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

If Ia si was the starting place for Goldfaden’s Yiddish theater and A.I. Cuza’s anti-Semitism, Cernau ti was the place where the International Jewish Congress of 1908 took place. That Congress decided the apparently definitive (but in reality utterly temporary) victory of Yiddish in its long fratricidal war with Hebrew. Despite the regeneration of Romanian nationalism that flowered after the restitution of Bukovina to the mother country in 1918, the city’s cosmopolitan character and its Habsburg tradition of multinational cooperation would maintain the atmosphere of intense cultural stimulation. In “the last Alexandria of Europe,” as Zbignew Herbert would call the capital of Bukovina, that eastern enclave of German-Austrian language and culture irradiated Romanian, Jewish (Yiddish and Hebrew), Ukrainian and Polish cultures, which re-experienced in their turn the inevitable influence of the Habsburg mentality.

In Ia si, the Jewish community met with a rich Romanian culture (Fondane’s mother frequented the famous Junimea literary circle, the classic Romanian writer Ion Creanga was a guest of the family, the “Via ta Romaneasca”—Romanian Life — circle hosted the poet in a truly friendly way) and with a marked French influence. In Cernau ti, eyes were fixed on Vienna and Berlin.

“Die Landschaft aus der ich zu Ihnen komme, dürfte den meisten von Ihnen unbekannt sein”—The landscape from which I come must be unknown to the majority of you, Celan told the audience present at the granting of the Bremen City Prize for Literature. “Es war eine Gegend, in der Menschen und Bücher lebten”—It was a province where people and books lived.

It was a definition of belonging that Fondane would have been able to pronounce facing his Parisian or Argentine hosts or, at the last moment, when he was thrown on the pyre, as in the hypothetical post-mortem dialogue “in the mountains” with the Bukovinian Celan.

To write in “the language of the executioners” means much more than the contradiction it announces with such vehemence. This possible impossibility conveys the history of centuries of persecution and their convergence in “the Final Solution” as well as the cultural venom that the national creative geniuses conveyed — not just once — with guilty ease and which (an ever repeated and incomprehensible paradox) those sent away carried on — in their case, however, to maintain the admiration of readers and apprenticed writers. The poet can only write in the language of his poetry, even when, as Celan says, “the language is German and the writer a Jew.” Here, there is an “impossibility” that art makes possible, necessary, and miraculous.

Why does “the unpronounceable name” remain a handicap? Both in Ia si, which hosted the oldest Romanian university and which was an effervescent center of culture and creativity, and in the cosmopolitan big-little metropolises: Cern u ti — Vienna — Berlin — Paris? Let’s leave the question to the ideologues of “multiculturalism” today.

Was Celan’s pseudonym only an anagram of his own name, as is often said, or was it the larkish invention of the student of Romance languages at the University of Cern u ti who had recently discovered Thomas Celano, the Italian poet and philosopher of the thirteenth century and biographer of Francis of Assisi, as Israel Chalfen suggests? From the friend of his youth, Edith Silberman, we learn that the suggestion for the anagram came, in fact, from a whisper on the part of Frau Jessica Margul-Sperber, the wife of Celan’s literary mentor.

Celan passed through Romanian schools (“with regard to anti-Semitism in our school, I could write a book of around three hundred pages,” he wrote in a letter to his family) and Jewish and German schools as well. He began to study medicine in France and “came back home” to study Romance languages. He let Nazism and anti-Semitism push him toward communism. Confronted with the “Soviet liberators,” he emigrated from Ukrainian, Soviet Cern u ti to Bucharest after the war where his unbearable retrospection (his mother having been killed in Transnistria would remain an obsessive guilty memory even in maturity) found much anticipated solace: the “Latin” joyfulness of his pals, reading and writing, contact with the Romanian Surrealists and with Alfred Margul-Sperber and the translations that he began from Russian literature. This was a happy period for the Pun, as Celan would call himself, and it blessed him with an affectionate and lasting memory.

He made his literary debut—“scandalous” for the dogmatic Stalinist period — with ‘Death Fugue’/ ‘Todesfuge’ in Contemporanul (The Contemporary) in 1947, an appearance that was largely due to able maneuvers in the wings by literary critic and historian Ovid. S. Crohm lniceanu (born Moise Cohen). This poem was translated into Romanian by his close friend Peter Solomon. It would become the perennial centerpiece of his later celebrity.

The exile of the two poets, joined for posterity in a conversation of silences, is both an eclipse and a liberation, as it was and is, too, for so many of their confreres before and after them. Debacle and drive (disorientation and springboard), exile offers an initial stimulating shock and then a state of persistent ambivalence in the face of the indeterminate and the unknown.

Aggressed in exile by upsets, mischances, and stupefaction, the center of being loses the ability to articulate within the premises of the time before. For Fondane and Celan, “the privileged trauma” of exile, as I once called it, was more privilege than trauma, though tragic endings hastened toward them. The long-awaited time when they freed themselves from the limitations and hostilities of their native environment signified for them the chance to become situated in a beneficent, “metropolitan” way in essential questions as well, for in their case alienation had destabilized the conventions of identity, reduced them to the solitary “entity” of the pilgrim to nowhere, and it turned each of them, more than once, toward the millenial exile of their ancestors. Even with the linguistic advantage of immigrating into a known language, Fondane did not become really French, or Celan German.

Through exile, Judaism gains another weight as a regenerating valence, something like a stable, residual magnetism with new vibrations. In exile, Fondane extends himself in a typically Judaic cry and call to awakening and universal brotherhood in the face of the cataclysm; Celan gathers himself into himself and into the neurotic imagination of memory.

Old and new accents strengthen the Jewishness of peregrination. Their distant star, “the grandfather between the flames of the Sabbath candlesticks praying: ‘let my right hand forget her skill! / If I do not remember you, / let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth / if ever I take thee in vain, O Jerusalem!’” This is how Fundoianu / Fondane evokes the diaspora of the exiles: “The soldier in the marshes of Masada / makes himself a fatherland / unflinching/against all the barbs in the wire / toward me / he came / with wakened name / hand wakened, for ever / from that which couldn’t be buried,” with his eyes set on the new Jerusalem. Lyric expression becomes, in one, the almost biblical invocation of a prophet, treated to violence and vulnerable, while in the other it is a continuous, fragmented undertone aspiring to the tumult of silence where the whispers and groans of the banished ghetto may occasionally be deciphered, sacrificed, and codified into an almost cabalistic austerity of language.