Manea’s Shadows

Some of the greatest interpreters of the Jewish collision with the European twentieth century were children of Bukovina, an enclave nestled next to Galicia at the eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From this unlikely corner came a handful of exceptional writers—Paul Celan and Rose Ausländer in German, Dan Pagis and Aharon Appelfeld in Hebrew, and Itzik Manger in Yiddish.

Norman Manea, age eighty-eight, is the last of this exalted line and the most widely translated Romanian author living today. His body of work—attuned as much to the ethics of memory as to the art of fiction—wrestles with the questions of how to live as a Jew after the Shoah, after Communism, and after exile. This is true of his latest work, Exiled Shadow, “a novel in collage,” in which a Norman Manea–like figure known as the “Nomadic Misanthrope” (NM) writes, ruminates, teaches, and—like Peter Schlemihl in the nineteenth-century fable by Adalbert von Chamisso—loses his shadow.

In July 1941, Romania’s Nazi-allied military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu heralded the ethnic cleansing “of the entire Jewish element from Bessarabia and Bukovina. . . . I do not care whether we shall go down in history as barbarians. . . . If need be, use machine guns.” Among countless barbaric acts that followed was the deportation that October of five-year-old Manea and his family to a concentration camp in Transnistria (“Trans-Tristia,” as he came to call it), in German-occupied western Ukraine. Traian Popovici, the then-mayor of Czernowitz, Bukovina’s capital, remarked that scenes from the deportations “could be from the pages of Dante’s Inferno.” To which Manea replies: “Except the Inferno was and is a supremely great work of the imagination, and the camps were absolutely real.”

When Manea’s grandparents died of typhus soon after arriving in the camp, he began imagining his own death. Five decades later, Manea would write that “he could see the grave, the snow-covered earth, the frozen blades of grass, the wriggling worms. The wind was howling, the bearded men were swaying to the cadences of the ancient Kaddish prayer.” By war’s end, more than 250,000 Jews had perished in Transnistria, and the cadences of five centuries of Jewish life in Bukovina had been silenced.

Manea emerged from the inferno at age nine and returned with his parents to Romania, where he learned that survival is not salvation. He had awoken from Nazi horror only to be trapped in the grotesque dream of Communism. Manea’s characters, like Dante’s shades in the Inferno, live a purgatorial existence—trapped between the twin tyrannies of Nazism and Communism. Their identities are fractured and reconstituted through memory, or more often, the impossibility of memory.

In stories like “Proust’s Tea,” Manea depicts a dazed child survivor, a boy to whom a Red Cross nurse offers a cup of tea and a biscuit. That warm, caring gesture only highlights the chasm between the world before and the world after, between what can be remembered and what cannot. In contrast to the tea in which Proust’s Marcel dipped his madeleine, this tea fails to evoke memories of a comforting past, for the boy has no such past to recall. “The aroma of that heavenly drink could not be reminiscent of anything,” Manea writes. “He had never experienced such pleasure.”

In “The Instructor,” Manea returns to the boy, four years later, now torn between the Torah and the Communist Manifesto, between the calls of Jewish tradition (voiced by his bar mitzvah teacher) and the seductions of socialism. The boy’s ambivalence mirrors Manea’s own. Earlier, seeking to replenish himself with the “nutrients of normality,” as he put it, Manea briefly embraced Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism:

I was strongly convinced that we must abandon ghetto mentalities and Diaspora habits. That we should go back “home” to the Holy Land and build our own society to prove that we were no longer a bunch of cowards, forever humiliated by others.

Now, in adolescence, Manea was enticed by Communist dreams of utopia. “I was easily fooled by Communist rhetoric promising an ideal, just society,” he said, “and I was willing to contribute and belong to this fairytale.” He recalls writing “terrible poems” in honor of the revolution and of Stalin. To mourn Stalin’s death, he placed an armband on his left arm, “at the very place where my ancestors would wear one of the two phylacteries.” But by the time his father was imprisoned in 1958 on trumped-up charges, Manea’s “juvenile fling with the Communist madness,” as he put it, had curdled into a disillusionment with “anything that had to do with ‘we,’ with collective identity.” He came to identify tyranny as a condition in which “individuality as such was blasphemy.”

