Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

But I was unaware of all this on that Saturday in 1950 when, as a young Stalinist-Leninist pioneer, sitting in that small room in my aunt’s dark house in Tîrgu Frumos, near Iasi, I, in my turn, opened the volume Two Thousand Years .

My grandfather and my future parents were equally unaware, in 1935, of the Chinese brushstrokes painting themselves on that illegible sky, slumbering over Burdujeni in the calm before the storm. They were all gripped — and who could have blamed them — by the joy of the wedding preparations. They were busy drawing up lists of names and menus and clothes and addresses, checking and double-checking complex calculations. Grand plans were being discussed in detail: how to rent the house of the pharmacist in Iţcani, next to the sugar factory, for the young couple to live in, with room for Maria, the good fairy of the Braunstein household; what new furniture to buy; how to settle the debts incurred in a recent lawsuit, following which the bookseller had lost his house. Bookseller Avram Braunstein was not wealthy — although he worked hard from morning till night — but a wedding, after all, was a wedding and it would be celebrated by the book. The guest list grew in number: the brothers and sisters of Avram and his wife, from Botosani and Fălticeni and Iaşi, all with their children and grandchildren; the parents, sisters, and brothers of the groom, from Fălticeni and Roman and Focsani, with their own children and grandchildren; neighbors and friends and officials — the mayor, the police chief, Judge Boscoianu, the veterinarian Manoliu; the notary Dumitrescu; and even the insufferable Wechsler, the rival bookseller, who never lost an opportunity to stab his competitor in the back. There were endless consultations, conducted by the bride herself, with Surah the cook — an expert on weddings — with the Bart-feld photographer, and with the invaluable Wanda Waslowitz, the seamstress. Indeed, the bride took charge of everything, displaying unequaled energy and proving hard to please. Mrs. Waslowitz had already made and remade the bridal dress three times. A large woman, with a determined air, the Polish seamstress had not yet acquired the bulk and the short temper of her later years, when only her steely blue eyes, delicate fingers, and hoarse voice recalled her younger self. She was annoyed then, as later, by unreasonable demands. She could not, however, refuse an old and faithful customer, with whom she had had so many successes and who, she had to admit, won her admiration many times over with her novel suggestions for new designs, for which she had found inspiration, goodness knows where, perhaps in her own perpetually restless and inquisitive imagination. She had even managed to acquire a copy of the fashion magazine Modisch , ordered from Czernowitz. The color of the dress, the fabric, the accessories, all these had to be more special than usual. What was called for in this instance was sober elegance, not the usual provincial outfitting.

There was no time for debates on Judas’ sufferings. Life, not death, now dominated the stage. Death, however, was waiting in the wings, preparing its revenge, ready, in its turn, to offer its services.

No less now than in 1945, Bukovina was about an hour’s journey from that dreamlike place in Moldavia — Fălticeni — where I rediscovered normality. Some 170 years earlier — or so my mother’s aunt Leah Riemer would tell me in her slow drawl — the Austrian Emperor Joseph, visiting Transylvania, was so taken by the grandeur of the Ţara de Sus (Upper Country), as it was known, that he sought to incorporate it into his empire. In 1777, the population of the newly acquired Austrian province of Bukovina swore an oath of allegiance to Vienna, an occasion that was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony in Czernowitz. The Romanian Prince Grigore Ghica, a fierce opponent of the acquisition, was assassinated by Turkish conspirators on the very day of the celebration.

“We are from Bukovina, young man, Bukovina,” Mr. Bogen would say to me. Mr. Bogen was himself from Bukovina, and had settled in Fălticeni when love beckoned. “You’ll soon go back to Bukovina,” he reassured me. Apparently, Bukovina was to have been renamed Graftschaft, so said Mr. Bogen, a jovial history teacher who was married to the beautiful mathematics teacher, Otilia Riemer, daughter of Leah Riemer, sister of bookseller Avram, my grandfather. I had met Leah and her daughter and sons — hardworking children of the ghetto and recent graduates in mathematics, turned overnight into passionate champions of the revolution — as well as Mr. Bogen, in the happy months after our return from Transnistria.

“Bukovina was to be named Graftschaft, like the Austrian Tirol,” Berl Bogen, my mother’s new cousin, said in his German-tinged Buko-vinan accent. “The name derives from the famous beeches of the Upper Country, Latin name, Silvae Faginales, buk in Slavonic, bucovine in the old Romanian chronicles.” The lesson continued with recitals whose importance I could only guess at from the way Mr. Bogen punctuated the key words. “In 1872, General Enzenberg issued a decree requiring those Jews who had sneaked into, I repeat, sneaked into , Bukovina from 1769 onward and had not paid the annual tax of four gulden, four gulden , to be expelled, expelled . “I think our young guest”—said Mr. Bogen, turning to me—”knows what this means. By 1872, there were thirteen Jewish deputies in the Bukovina Diet, thirteen, young gentleman, thirteenl They all signed a protest against the expulsion order addressed to the government in Vienna.”

I had already learned some strange things from Mr. Bogen. For instance, in Bukovina’s Diet, in 1904, the Romanians (who, as an Austrian officer had written, spoke a “corrupt Latin”) held a majority of the seats, twenty-two. “However,” Mr. Bogen emphasized, “all the minorities were also generously represented, according to the Austrian model: seventeen Ukrainians, ten Jews, six Germans, four Poles.” Why however?

“We are from Suceava, young man, from Suceava in Bukovina, the princely seat of Ştefan the Great!” said Mr. Bogen, wagging his finger at me. “After 1918, when Bukovina was returned to Romania, conciliation with the new Romanian administration went more smoothly in Suceava than it did in Bukovina’s capital, Czernowitz. The Jews of Suceava spoke Romanian, as well as German, and enjoyed uninterrupted contact with the Romanian population. The opening of the border from Burdujeni to the Kingdom of Romania, now Greater Romania, promised to speed up trade and investment for the landowners and industrialists who retained the citizenship rights they had under the Austrians. The Jewish civil servants were kept on, but the new Romanian administration stopped appointing more,” my new cousin Berl Bogen continued to inform me.

Four years previously, my father recounted, we had been expelled from “sweet Bukovina, that delightful garden,” as the poets called it. “But, in fact, we’re not really from Bukovina,” my father said to me. “Your mother and her parents were born in the old Kingdom of Romania, in Burdujeni, near the border, it is true, but on the other side. And I was born in Lespezi, not far from here, where my parents lived.”

The people of Bukovina — pedantic, calculating, proud of their German language and the customs they had borrowed from those who proved to be our most brutal enemies — had been the butts of perpetual jokes in our home. I remembered this distinctly. Although we were consumers of Butterbrod und Kaffee mit Milch ourselves, neither my mother nor my father was born in Bukovina. At home, we all spoke Romanian, not German. My father had been born, as I now learned, not far from Fălticeni. My mother’s brother and sister had lived in that house in Burdujeni where I was born, as had my great-grandfather, his parents, and his grandparents. Burdujeni was a typical East European market town, adjoining a similar town, Iţcani, which differed from its neighbor only in the Austrian influences that could be seen there. Both gradually evolved as suburbs of the city of Suceava.