Norman Manea - The Hooligan's Return

Now Communism has expired, the Great Rabbi is dead, and with them have gone the risks and the masks. Now there are only worn-out celebrants, a shabby hall, a ritual reduced to routine performance. One cannot compare this skinny, mumbling rabbi conducting the Seder to Chief Rabbi Dr. Moses Rosen. This substitute does no honor to his role, he looks like a mere teacher in a cheder, from another century, desperately calling his flock to order, with his squeaky voice and anguished gestures. On his left, his wife, in a leek-green dress, with an enormous red wig on her head, gives him the occasional nudge to alert him to the fact that the company is nodding off.

“Who is this rabbi?” I ask the fat, silent man sitting on my left.

My neighbor turns placidly toward me. He has a wide face and drooping eyelids.

“He’s been brought over from Israel,” he informs me, extending his hand and introducing himself as Dr. Vinea. Next to him is his pale mate, wearing a black lace dress, whom I recognize as a fellow student from the university.

“From Israel? But he speaks Romanian.”

“He comes from the Romanian Jews in Israel,” his wife, who has not recognized me, interjects. “It’s the American Joint Distribution Committee that pays, and they choose. What else would they choose for Romania but the cheapest rabbi available. We mustn’t complain.”

I turn to Leon, to translate the explanation, but I discover him engaged in animated conversation with the couple on my right, an American Jew, a representative of a New York bank in Bucharest, and his companion, a Romanian woman who speaks fluent English and doesn’t seem at all embarrassed as her escort recounts in detail the history of his family in New Jersey, including a wife, daughters, sons-in-law, brothers, sisters-in-law, their children.

“I think I know you from somewhere,” the doctor’s wife announces, staring at me.

“From our student days. You were one year behind me.” She seems pleasantly surprised. “Really? I graduated in 1960.”

“I used to associate your name with something different,” Dr. Vinea says.

“Yes, some people make a different connection to my name,” I manage to murmur, before my words are drowned out by the choir, now onstage.

Leon shows no interest in the choir or the rabbi, only in the American Jewish banker and the young companion who brightens his Scythian exile. I take a sip of the wine, taste the Israeli matzos, the traditional soup, and the delicious roast. Equally tasty are the bitter herbs of legend and the memories of the flight from the Egypt of socialist Jormania, on this night of memory, in which the past usurps the present and returns my self to the one I no longer am.

My former fellow student wants to know when I left the country, where I live in America, how I am doing generally. She offers to take me on a tour of the Ceauşescu White Palace — the interior is worth seeing, oh yes, especially the interior, but not with a guided tour that rushes you through. I thank her, but decline the offer; we have no time, we are here on a short and event-packed visit. No, I do not have an e-mail address, although I’m sure I’ll be getting one.

I flash my watch to Leon, it’s midnight. His cake lies stale on his plate, but he shows no desire to leave. Finally, we make our way out. The dignitaries at the head table do not notice our departure, capitalist guests no longer benefit from special attention, and that is as it should be.

It is raining, the darkness is medieval. On a night such as this, some forty years ago, in Stalinist-era Prague, the representative of the Jewish Agency was assassinated. But Stalinism is no longer fashionable, and Professor Culianu’s Chicago assassins would have had no interest in us. In any case, Leon shows no interest in somber speculation. This Seder in Bucharest has awakened a nostalgia in him.

“This evening has been fascinating. It’s reconnected me to my East European forebears. What you have in Bucharest is unique, you couldn’t find anything like this anywhere else. That rabbi, his wife, the TV man, his wife — these are all shadows from the past. And the choir and that American guy with his young mistress… Thank God, Romania is lagging behind in the race to capitalism.”

I remain silent, I am not convinced of the advantage. I simply stand in the middle of the square, with my arm extended, waving for a taxi that fails to materialize. We proceed on foot toward the city center. Somewhere around here is where I used to live as a student, in a rented room. Here it is, one of those side streets branching off into the dark, on the left, on Alexandru Sihleanu Street, at number 18. That’s it, the sleepy house with the sleepy ghost of Dr. Jacobi, now long dead, and of his fat, scandal-mongering wife, also dead, and the Gypsy mistress in the basement, the object of their daily rows, certainly now dead as well. Hail to sovereign and democratic Death, working nonstop, day and night, bored, but oh! ever so efficient.

“So what was it you enjoyed so much?” I ask Leon, to chase away the phantoms.

“Everything, I liked everything. That idiotic rabbi and his pushy wife, the music critic’s wife, speaking Hochdeutsch , and the New York guy with his mistress, the choir, the soup, the president, the biologist— everything, absolutely everything.”

“It’s a shame you missed the great Chief Rabbi. He was a deputy, for a quarter of a century, in Romania’s Communist parliament, the eminence grise , the great wheeler-dealer, as you Americans say. He managed to convince the Communists of the advantages of getting rid of the Jews, by letting them emigrate.”

“Wasn’t he right?”

“Sure. He convinced the authorities that there were at least three major advantages in letting the Jews go: One, they would be rid of an old troublesome lot. Two, they would get capitalist money, $8,000 per head, to be more precise, for each Jew they let out. Three, by letting the Jews go, they improved their image abroad. The Jews themselves no longer needed any convincing, and so, the latter-day flight from Egypt!”

“A clever man, this Rabbi Rosen.”

“Very clever, a real pragmatist, trying to be useful to all sides. As someone once said, he was for the Romanians what prescription glasses are for the myopic. He was not happy about needing them, but happy to have them. In my parents’ house, they had a completely different idea about what a rabbi should be.”

“But they were believers, and you aren’t.”

Silently, we advance through this night of questions without answers.

“A few years ago, in Israel, a taxi driver asked me whether I was Romanian. He had heard me talking to the relatives I’d just dropped off. Yes, I was born in Romania, I said. I met Rabbi Rosen, the old taxi driver told me, in English, many years ago, on one of his visits to Israel, here, in my taxi. I didn’t know who he was at first, we have lots of rabbis visiting here, but this one spoke perfect Hebrew. I took him first to the Foreign Ministry, then the Labor Party headquarters, then to their opponents, the Likud. Afterward, we went to the trade unions, then to the religious people. Then, if you can imagine, even to the Communists. At the end I asked him, ‘Are you by any chance Rabbi Rosen of Romania?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘How did you guess?’ ‘Well, you’re well-known here. Nobody else would have visited the religious people, and the Communists, and the trade unions, and Mr. Begin.’”

This anecdote about Rabbi Rosen reminds me of how Romanians, in general, used to solve the incompatibilities of daily life, a practice so acutely denounced by Sebastian. I tell this to Leon.

“You’re right,” Leon says. “It would have been worth meeting Rabbi Rosen, but even without him, it was a fascinating evening.”