632
PARTISAN REVIEW
combined various texts in The
Years
if
Apprenticeship
if
August the Fool.
The
aesthetic impetus for Manea's preferred genre may be found in his love of
the modern; maybe that was the
fragment,
as with other writers of his gener–
ation, for the revolt against the domination of fiction by the cult of the
proletariat, in the 1950s. But without doubt, Manea's life experiences and
the bottling up of accumulating fervor against his fate made him remain
faithful to these literary forms. Through their content and formal elasticity
they gave
him
the maximum freedom; thought experiments were not stran–
gled by obligations; the wish to generalize was not thwarted by the need for
scientific proof; and he dominated aesthetic form.
Manea's
oeuvre
is formed by his obsession with three life experiences, as
he stated to the Italian literary historian, Marco Cugno:
When you discover your Jewishness in a camp at the age of five, your
options disappear as you are instantly connected to an ancient collective
tragedy. At too early an age, the Holocaust was my first
brutal
initiation
into existence. Later, communist totalitarianism meant not only the
banning and reversal of tradition, but also a complicated instruction in
what it is to be marginal. Finally, on the threshold of old age, exile
returned me
to
the condition of alien and nomad which
I
had thought
to overcome by rooting myself in the language and culture of the land
of my birth.
Deportation and internment, decades of daily deprivations and self-affir–
mation as a writer in a dictatorship and late exile, offered the "material" for
the ever-recurring themes in Manea's literature: holding one's ground
against hostile living conditions, the threat of losing one's human dignity,
escalation of fear and insecurity, unstoppable corrosion of human relations
and feelings of being lost and of giving up. Manea's stories conjure up
oppressive feelings of opaci ty, of black visions and apocalypse as well as pic–
tures of bizarre and ironic detachment. The unsentimental yet constandy felt
presence of the author, which never loses itself in self-pitying lament but
does not resort to naturalistic observation, furnishes the emotional ground–
ing of this literature, which sometimes may even suggest, paradoxically, a
deeply buried optimism glowing above the oppressive panorama of darkness.
The earliest awareness of a child produces the coercive experiences of
the story teller-the life created especially for Romanian Jews in a concen–
tration camp in Transnistria by Hider's faithful dictator, Antonescu.
Together with the Jewish population of Bukovina, the Maneas were brought
there in October 1941. Many of his stories deal with everyday life in the