In the 1960s, as Stalinism subsided, many touted Romania’s regime as a gentler, more autonomous version of the Soviet model. In the spring of 1966, Time magazine featured a story on Romania under the headline “Life under a relaxed Communism.” But as the Ceaușescu cult of personality took shape, the People’s Republic increasingly became a dictatorship of “slaves forced to praise their slavery,” as one of Manea’s narrators says. “The single Party,” Manea recalled, “imposed a single language, official, canonic, without nuance . . . a restricted, monotonous language that only served to undermine people’s confidence in words.” Manea’s fiction—beginning with his first novel, Captives, in 1970—was a seismograph of that bleak era, registering the abolition of private life under the Securitate, the most oppressive and omnipresent secret police apparatus in the Eastern Bloc. “Suspicion and duplicity gradually infiltrated the kitchens and the bedrooms, insinuated themselves into sleep, language, and posture,” Manea writes.

A writer in Romania, in which even poets moonlighted as informants, had to master the art of saying things without quite saying them. More a debunker than a dissident, Manea mocked Ceaușescu as “the national clown,” who extended “his macabre circus to cover an entire country.” But Heinrich Böll was right to describe Manea’s writing as only indirectly political. Much of that writing chronicled the lives of the country’s defeated, unheroic, almost invisible people—many of whom were Manea’s most devoted readers. The last novel Manea published in Romania, The Black Envelope, sold out its 26,000-copy print run in a matter of days.

Still, Manea’s mockery was not without consequence. “My books got me in trouble,” he said, “so I had to fight with them.” His satirical scenes were expurgated; anonymous censors from the Reading Service, he recounted, “would massacre or eliminate sentences, paragraphs, and chapters” of his manuscripts. Manea also faced persistent antisemitism, which he called “the central disturbing force of my biography.” The regime condemned what it saw as the “Jewish monopoly of suffering” and frowned on writing about the Shoah. (The first Romanian translation of Night by Romanian-born survivor Elie Wiesel would appear only in 1991, two years after the fall of Ceaușescu and more than thirty years after its original publication.)

“At the age of five,” Manea recalls, “on my way to the camp, the war-like word ‘Berlin’ brutally crushed my innocence.” In 1986, at age fifty, he accepted a scholarship in West Berlin, marking the beginning of his life in exile. “I found myself leaving my place and my language,” he said, “the only forms of wealth that really mattered.”

His first trip abroad—an anomaly in the Iron Curtain’s calculus—had been to Israel a decade earlier, a journey that had filled him with awe but also indecision. “What if I had been born and lived there, in Jerusalem?” he mused. But even after that pilgrimage, he postponed his decision to leave Romania, “because I was childish enough to fool myself that I didn’t live in a country, that I lived only in a language. So I took the language, the home, with me, as a snail does.”

Several of Manea’s friends had fled to Israel, including the historian Leon Volovici (author of a searing account of Romanian antisemitism in the 1930s). “If you want to be a Jew, go to Israel,” Volovici advised his friend. “If you want to be a writer, don’t go to Israel.” Manea, ambivalent about his Jewishness, wanted to remain a writer. While still in Romania, he had expressed annoyance when Hebrew translations of his stories appeared in an Israeli anthology called Jewish Writers in Romanian. “I considered myself, quite simply, a Romanian writer.” Only decades later, wondering whether the title of that anthology was “the correct assessment of my destiny,” did he come to a belated recognition: “I am a Jew. I may negate it. I may dislike it. But that’s it—because despite all my efforts to try to be different, to be, as I said, more universal, I am still also something quite specific.” For Manea, it turned out, Jewishness has been the hinge, if not the whole door.

After a two-year detour in Berlin, Manea and his wife, Cella, an art restorer, came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship and never left. The artist Saul Steinberg, a fellow Romanian émigré, told him: “We can’t be Americans.” Yet thanks to Philip Roth, Manea found his footing at Bard College, a liberal arts school in the Hudson Valley, where Manea would for the rest of his career find a home, as he put it, “between the fracture of the old and the nutrition of the new.” “It was the force of Roth’s fame,” said Cynthia Ozick, “that enabled him to facilitate the passage of Manea to a much-honored American literary life.”

