NORMAN MANEA
The Jewish Wri ter in the Public Arena
Having had the greatest part of my biography located in communist
Eastern Europe-where real life was an underground life and public life
was an arena for masquerade-I had many reasons to doubt the role of the
writer as a public speaker.
Life taught us over there to distrust anything public; readers read our
books between the lines and we accepted the distortion as the inevitable
price to pay for our mutual inner exile.
As you well know, politics is about power, art about freedom; so, art in
a totalitarian state comes to stand not only as a challenge-as it does for
every authority-it comes to stand for nothing less than
the enemy.
This was also true, and perhaps especially so, for the Jewish writer. I
and my Jewish writer friends felt distant not only from the Party
nomenclature-be it Jewish or not-but also from the Jewish communi–
ty as an official institution. The game that institution played was not an
admirable one. I was quite often offended and appalled by official state–
ments of the Jewish community, in line with and serving Party
propaganda. Even when we had to accept a kind of complicity with the
Jewish community as the last possible enclave, we did it with a very odd
feeling.
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.
Throughout those years of misery and terror, it seemed 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 can–
not really assess your situation
if
it is impossible to criticize (even) your
own community, if you are forbidden to express your conflicts with it, if
you are living in that state of siege characteristic of totalitarian society.
Since 1989, when we stopped being all "Jewish" and began to rede–
fine ourselves wi thout the heavy lid of terror, the shocking rebirth of
nationalism in some parts of Eastern Europe has deepened, of course, the
disappointment of those of us who hoped for a rapid separation from the
Editorial Note: This was a speech given at the International Conference of
Jewish Writers, Berkeley-San Francisco-Stanford, February 1-3,1998.
