30
PARTISAN REVIEW
NM: I
am answering your questions today, August 18th, 1992. It is a
rainy day; I am in the house (where Mary McCarthy lived before me) at
Bard College, where I've come, although it is still summer recess, for
two weeks of quiet, reading, and concentration. It is quiet indeed, in the
surrounding woods; it is quiet too in this spacious house, too big for
me.... Ten months have passed since I received your questions, and I
have not had the time to answer until now. This might be indicative of
what it is like to be or not to be "between" things, between intense,
sometimes excessive demands. This morning I ran into a colleague of
mine who had just returned from a year's sabbatical spent in his native
country, India. I asked him how he had felt seeing his family, the lay of
his native land again. What it was like back home, in other words. That
term, he answered, no longer exists for me except in quotation marks.
Neither America nor India is home anymore; everywhere and nowhere is
a kind of "home."
We live in a centrifugal world, which is scattering faster and faster
every day. For me, who postponed leaving Romania until I could post–
pone it no longer, and who, even after I left, could not until recently
accept the violent displacement that is common in today's world, the
sense of a visible "banalization" of modern evil gradually eased my resig–
nation; it also eventually helped me to discover the advantages of a sharp
break, of a sudden broadening of perspective. Weare no longer sheltered
anywhere; the risks of daily life in an ultracompetitive and mobile society
are at least partially compensated, however, by the variety of the human
experience in a rapidly changing, democratic, multinational world.
Do I feel American? Only after some years in America do you come
to realize the great gift of this country, namely, that to be American you
don't have to feel anything particular. It is this extraordinary diversity of
a human community united by the principles of working together that
defines the American character.
My relationship with Romania, however, has not yet reached the
point of indifference, in spite of the bitterness which has deepened these
last few years, sincce we all stopped being "Jewish" and began to rede–
fine ourselves without the heavy lid of terror. It is not easy for me to re–
define myself after all that has happened and is happening with me, with
the country to which I belonged.
Soon after I had begun to publish, the first translation of my work
abroad appeared in 1971 in a literary anthology printed in Hebrew in
Israel,
Jewish Writers
il1
Romal/ial1.
I remember that the moment I had the
imposing volume in my hands, I was angry. I considered myself a
Romanian writer, quite simply, and the question of my ethnicity, which
I neither exalted nor denied, was purely personal and of no concern to
