Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Apparently, this fact could not be ignored or altered: Hechter-Sebastian and his co-religionists, even when they were atheists or assimilated, could not be considered Romanians. Romanians are Romanian because they belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church, and they are such because they are Romanians, Legionnaire Ionescu explained. As simple as that!

By 1935 the bookshop already stocked another volume by Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan) , in which the author pronounced that 1934, a year of such happiness for the future bride and groom, was a Hooligan Year. “Why should we care?” bookseller Avram asked out loud, just to provoke his rebellious nephew. Ariel, with fanatic zeal, persisted in selling old news. Mr. Nae Ionescu claimed there was no solution for the damn situation! Shaking his wildly tousled hair, dyed blue, he would recite the verdict passed by the Legionnaire: “Judas is suffering because he gave birth to Christ, because he saw him but did not believe in him. This in itself wouldn’t have been so bad. The trouble is, we Christians did believe in him. Judas is suffering because he is Judas, and he will continue to suffer until the end of time.”

Sebastian’s former friend Nae Ionescu had become an Iron Guard philosopher, a militant advocate for an Eastern Orthodox state. In the next Hooligan Year of 1935, Ionescu’s message was even more unmistakable and Ariel’s frenzied concern was hard to challenge. “Joseph Hechter,” Ionescu had written threateningly, “dost thou not feel that thou art seized by the cold and the darkness?” “He’s talking about us,” Ariel whispered dramatically. “Our Legionnaire friend is pointing at us.”

But if neither assimilation nor conversion afforded a solution to the so-called Jewish question, what could? This dilemma, Ariel helpfully supplied, was addressed in a contemporary guide, titled Mein Kampf . Whatever Ariel’s audience’s feelings, the Legionnaire had made his point. The darkness and chill of the Final Solution were not the invention of the Romanian Eastern Orthodox legionari . All of his forebears, from time immemorial, had endowed Judas with a gene that enabled him to sense hidden danger. Not so the family of bookseller Avram.

But what was it that distinguished the dark years of 1934 and 1935 from all the others? Ariel would reply to this question in the same way that Joseph Hechter had: they were Hooligan Years. Delighted with the word “hooligan,” he waved Hechter-Sebastian’s pocket-sized booklet at his audience, showing off the pink cover with black lettering, presided over by an owl, the logo of the Cultura Naţională Publishers, Bucharest, Macca Arcade 2. Of course, Librăria Noastră in Burdujeni had ordered several copies of How I Became a Hooligan , more copies than it had ordered of the notorious novel by the same author the previous year. “In general,” the author had written, “Romanian anti-Semitism is a fact rather than an idea, which it occasionally becomes.” But what about love for his motherland? “Show me the anti-Semitic law that will eradicate the undeniable fact that I was born on the banks of the Danube and love this land,” the author bravely declared.

“Is it true, then, that anti-Semitic legislation will not shake your love for your native land?” our unstoppable cousin Ariel, sweating profusely, asked the unseen author. “Remember, we Jews have moved continually from one rocky precipice to another, all over this world!” His own family, now listening attentively, should have been rolling with laughter— or so he thought — at that Joseph Hechter-Mihaii Sebastian. But they were not laughing at all. They merely smiled at what they regarded as the youthful musings of the young orator. They knew Mr. Hechter-Sebastian had left the ghetto and moved freely around on the wide and colorful Bucharest stage, but their small town — eternal as the blue heavens — did not understand what it meant to walk away from one’s kin and still claim kinship.

“The dictionaries in your bookshop are wrong!” the all-knowing Ariel shouted, pointing at the bookshelves. What he meant was that Hechter-Sebastian had not used the word “hooligan” in its English sense, or in the sense used by the Hindus for their spring festival, or in the Slavic sense of the word, meaning “blasphemer.” What Ariel intended was the French troublion , or, as the American put it, “troublemaker.”

What the author of the 1935 booklet had in mind, in fact, was the new hooliganism: a mixture of scandal-mongering, buffoonery, and lampooning, all united by the sense of a new mission, as formulated by another of Joseph Hechter’s friends, Mircea Eliade, in his novel The Hooligans , published in the same year and displayed in the bookshop’s window. Was rebellion a rite of passage on the way toward the Great Ecstasy, Death? “There is only one promising path in life: hooliganism.” Youth itself is a vehicle for the hooligan hero. “The human species will gain its freedom only when organized in regiments, perfectly and uniformly intoxicated with a collective myth”—militias and assault battalions, the legions of the present-day world, youthful crowds joined by the same destiny, collective death.

