Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

It was from Iţcani and its sugar factory that the young accountant came, the young man who, on that crowded bus returning from the St. Elias fair in July 1932, made the acquaintance of the beautiful Janeta Braunstein, the bookseller’s daughter from Burdujeni. He had been struck by her resemblance to Leah Riemer, in whose house we now lived in the first postwar months. It was also in Iţcani where the young couple settled after their marriage and where we all lived before we were deported.

The two towns, Iţcani and Burdujeni, and the city of Suceava, situated at the top of a hill on the site of an ancient medieval citadel, marked the points of a triangle three kilometers long. The differences between the towns were important, however, as were those between Romanian Bukovina and Austrian Bukovina. Romanian Burdujeni had received only minor influences from its neighboring “Austrian” Bukovina, where Iţcani and Suceava were located. Iţcani’s unassuming railway station, near the border, was overshadowed by the sumptuous railway station of its neighbor on the Romanian side, Burdujeni. Both stations survived all the vicissitudes of the times and stand intact to this day, witnesses of the past.

Before the war, Iţcani, unlike Burdujeni, boasted a skating rink and was host to all the philanthropic balls, held to raise money for the building of a school, a club, or a hospital. The Czech, German, and Italian “foreigners” all worked in Iţcani’s sugar and oil factories. My greatgrandfather from Burdujeni would walk about on the Sabbath in his festive Hasidic garb, a black satin caftan, breeches, a round fur-trimmed hat, knee-length white stockings, looking like a majestic Assyrian king to the astonished natives of Burdujeni, so my mother told me, her eyes shining with pride and tears. To the Westernized inhabitants of neighboring Iţcani, my great-grandfather must have looked like some ghost from the Polish provinces of Galicia.

Burdujeni, a typical, bustling shtetl, vibrated with all the great debates and major tragedies of the ghetto. The latest Parisian scandal, reported in the press, jostled for attention with the suicide-threatening romances of the neighboring street. The social divide between those who lived along the main street and those crammed into the narrow side streets marked a centuries-old hierarchy. Religious and political passions grouped and regrouped. Respect paid to learning and living decently competed with the chase after money. Yearning for grand adventure pulsated in every cloud drifting over the Chagallian sky of that swarming ant heap.

The German atmosphere of Iţcani was less picturesque and more formal. A major crossroads, Iţcani had opened up, like the whole empire to which it belonged, to the “foreigners,” gradually assimilating them into a wider cosmopolitan community that belonged no longer to the East but to the West. Jews were not a majority in Iţcani, but it often elected Jewish mayors, as I learned from my father and from Mr. Bogen. This would have been hard to imagine in nearby Burdujeni. Frau Doktor Helmann, who, in that first terrible winter in Transnistria, demanded a lot of money from my mother for a small bottle of ordinary medicine— which proved of little help to my dying grandfather — came from a family of such mayors. Her ancestors Dische and Samuel Helmann were listed on the honor roll in the town’s archives.

The deportation order of October 1941 abruptly erased the differences between Iţcani and Burdujeni. Those from Burdujeni, from the Old Romanian Kingdom, that is, my grandfather, uncle, and aunt, were placed in the same category as us, their “Germanicized” co-religionists from Iţcani. This served to cure the Bukovinans of the airs and graces of the Austrian Empire, they who, in happier times, had looked down their noses at their picturesque, noisy neighbors in Burdujeni, on the Romanian side of the frontier, who, in their turn, mistrusted the others’ frosty civility.

The provisional certificate, issued by the Inspectorate of the Iaşi Police on April 18, 1945, which my father would often show to me, simply confirmed that “Mr. Marcu Manea, together with his family, comprising Janeta, Norman, and Ruti, is hereby repatriated from the U.S.S.R. through the customs point at Ungheni-Iaşi, on April 14, 1945. His destination is the commune Fălticeni, county of Baia, Cuza Vodă Street. The present document is valid until his arrival at his new address, where he will conform to the regulations established by the Population Bureau.” No information was given concerning the reasons for repatriation in 1945, or for the expatriation of 1941. “We have no other documentary evidence of our expulsion,” Father said tersely.

The ground for the shock of 1941 had been well prepared by the previous Hooligan Years, as I now learned, and by events that only the deaf and the blind could have ignored. In September 1940, Marshal Ion An-tonescu proclaimed the National Legionnaire state. This was soon followed by the Legionnaire Rebellion. The Green Shirts marched through the streets, occupied the sugar factory in Iţcani, where my father was prevented from going to work, and hanged the musician Jacob Katz from Suceava. The people of Bukovina heard rumors about the “ritual” killings at the slaughterhouse in Bucharest, where the Legionnaires had hung the corpses of murdered Jews under signs reading KOSHER. Jews were being subject to forced labor, taken as hostages in synagogues. German officers, from the troops massed near the Soviet border, taunted Jews with threats of the Führer’s Final Solution. The ordinance of the morning of October 9, 1941, required the town’s Jews “to hand in immediately at the National Bank all the gold, currency, shares, diamonds, and precious stones they owned and to report on the same day in Burdujeni with their hand luggage.” The concentration camp in Suceava, where 120 Jews had already been locked up, was immediately dismantled, in light of the new measures. The drums were beating out their message on that day, October 9, 1941, on the main street: “The Jewish population is to leave the town immediately. All personal belongings must be left behind. Anyone who does not comply risks penalty of death.”

“This is how it all began, during the week of the Sukkot festival,” my father would recount, “the march, that infamous procession familiar from so many films made after the war. Suddenly we lost all our rights and were left with just one duty, death. There we went, shivering from the cold, with our knapsacks on our backs, slowly descending the hill. Disorderly lines of people, marching along the three kilometers of that road lined with poplars.” Yes, the same poplar-lined road to and from the Burdujeni railway station, along which bookseller Avram Braunstein used to carry his daily burden of newspapers.

From the Burdujeni station, the trains left for their all-too-predictable destination. The Dniester was our river Styx, across which we were ferried to such places as Ataki, Moghilev, Shargorod, Murafa, Bershad, Bug. These exotic names were often recalled in conversations in the spring and summer of 1945. In contrast, names such as Burdujeni, Itcani, Suceava were rarely mentioned, as if they were shrouded in shame.

That unresolved conflict between nostalgia and resentment translated as silence. The oppressors had not, when all was said and done, managed to annihilate us, and furthermore, they had lost the war. Only this seemed important at the time. The new era already had its new missionaries. Among them — who would have believed it? — the new husband of our gentle Maria. “A Communist,” it was whispered. The couple lived in Suceava, but for us there was no talk of returning to, or even visiting, our old haunt, which was only an hour away. Going back to the place from which we had been expelled seemed taboo. My parents did not speak about the future, and for their offspring, life in the present was a Paradise, without past or future. We were repatriated on the eighteenth of April, the day on which we registered with the Iasi police and decided to go to Fălticeni. At first, we stayed with the family of my father’s brother, Uncle Aron, then with the Riemers. For the next two years we lived in Rădăuţi, a charming small town in Bukovina, not far from the Soviet border.