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PARTISAN REVIEW
peared was suspended a few issues later.
It
is no less significant that when
my novel,
The Black Envelope,
my last book published in Romania - a
description of the everyday hell of the Ceausescu regime - appeared in
1986, it was mutilated beyond recognition by the censor's interventions,
at a time when writers interested in "aesthetic" rather than political ques–
tions were given preference.
"Censorship is the mother of metaphor," wrote Borges. One of the
communist censor's most perplexing taboos was the Holocaust. I was, out
of personal experience, obsessed with this topic. Skeptical of melodra–
matic public displays of suffering, mortified at the ease with which the
Holocaust is trivialized through the cheap marketing of extreme suffering
in other parts of the world, and outraged by the hypocrisy, dishonesty,
and cynicism with which it was made suspect, manipulated, and avoided
in my own country, I have always been interested in the artistic potential
of this topic - a topic that ought to have caused an overpowering,
traumatic, and crippling silence. Horror refuses to aestheticize, drastically
restricting creative freedom. The greater the difficulties, the more I felt
they deserved to be mastered. Faced with painful and dangerous conse–
quences, encoding this tragic subject seemed both unavoidable and one
way to "protect" it from the grip of manipulation. My story,
"Weddings," sought to transfigure just this dilemma. I thought the image
of a boy who, having returned from a concentration camp, was trained to
give an anti-fascist speech at assemblies and at family celebrations like
weddings, birthdays, and christenings, summed up not only the situation
of a persecuted minority, but also the general state of postwar Eastern
Europe: the perversion of truth in the realm of the official lie and in the
herdlike world of private life.
The illusion that censorship inspires creativity, as is sometimes
claimed in the West and as many writers and readers in the East resignedly
believe, is at best frivolous sophistry. When describing firsthand experi–
ences of reality, erotic life, religious feeling, and especially concrete politi–
cal problems, Aesopian language works only seldom to aesthetic advantage
and almost always results in a lack of honesty. Truth seeks to preserve
itself in obscurity and ingenious artifice and survives only in fragments, in
ambiguous, often cryptic forms. Readers in Eastern Europe looked to lit–
erature for what they could not find in the newspaper or in history and
sociology textbooks. They chased truth between the lines, while the au–
thor accepted the distortion of his artistic work as the necessary price of
solidarity with his audience.
In those difficult times, culture stimulated underground life and ex–
erted a counterforce to state power by restoring trust in creativity, ideas,
beauty, and intellectual dialogue, at a time when actual dialogue was
