652
PARTISAN REVIEW
and understatement.
A leading dissident (Charter 77 was composed on Urbanek's type–
writer by Havel with Urbanek by his side) and a towering figure - a
"lighthouse" and "the embodiment of decency" as people in Prague
admiringly have described him - in Czech culture as an essayist, novelist,
and translator (particularly of Shakespeare), Urbanek is reticent to talk
about his extraordinary acts of bravery and humanity during the war,
which last year earned him the title "Righteous Among the Nations" at
Yad Yashem. Not only did he provide a haven in his tiny apartment to
over twenty people ("I didn't count them, nor did I save their 'lives'- 1
only saved the moment" he modestly claims), but he also helped gel
packages of food for his Jewish friends in hiding and in Terezin.
Under the Sky's
tales of confinement, isolation, paranoia, disappoint–
ment, silencing and grief do not make for easy reading, and its few light
moments provoke what Urbanek's doomed tour guide in "Relato
Refero" endures - "laughter that rather resembled tears." It is no wonder
that so many of Urbanek's sufferers attempt, and usually succeed at, sui–
cide, leaving behind what one calls "dreams that are now vanished."
Heroes here end up dead or tortured, and those who remain alive do so
by compromise and by hiding behind a shield of indifference. In "The
Music Theater," a man in the audience watches Honegger's
Joan oj Arc
and muses in an imaginary conversation with the composer:
We're all born with the same opportunity and with a hidden desire to
become great. And then we walk the streets in colorless clothing; we
avoid danger; here and there we make a gesture by which some
woman we admire might remember us, or some man who is more
important than we are, and we seek his intervention on our behalf.
Slowly we all grow grey, and from the trip to the stake, which could
have made a legend of us, there remains only the trip to the office, to
the movies, a rendezvous, to the music theatre .... Were there a real
stake in front of us and Joan upon it, the result would be different to–
day. You wouldn't have the strength to make her say it. ("II y a de
joie qui est forte."). We all go away indifferent.
Yet Urbanek's dark world seems like a benign introduction to the
even darker, more sinister and paranoid Romanian reality - or unreality -
we encounter in Norman Manea's
Compulsory Happiness,
another attempt
to "preserve the truth, the reality of memory." Born in Bukovina in 1936,
Manea spent four years in a concentration camp in Transnistria (from
which Aharon Appelfeld and Paul Celan, then age eight and fifteen, also
escaped) . Until 1986 he lived in Romania, "the guinea pig of two totali-
