328
PARTISAN REVIEW
At one point in the discussion, apparently having deduced from their
names that her guests are Jewish, Cornelia turns to the subject of the
Jews. She tells Hoffman and her friend that they are in a place where
many Jews once lived. And though there are none left, she thinks about
them often.
" 'Sometimes I go
to
look at their houses, their cemeteries,'
Cornelia continues. 'Some of the most beautiful, big houses you see
around here belonged to Jewish people. Sometimes I think I can feel
their presence.' "
"I didn't expect," Hoffman writes, "in this tucked away corner of
Transylvania, to hear about a once-thriving Jewish community that dis–
appeared with the war. But the Jews, it seems, are the specter haunting
Eastern Europe these days, the inescapable absence that is itself felt as a
presence, a wrongness .... "
"The absence that is itself felt as a presence" captures exactly the ef–
fect the Jews still evoke in all of the countries Hoffman visited.
To write
Exit into History
she traveled to Eastern Europe first in the
summer of 1990, and then again in the summer of 1991, to witness the
creation of a new history emerging on the heels of the demise of
Communism. As to the matter of the Jews, it made little difference
whether Hoffman was in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania or
Bulgaria; the Jews were still there, in one form or another.
During her journeys, other discussions about Jews did not resolve
themselves quite so benignly as did the exchange with Cornelia. In
Bratislava, Hoffman spoke with a middle-aged man named Jozef, a
Slovak writer and translator. "Everything in his demeanor proclaims a
zestful love of pleasure, a good-humored enjoyment," Hoffman writes.
The mood is merry until the conversation turns to the Slovak separatist
movement and its struggles with the Czechs. Jozef supports the move.
Hoffman presses him on the point, and it is then he invokes the name of
Father Tiso.
"The Slovaks have always been treated as inferior by the Czechs,"
J ozef tells her. "Even Father Tiso has to be understood as the person
who stood up for Slovak independence .... "
Hoffman is astonished when Jozef defends Father Tiso, since it was
under Tiso's rule during World War
II
that fascism and anti-Semitic
atrocities had so thrived. She explains, "I expect to hear such opinions
professed by people who can be safely dismissed as extremists; but I'm
barned to hear them come from this nice, genial 'intelligent' who has
nothing of a fanatic about him. This implies a different kind of
nationalism from what I've sensed elsewhere: a burning, nineteenth-
