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

In the beginning was the Word, the ancients told us. In the beginning for me, the word was Romanian. The doctor and all those who assisted at my difficult birth spoke Romanian. Romanian was spoken in my home, where I spent most of my time with Maria, the lovely young peasant woman who took care of me and spoiled me, in Romanian. Of course these were not the only sounds around me. German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish were spoken in Bukovina, as was a peculiar dialect, a Slavic mixture typical of the Ruthenians. It is notable that the family quarrel between Yiddish, the earthly-plebeian language of exile, and Hebrew, the holy-chosen language, peaked at the 1908 Czernowitz conference when the celebrated triumph of Yiddish (“The Jews are one people, their language is Yiddish”) gave no sign of the spectacular and definitive domination that Hebrew would attain with the founding, four decades later, of the State of Israel. When my grandfather asked at my birth if the newborn had nails, trying to gauge my chances of survival, he presumably asked in Yiddish, although he knew Hebrew and spoke fluent Romanian. The books sold in his bookshop were, in fact, Romanian. At five, when I was deported to the Transnistria concentration camp, along with the rest of Bukovina’s Jewish population, I spoke only Romanian. With my first expulsion beyond the Dniester, the Romanian language was also banished.

The Yiddish poet Itzik Manger once said: “When the great calamity overwhelmed the German-assimilated Jew, when a brutal sergeantmajor roared: ‘Out, Jew!’ the German Jew woke from his self-justifying dream, from his trance of German culture, and began to run. But in himself, and with himself, he carried a bastard: a foreign language; a foreign body.” 1In my case, a brutal Romanian, not German, sergeant-major roared: “Out, Jew,” but the Romanian language I carried wasn’t a bastard or a foreign body; it was my only language. It was also, of course, the language of that brutal sergeantmajor, and this I was already aware of at too early an age.

In the camp I learned Yiddish from the elderly captives and Ukrainian from native children in the neighborhood. After liberation by the Red Army I attended a Russian school for one year. When we returned to Romania in 1945, I enrolled in a Romanian school, but my parents soon arranged for me to be privately tutored — in German. What we experienced during those years of terror in “Trans-tristia” had originated, they knew quite well, in Hitler’s Berlin, but they were also aware of, even though they were not particularly well educated in, the difference between recent horror and the longer view, between hatred and culture. I studied Hebrew for only one year, when I was roughly 13, in order to be formally accepted among the “men” of the tribe. Surprisingly, traces resurface, even today, when I least expect them. In high school I learned French and Russian, but none of the languages I had taken up ever became fully internalized. Echoes of my subconscious “cosmopolitanism” sound only occasionally these days when, suddenly and without effort on my part, the proper turn of phrase occurs to me in a conversation held in one of these half-familiar, still foreign, languages, even when I have access to them.

In the end, I feel at home in only one language.

Writing seems a childish pursuit, as we well know, even when done with the excessive seriousness to which children are prone.

My long road to this immaturity began one July day in 1945, several months after our return from the camps. An Edenic summer in a small Moldavian town. The enchanted banality of the normal, the overwhelming joy of finally feeling secure. A perfect afternoon: sun and stillness. In the room’s half-light, I listened to a voice that was mine and yet not my own. The green book of Romanian folktales I had been given just before I reached the solemn age of nine spoke directly to me. It was then, I think, that I experienced the wonder of the word, the magic of literature: both wound and balm, disease and therapy. The language to which I had been subjected in the Transnistria camps was a cacophony that mingled despair with barked orders from the guards, that brutal sergeant-major roaring. Yiddish, German, Ukrainian, Russian: all the camp’s idioms rushed into the chasm it had rent in my life.

In 1945, the survivors and their nomadic language were repatriated. An impoverished language, anemic, hesitant, and confused, it needed, as I did, the nutrients of normality. I made all sorts of rediscoveries: food, games, school, clothing, relatives, but above all I was mad for books, newspapers, magazines, posters. I discovered new words and new meanings, my language absorbed them quickly and with great excitement. Early, too early, I dreamed of joining the clan of word wizards, the secret sect I had just discovered.

My first literary attempt was, of course, an “amorous discourse,” as Roland Barthes would say. In 1947, in the lowest high school class at the Jewish Lyceum in Suceava — a private school that was to be banned a year later — I dedicated my childish rhetoric to the blond girl whose name followed mine in the class registry: Manea, Norman; Norman, Bronya. I read that solemn declaration, full of pathos, to Bronya and a small group of bewildered classmates. And then, in the first year of the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” I continued with the same childish enthusiasm to write poems in honor of the Revolution, of Stalin, of world peace — terrible poems, of course, which may compete, I would say, with the terrible poems written at that time by mature and renowned poets all around the world. Yet, I was already searching for something “different,” something that would transcend daily trivialities, eager as I was to uncover my true self among all the individuals who inhabited me. The one-party system of the socialist dictatorship took over, gradually, any private ownership: land and banks, industry and schools, farms and hospitals and newspapers, apartments and kindergartens, stadiums and pharmacies and libraries, agriculture and culture — everything. All of us were owned by the state, and the official language of the Party dominated our daily life, sometimes our nightlife, too. Some people could still find a shelter in their family library. That was not my case. Coming back from our nomadic ordeal, we didn’t have much of anything. The bookstore of my grandfather was gone, as was he himself, buried in a nameless grave in the Ukraine. Hunting for books took many useless detours and traps before I could find, finally, after a great waste of time and energy, the authors I was looking for. Yet, reading saved me from the deadening effect of the dictatorship’s wooden language. My imagination was inflamed by German Romanticism; I immersed myself in English and French realism; but above all I was mesmerized by the great Russian literature, at the time extensively and superbly translated in Romania. Tolstoy and Goncharov, Gogol and Pushkin, Chekhov and many others. It was not until the “liberalization” period of the 1960s that I would experience the true Dostoyevky and the great modernists, Joyce, Proust, Faulkner, the Latin Americans, and the Surrealists, as well as modern Romanian writers who had finally been republished after years of a stupid ban. Reading preserved me from ideological idiocy and grotesque opportunism, first as an unhappy student at the polytechnic and then as an unhappy engineer. The naïve illusion that a solid, practical profession might save me from socialist demagogy and terror was soon dispelled.

My first story, “Pressing Love,” published in 1966 in a small avantgarde literary journal banned after six issues, was filled with coded erotic anxiety. I had timidly tried to re-establish a thematic and linguistic normality. The official press immediately condemned the text as apolitical, absurd, aestheticizing, and cosmopolitan.