NORMAN MANEA
29
example, because you are a Jew and were obliged to assume this condi–
tion as a child. You were deported. You write about it in your prose,
although never explicitly. Then you lived among us. I remember you
saying once, "I wonder who would hide me?" Tell me about yourself as
a Jewish writer in a Communist regime.
NM:
The fact that the Holocaust became a taboo subject after the early
postwar years of antifascist propaganda is not the reason why I did not
speak "explicitly" about my childhood in the concentration camp.
Everything was manipulated in the strategy of Communist ideology. It is
hard to scrutinize and truly understand yourself in the midst of so many
perversions against which you try to pit yourself. I was horrified by the
idea that I might involuntarily "serve" the official propaganda. I was also
repelled by lamentation - the traditional posture of the victim that the
Jew occupies in the philo-Semitic repertoire as well as in the anti–
Semitic. I preferred to encode in my fiction what really had happened.
Throughout those years of misery and terror, it seemed to me that we
were all suffering, that all of us were so "Jewish" that it would have
been unseemly
to
emphasize the extra reserved for the alien. Besides, you
cannot really assess your situation if it is impossible to criticize your own
ethnic community, if you are forbidden to express your conflicts with it,
if you are living in this state of siege, characteristic of totalitarian society.
There are many, far too many things to say about the implications
of being Jewish in the multilaterial, bestial masquerade of postwar
Romanian socialism - definable not only in social or religious terms but
also in strictly individualized accents, definable only through the gradual
unraveling of many fluid obscure premises. I refer not only to the many
dirty details of anti-Semitic pressure, but also to the much subtler com–
ponents of daily life including literary life, which was not as totally dif–
ferent from normal social life as many would like to think. Paradoxically,
in a period of socialist depersonalization, and later, during the difficult
challenges of exile, I gradually became what I had kept putting off un–
derstanding that I am. I would like to be able, finally, to write a book
about this becoming aware of the inevitable. If I succeed, then my future
prose, too, will focus on this grand postponed theme. In this context,
You lived among
liS
sounds, strangely, like an appropriate motto.
MP:
Do you feel at home where you are now? Do you feel safe? Do
you consider yourself an American or a Romanian-American writer or a
Jewish-American writer? Who is "hiding" you? Or is that no longer
necessary?
