’ and my life ‘tomorrow’?” In 1944, he was preparing to leave “the eternal Romania in which nothing ever changes.” His description of an encounter with a Jewish captain from the U.S. Army suggests which destination he had in mind for his adventure: “an unaffected young man full of vitality, concerned about us as Jews, concerned about democracy and its reality. A human being. A new figure. Really somebody.” But Sebastian’s hope of leaving “the land of the Danube” was cut short by his accidental death on May 29, 1943. He was 38 years old. Death spared him any postwar experiment with “compulsory happiness” in communist captivity in his own country.

The publication of Sebastian’s Journal sparked a powerful reaction in Romania. Several editions have already sold out, and the discussion continues in the press. The book provoked a catharsis in a society that seems afraid to scrutinize its past and hesitates to admit its own contribution to the Holocaust, in a country in which criticism of the nationalist tradition in culture is sometimes considered an unpatriotic act, if not actual blasphemy. “In reading it,” writes Vasile Popovici, a writer from Timisoara, where the anti-Ceau sescu revolt began in 1989, “you cannot possibly remain the same. The Jewish problem becomes your problem. A huge sense of shame spreads over a whole period of the national culture and history, and its shadow covers you too.”

Still, the number of those who are willing to make the Jewish problem their problem is not very large. For a significant number of public voices in Romania, the Holocaust seems to be (as Jean-Marie Le Pen once put it) a “detail” of the war. Even those who recognize the scale of the catastrophe do not always seem prepared to accept what it reveals. This is especially evident in the debate about Marshal Antonescu, the military dictator during the period of Romania’s alliance with Nazi Germany, to whom the Romanian Parliament paid homage in 1991, and who has been honored in many public places in today’s Romania. When a distinguished Romanian intellectual with democratic leanings intervened a few years ago in the controversy about the rehabilitation of Antonescu, he argued that an “exclusive, overwhelming” emphasis on the dictator’s anti-Jewish policy “would prevent science — in this case, history — from honestly and objectively performing its duty.” Similarly, in the polemics surrounding the publication of Sebastian’s Journal, there have been voices “annoyed” at this new and weighty testimony in what some see as an overly protracted discussion of the Holocaust. Not surprisingly, doubts have been cast on the authenticity of the text. Critics have ruminated on the subjectivity of private journals generally. All this, so as not to face the evidence of what Sebastian wrote.

It is little wonder that even the infrequent empathy with the suffering of the Jews is peculiarly expressed. In 1997, the director of the publishing house Humanitas, the very house that published Sebastian’s Journal, gave a talk affectingly entitled “Sebastian, mon frère” at the Jewish Community Center in Bucharest. He explained his solidarity with Jewish suffering in terms of his own hardship under the communists and the post-communists. It is an analogy that leaves no room to evoke anti-Semitism and the Holocaust properly, or to analyze honestly the “happy guilt” of such intellectuals as Eliade, Cioran, Nae Ionescu, and Noica.