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

“The Land of Dada,” as he called Romania, reappeared more and more often in recent years, not only as “the dark land” or “the land of exile” (as he wrote in a letter to his old school friend Eugen Campus) but also as the land of his childhood, that “miraculous time” beyond recall even for a childlike artist fascinated by the magic of its set pieces and clowning.

The street of Calea Grivi tei, where an uncle of his apparently had a watchmaker’s shop, came back to life as a bewildering initiatory realm. Even eighty years later, he remembered vividly the smells of cobblers’ workshops and shoeshine booths, spice stores, dust and perspiration and a nearby railway station, pickles and pies and Romanian-style kebabs and the hairdresser’s shop.

He frequently woke me with a ’phone call, presumably holding a Romanian dictionary on his knees. “ Cacialma. What would you think?” he would ask about the word for “bluff.” “Obviously a Turkish word, no? Like mahala [slum district], like sarma [stuffed cabbage], narghilea [hookah], or ciulama [chicken in white sauce]. But what about cic [a contracted form of ‘it is said that’]? And then there’s cic leal [teasing]. Or ci smea [fountain]. Turkish, both of them, right? Colib [hut] is Slavic. And the linguistic influences of these words: professions are German, flowers French, but rastel [gun rack] comes from the Italian rastello [rake], or rastellum in Latin. And sear [evening] and searb d [tasteless] and zi [day] and ziar [newspaper] and zîn [fairy]. But zid [wall] is Slavic, and so is zîmbet [smile] ….”

He discovered strange words whose exotic sound seemed suddenly to bring back the time and place that had formed and deformed us. “I can’t manage to make my peace with the language,” he wrote in 1988 to Eugen Campus, who was living in Israel. And in another letter that same year, referring to his relations with his native country, he recognized “a complexity that caused me confusion in my childhood — I should have liked to be normal, that is, primitive.”

In his last years, more and more frequent incursions into Romanian confirmed his fascination with the language and the aura of his early life. To me, too, he said that in his youth he had wanted to become a writer but that lacking a language even later on, he had turned to writing through images. We were joined in our plight, he was saying, but the suggestion of kinship did not stop there. “We can’t be Americans,” I was told more than once.

The Romanian archives that Saul kept in his apartment and that I consulted after his death show a far from dimmed memory of the inaugural place and time.

The genealogical tree sketched in his hand on large drawing boards maps a large Jewish-Romanian family. His paternal grandfather, Nathan, who had children from both of his two marriages, was born in Russia and lived in Buz u, Romania, where he worked as an army tailor, and where Saul himself spent his early childhood. His only son from the first marriage emigrated to America and founded a new family there, while the children from his second marriage, two sons — Martin and Harry — took the same course and went off, respectively, to New York (as a printer) and Denver, each eventually producing a sizable family of his own.

Most of Nathan’s offspring, however, stayed in Romania. Saul’s maternal grandfather, Iancu Itic Jacobson, lived all his life in Buz u as a wine merchant; some of his sixteen children died young, but the others spread to France, America, Israel, and, above all, to different parts of Romania, as typographers, watchmakers, engineers, binders or sellers of books, one even as a croupier. In the graphics of this meticulously documented genealogy, Saul appears with his arms outstretched toward Hedda Sterne (the wife from whom he was separated but not divorced) and Sigrid, his companion of many decades.

The Romanian postcards that he collected (first through an agent in Queens, New York, then through an art dealer in Amsterdam) display the same obsession with his native country: picturesque views from the interwar years of Romanian towns and villages and spas. As I looked with amusement at a market sequence with halva sellers (“Alvi tari. Marchands d’alvita, Editura Mag. M. Rosenbaum, Bucure sti”), I was inevitably reminded that when Saul first came to our house, he arrived not with the usual bottle of wine, or the even more usual box of bottles, as he would later, but with an old colored postcard of interwar Buz u.

Both before and after the war, Saul’s letters from his parents, still in Romania, are full of a great affection and concern, especially after he was forced by new anti-Jewish laws to leave his beloved Italy and go to America. They confirm the same painful connection to that common Romanian past from which he and eventually they were severed and liberated.

One can see why a winter journey to the Soviet Union in 1956 had a powerful meaning for the tourist Saul Steinberg. “That winter in Russia was a trip for my nose,” Saul confessed, “a voyage to the odors of Eastern Europe and my childhood — beautiful ones of winter and also of elementary school, police station, disinfectant, the terrible odor of fear which at that time, with Stalin only recently gone, permeated Moscow and Leningrad and even the countryside. Those ancient smells and emotions were like a visit to my past, a travel in time.”

The adult’s journey was also the child’s journey. Among Saul’s envelopes, letters, Romanian identity papers, documents, and other relics, I found a recent photograph that looked as if it had been extracted from a Bergman film: the elderly Saul Steinberg holding the hand of a child, himself as a boy. A collage, then, a bewildering sequence from the lost and yet never lost Proustian time of childhood.

“By putting oneself in the uncomfortable position of the immigrant, one is again like a child,” explained the New World immigrant. “I am among the few who continue to draw after childhood is ended, continuing and perfecting childhood drawing.” The place of exile was childhood itself, but a miraculous one full of visions and magical effects. Saul Steinberg discovered his homeland (“patria,” as he used to say) in America precisely in this sense of liberty and play and substitution, openness and creativity — and also farce. Stunning mutations, dreams and versatility and spectacle, energy and illusions, oceanic solitude, ingenuity, devastating despair.