EVA BEHRING
THE FATE OF AN EXILED
WRITER
Norman Manea is one of the last of the "emigres" from Ceausescu's
Romania. Already in his fifties, hesitantly and "much too late," after having
left on a tourist visa, he decided finally to remain in the West.
Unti11974, he continued to work as an engineer in the waterworks. But
then, due to his growing repute as an author, he joined the Romanian liter–
ary
union and thereby was assured a modest social security-which, however,
also meant intensified state control. His collections of stories
The Night on the
Long Side
(1969) and
The First Gates
(1975) were praised by readers and crit–
ics alike. His allegorical and shocking novels, among them
Captives,Atrium
and
The Book
<f
the Son,
which were not easily accessible, found an astonishingly
broad public that managed to penetrate the complex structure of his works
and soon saw in Manea a new type of social-psychological raconteur.
Manea's genre was celebrated as a new artistic intelligence in Romania
and, finally, beyond, and he was frequently compared to Robert Musil, Bruno
Schulz and Ernesto Sabato. His reputation grew further after Heinrich Boll
read in manuscript and highly complimented a German translation of his
text. However, Manea's psychological subtleties and refined enciphering were
bound to be mistrusted by the cultural conurussars, especially since he did not
belong to the party and was unwilling to support the government's cultural
politics. At the beginning of the 1980s, he provided grounds for a concerted
attack when, in an interview in the Transylvanian periodical
Familia
he criti–
cized an (anonymous) scandalous editorial which had appeared in the
officially protected cultural publication,
Saptamina
(The Week), for its nation–
alistic, chauvinistic and antisemitic stance.
From now on press campaigns against Manea became the order of the
day. Attacks went in three directions, as "anti-party," "cosmopolitan" and
"not indigenous," against Manea the dissident, the open-minded and the Jew.
In spite of the solidarity inlplicit in the reviews and comments of influential
literary critics, the consequences for me publication of Manea's new books
On the Contour
(essays, 1984) and
The Black Envelope
(novel, 1984) were dire.
The author was designated as
persona non grata.
He had to struggle bitterly
with the censors about changes and new formulations for these last books–
wrestling between what was required by the officials and what he himself
could morally justify.