Manea’s thirty-year friendship with Roth began when he wrote to him in 1987, from Berlin, to ask why Romania was the only Eastern European country absent from Roth’s book series Writers from the Other Europe. Roth replied by inviting Manea to meet when he came to America. “I suggested we put it off for a while,” Manea said, “because I didn’t speak English and was about to start a course in the language for new arrivals.” Said Roth: “It doesn’t matter, we’ve got hands, we’ve got eyes, we’ll understand each other.” When they met the next year, at the Essex House in New York, Manea gave Roth an English translation of his story “Proust’s Tea.” Roth would describe Manea as “mild, reserved, anxious, at times a bit timid. He does not strike even himself, I believe, as the ideal writer to have been pitted against perhaps the most vicious dictatorship of the last forty years.” He ended up accompanying Manea to Manhattan’s federal building when he took his oath of citizenship. A year before his death, Roth asked to be allocated a gravesite at Bard, near Manea’s plot, so he wouldn’t be bored in the afterlife.

Unlike émigré writers who switched to English after coming to America—Nabokov, Conrad, Eva Hoffman—Manea continued to write in the language of the country he left behind. English, he said, remained “a rented tongue.” Its tenant suffered “many moments of hysterical helplessness in my new linguistic residence.” The decade after Manea’s arrival saw a flurry of translations into English: On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist (1992), a compilation of six inconspicuously intimate essays;
October, Eight O’Clock (1992), a book of fifteen stories linked by a single character; Compulsory
Happiness (1993), a collection of four novellas featuring cynical interrogators in the trademark trench coats of the secret police; and The Black Envelope (1995), an unsettling novel about a family destroyed by the duplicities of the Romanian dictatorship.

If displacement brought a new way of inhabiting his native language, it also offered a new vantage point from which to examine the homeland that had formed and deformed him. His most scathing critique came in a 1991 essay on Mircea Eliade, the influential University of Chicago scholar of religious history and symbolism. Though Eliade was revered in postwar America by both academics and New Agers, before the war he had been an ultraright-winger, who sympathized with Romania’s Iron Guard. Manea threw a harsh light on Eliade’s amnesia about his youthful lust for “a nationalist Romania, frenzied and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous, ruthless and vengeful,” as Eliade himself had written in 1938. Like many other former fellow travelers of fascism, Eliade refused to come clean. “Is not honesty, in the final analysis, the mortal enemy of totalitarianism?” Manea asks.

Manea’s honesty landed in Romania like a bomb. He was denounced as a “louse,” “a dwarf from Jerusalem,” and a “traitor.” “From one day to the next,” Manea said, “I again became the Jew.” In Romania’s largest circulation daily, a former Communist propagandist turned literary critic called him “semi-human.” He received death threats and, briefly, police protection. This episode, along with the unsolved murder at the University of Chicago of Eliade’s academic protégé Ioan Culianu (quite possibly by former Securitate agents), laid the factual basis for Manea’s next novel, The Lair.

Neither Manea’s blasphemy against a Romanian hero nor his American successes of the 1990s—Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships among them (in both cases nominated by Roth)—endeared him to the compatriots he had left behind. Nevertheless, after a decade’s absence, Manea visited in 1997. Back in Bucharest, he felt not catharsis but estrangement, like a “dead man now revisiting the landscape of his life in which he can no longer find a place or a sign of himself.” He told the story in perhaps his most accessible book, a memoir he titled The Hooligan’s Return (2003). (The title nods to How I Became a Hooligan, an anthology of essays on Romanian antisemitism by Mihail Sebastian, as well as Eliade’s early novel, The Hooligans.)

In Exiled Shadow, Manea adopts a prismatic style that reflects the fractured identity of his Manea-like protagonist, whose memories flicker as he moves between Bukovina, Berlin, and the banks of the Hudson—a series of incongruities and metamorphoses that prevent the Nomadic Misanthrope from acquiring a fixed self.

