A Romanian reckoning

“Bucharest, in the spring of 1986, had reached levels of degradation for which even sarcasm was no longer sufficient,” remembers the Romanian writer Norman Manea of his last year in his country. “Not even the chimeras could survive in the underground labyrinth of Byzantine socialism. Everything seemed about to fall into decrepitude and die, including the chimeras. Facing the inevitable, a writer could either become a character in fiction or disappear altogether.”

This was a decade when most of communist Europe was falling into disuse. Poland was kept in suspended animation after the suppression of Solidarity, Czechoslovakia and East Germany suffered from moral paralysis, and even the Hungarian experiment in “managerial socialism” was failing to deliver on its promise. And yet Romania was a case in itself: bankrupt, bleak, overrun by the infamous secret police, the Securitate, and ruled by a mad dictator who razed whole swaths of the once-charming capital to build hideous office-temples to himself. Manea, one of Romania’s foremost writers, had his own set of problems. The censors mutilated his novel “The Black Envelope,” and his public statements against an officially condoned brand of anti-Semitism resulted in threats from the secret police and the anger of some of his fellow writers. Faced with the role of a writer entangled in political games, he chose “disappearance” and emigration. The author was 50 and practically unknown outside his country.

“The Hooligan’s Return” is a personal, lyrical, ironic, poignant account of a life that brought Manea from his native Bukovina to New York, where he now lives, and to Bard College, where he teaches. The reckoning is prompted by a visit -- the only one, so far -- that he paid his country 10 years later on the insistence of his American boss, Bard President Leon Botstein. His reluctance to go back despite the fall of communism was caused partly by the familiar emigre sense of personal discontinuity. “I was not prepared,” he explains, “for a reunion with the self I had been, or for a translation of the one I had become.” But the author was also aware that his battles with his country, his literary colleagues and his own personal demons had not ended with the fall of the Ceausescu regime. “I had grown tired of scrutinizing the homeland’s contradictions,” he writes. “I was afraid of the knot of entanglements from which I had not yet extricated myself.”

And yet he decided to go to Romania and face his past armed only with a Bard College notebook as his shield. The result is an unusual collage of recollections, journal entries, dreams and confessions that seem to circle around a silence zone surrounding a horrific experience from the author’s early childhood. In October 1941, when Manea was 5, he was deported with his middle-class Jewish family from Bukovina to a labor camp in Transnistria, which had been occupied during World War II by the pro-Nazi Romanian regime of Marshal Ion Atonescu. Transnistria is one of the largest and least known Holocaust killing fields, where almost every town and village housed some kind of prison, concentration camp, labor camp or death camp filled with members of the Romanian and Ukrainian Jewish populations. Manea and his parents survived their four-year ordeal, but Transnistria claimed his two grandparents.

Manea never reveals what he saw and experienced in the camp, but he calls it his initiation, his second birth, which would present him with a world that continued to call into question his sense of selfhood and his right of belonging. Years later, during his visit to his native land, feeling again an indefinite menace and estrangement, he wondered whether Transnistria had not “taught me as a child to reject the outer world, to resist being born, to delay the escape from the nurturing placenta?”

His life under communism appears to have followed a pattern of isolation, estrangement and the search for sanctuary. “For the next forty-odd years,” he writes, “captivity and freedom were to strive for supremacy through hypothetical negotiations, compromise, daily complicities and feints, occasionally allowing secret enclaves of rest.” He grew up as a young Jew at war with “the ghetto” personified by “the anxieties, the exaggerations, and the panic” of his mother and her small-town friends. But he also felt the menace of his country’s resurfacing anti-Jewish attitudes, which the communist authorities utilized to secure a measure of legitimacy among Romanian nationalists. Despite his literary inclinations, he went to a technical college and wasted years in a hated, mindless engineering job that he hoped would shelter him from forced political involvement. Later, as a full-time writer, he hid within the language -- allusions, metaphors, private images -- used simultaneously for self-expression and as protective camouflage. Finally, as an American professor and international celebrity, he carried the remains of his past, locked within his native tongue and his private world, just as “the snail does his house.”

As told in “The Hooligan’s Return,” the writer’s life is rich in uncanny symmetries and echoes. His father’s desperate, resigned dignity in Transnistria was replayed in a Romanian-Stalinist labor camp, where he was sent for some deviation from the official orthodoxy, and much later, when he was harassed by the Securitate for his activities in his town’s Jewish community. Fascist anti-Semitism of the Atonescu regime returned as the communist anti-Semitism of Ceausescu, and later as resurgent anti-Semitism in the “free,” post-communist Romania. His labeling as a “dissident” writer for taking allusive jabs at the communist system was matched by his being branded as a renegade by the newly anti-communist elites for writing an article about the fascist sympathies of a Romanian literary icon, the writer and essayist Mircea Eliade.

“The Hooligan’s Return” is a book of memory but also a book against memory. Manea practices what he calls “anamnesis” -- which means both “a recollection” and “a history of an illness” -- not in order to regain the past but to unmask it, to peel off successive layers of anger, embarrassment, self-denial and perhaps to try to free himself of its detritus.

And yet, even in this candid retelling of the author’s life, there are areas seemingly too personal and too painful to address directly. Only vague allusions suggest an apparently complicated, agonizing relationship between the writer and his mother, who appears to him in a waking dream in a street in New York, or a strange breakup and dispersal of his seemingly close-knit family that leaves the blind, crippled mother in Romania, the father suffering from Alzheimer’s in Israel, and the son in New York.

Manea can be forceful and direct in his descriptions and portraits, but he can also be exasperatingly vague and elusive. His elliptical, metaphoric style may occasionally confuse those who are not intimately acquainted with the convoluted history of his part of the world. There is something monotonous in the persistent melancholy of his narrative. Despite moments of humor, almost everything here appears in a pale, sickly glow. Everything is scattered and wasted. Moments of happiness are portrayed as something accidental, even shameful. It seems that Augustus the Fool, as the author calls himself in the book, is never able to smile at anything or anybody other than with bitter sarcasm.

And yet the narrative is a convincing tale of a life of anguish and alienation rooted in the author’s earliest memories and confirmed by his later experiences. A recurring motif in “The Hooligan’s Return” is a postcard depicting one of Chagall’s more ominous paintings: A Jew is being burned on a stake in a crucifixion pose amid what looks like a pogrom in an Eastern European shtetl. The author does not remember who sent it to him and why. What is its message? A warning, a token of solidarity, a threat?

The story ends in a rather predictable anticlimax. Back in his American “afterlife” the author realizes: “The departure did not liberate me, the return did not restore me. I am an embarrassed inhabitant of my own biography.” Aren’t we all, nomads and settled folk alike? But in this unusual, private book the Romanian author shows us that even as the view from the snail’s house can embrace much of the modern world, the shell’s curve inevitably leads us back to the raw, dark personal source. *