“The Legionnaires have even claimed the national poet Mihai Emi-nescu as the great hooligan of the nation, as a sacred forerunner of the martyrs in green shirts, chanting the glory of the Cross and the Captain Codreanu!” Ariel ranted on, oblivious to the fact that his audience had stopped paying attention once he had abandoned Judas for his more complicated ramblings.

“Collective death!” Ariel shouted. “Whatever he chooses to become, whether an atheist, a converted Jew, even an anti-Semite, Mr. Hechter cannot avoid the darkness threatened by the hooligans. ‘Inner adversity,’ he says. Now, while his friends are applauding assault and collective death, this is what’s on the mind of Yosele Hechter from Brăila. Admittedly, we can be excessive, suspicious, agitated. But these ancestral maladies are enough, we don’t need new enemies, we’ve got ourselves to cope with. Is anybody asking us whether we prefer the ‘inner adversity’ of Mr. Sebastian or the adversity of the legionaria? It was hard to tell whether they were still listening to him, the relatives and the relatives’ relatives gathered in old Avram’s bookshop. Then, as later in life, Ariel was talking more to himself. They were probably still listening, but without much pleasure, irritated by the prodigy who believed they were all half-asleep morons.

Sebastian’s novel Two Thousand Years , with Nae Ionescu’s preface, published in 1934, and the booklet How I Became a Hooligan , published in 1935 at the same time as the two-volume The Hooligans by Mircea Eliade — these publications were all on display on the shelves of the Librăria Noastră in Burdujeni. Indeed, all the major periodicals and books reached that shtetl metropolis. Avram even ordered French and German publications, if any of his customers were interested. Ariel, the son of his sister Fanny, took care to alert him to special titles and was the first to read the exotic acquisitions.

The book Two Thousand Years had left no one indifferent. It was no accident that I came across the volume in 1950, when the hooligans’ war was over and the hooligans’ peace was in force. It was one of only three or four books I found in the house of my aunt — my mother’s older sister — a simple woman of little education. I was about thirteen or fourteen years old and paying a short visit to relatives in Tîrgu Frumos, when I found, where least expected, a first edition of the novel, with its blue-gray covers and diagonal lettering. No socialist publishers or public library would have dared promote such a title and such themes. But there was the book, in the home of the other daughter of the bookseller from Burdujeni, a relic of the old times and a guide to the new. My aunt Rebecca was one of those who had listened to cousin Ariel’s tirades against Hechter-Sebastian, who himself had used the term “hooligan” against everybody, including those of his fellow Jews who had attacked him. “He has the right to say what he wants. But death — how could he traffic with death?” Ariel would shout. “The delicate Hechter-Sebastian, unwilling to offend his mentor, accepted the Legionnaire’s preface and, with it, his death sentence. And, delicate as ever, he responded to the hooligans by declaring himself a hooligan, too. Mere irony? Well, that’s his business. But death … the cult of death? The ecstasy of death, the chill and darkness of death? These are no jokes, and Hechter-Sebastian should know better. This is where irony itself ceases to operate. What shall we do with the Legionnaire hooligan, with death’s hero, sanctified by the magic of death? Mr. Sebastian, the atheist, the assimilated citizen of Romania, should have been aware of all this.” Indeed, Aunt Rebecca explained, for the benefit of the freshly minted thirteen-year-old Communist I had become, “we cultivate life, not death. Life as proclaimed by the Torah, again and again, unique, nonrepeatable, invaluable.” The urgency of this refrain was exasperating, and its reverse was no less maddening. We knew only too well what the cult of death had led to, Aunt Rebecca reminded me. The far-seeing Ariel was right. My grandfather’s family — the Braunsteins — and all the other families in that market town, vibrating with the whirlwinds and the turmoil and the buzzing of the beehive called life, did not seem at all interested in the “transformation of anti-Semitism into idea,” as quoted by Ariel from the wisdom of Hechter-Sebastian. But the chill and darkness of death … Such words were not to be taken lightly.