The novel’s fragmented structure is not merely a stylistic choice; it is an extension of its themes. “I am more obsessed with contradiction than with coherence,” Manea has said, and his prose—fleeting, elliptical, yet dense with implication—reflects this obsession. His language, even in translation, retains its peculiar elasticity, bending time and space so that a single image—a cup of tea, a fleeting shadow—becomes a portal into histories both personal and collective.

This is not to say that the novel lacks cohesion. On the contrary, the tension between these fragmented parts and the overarching themes of exile give the novel its remarkable power. Manea’s carefully cadenced prose, translated with exemplary skill by Carla Baricz, holds the disparate elements together.

NM is a kind of Orpheus of exile—seeking to retrieve a shadow self that has been lost to the underworld of history. Like the author, he has survived “the exile of his childhood of barbed wire” and as an adult grown “accustomed to exile in his own birthplace” in a country that, “little by little, had annihilated his emancipatory reflexes.” Offered the chance to leave, he finds himself in Berlin, “a foreign capital with a dubious past,” and finally in America, “a great carnival of capital.” Diagnosed by his psychiatrist (also a police informant) with Reality Phobia, a fear of the real, NM seeks refuge from the overwhelming reality of his experiences by sequestering himself in a “sepulcher of books,” amid volumes that “offer him only a fictitious and frivolous kind of protection.”

His attempts to narrate his life are thwarted at every turn by the realization that memory itself is as unstable as a wavering shadow. His encounters with bureaucratic officials, ambivalent lovers, and even his own reflections are all tinged with the surreal, as if the very fabric of reality has been loosened by the violence of history.

At the heart of Exiled Shadow is the figure of the shadow itself—a symbol that variously represents the informant or surveillance tail who cannot be shaken off, the darker aspects of the psyche, the penumbra cast by, or the haunting presence of a homeland that exists only in memory. In one passage, NM describes the boy who emerged from the camps as a specter of what he might have been. As an adult in America, NM teaches von Chamisso’s The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl (1813), whose hero is a feckless migrant who sells his shadow for an endless sack of gold. He asks his students to consider whether Peter’s story contains “the drama of all estranged people, of those who have been dispossessed and excluded.”

Exiled Shadow is a novel, if you can even call it that, constructed like a dossier of disappearances, a confessional monologue by a man who could become a carbon copy of himself, palimpsested to the point of illegibility. And yet it’s funny—funny in the way that watching a man try to argue with his own shadow is funny, funny in the way that being told you’re under house arrest by two identical apparatchiks named Ed is funny. There they are, Tweedledum and Tweedledee in their drab suits, delivering a yellow envelope under the door like a slapstick subpoena. And so the narrator drifts, schlemiel-like, from one stage set of exile to the next: from the dystopian circus of state surveillance to an American limbo, where he has, according to official records, been employed at Buster Keaton College—an institution that, if it exists, must surely be dedicated to teaching its émigrés how to trip over their own feet with dignity.

Who are you without your shadow? Someone who no longer casts a presence. Exiled Shadow swirls with interlacing references to texts on this theme, from Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Shadow” (Andersen’s story was prompted by von Chamisso’s) to Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, from Argentinian Jewish writer Alberto Manguel’s reading journal to Ruth Wisse’s The Schlemiel as Modern Hero. The narrator is familiar with Hannah Arendt (who remarked on “the touching innocence and the enlivening schlemihldom” of the Jewish pariah), Itzik Manger (the great ventriloquist of the Yiddish schlemiel, in his Medrash Itzik and Megile Lieder), and Manea’s own works. (This is a novel with a hundred footnotes.) This intertextual tapestry—or, as Manea puts it, “biography metamorphosed into bibliography”—serves not as adornment but as a key to the novel’s most resonant theme: the exile’s estrangement.

Reflecting on the province from which he had been exiled, the poet Paul Celan wrote of the “too short season which was ours.” In a speech on accepting the Bremen Prize, he later added that as “a region in which human beings and books used to live,” that province, Bukovina, was “now reduced to historylessness.” Norman Manea’s writing—the specific afterglow of Bukovina refracted through the dark lens of exile—extends that season and shines through that historylessness with a rare radiance.