62
PARTISAN REVIEW
with the same acidity and skepticism as I tried to do with my fellow
countrymen.
I
was very receptive this morning to what Andre Aciman said about
his Alexandria. My case is different, despite some similarities, comple–
mentary in many ways
to
his. I left Romania at an almost old age and
my homeland didn't stay with me, as a faraway imaginary country of
childhood-but rather as a tense and disturbing biographical obsession.
On the other hand, speaking about my East European roots, I cannot
claim any noble Jewish heritage, any aristocratic or religious great con–
nection to Jewish history. I am rather a second-rate heir and second-rate
by-product of several generations of what is called the shtetl, a kind of
comparable, symmetrical side of the Greek
agora.
The shtetl created civ–
ilization on its own, destroyed by the Holocaust and ravaged by com–
munists. Living in Romania after the war, I had to choose between
communism and Jewishness. Quite early, in my teens, l chose a much
more ambiguous solution without solution-literature. You may
remember that Freud asked himself what remains of a Jew when he is
not religious or nationalistic and doesn't even know the language of the
Bible. The very assimilated Austrian Jew answered, "a lot," but never
explained what he meant. We should probably accept the generous
vagueness of such a statement.
The book I was writing during the last years, called
The netuTIl of the
Hooligan,
combines an autobiographical part, called "Past as Fiction,"
with a second part, reporting on my trip back
to
Romania in ]
997,
called "Posterity." Th is second and complementa ry pa rt of the book
seemed to me an honest way of diverting the risk of imprecise memory,
or retrospecti ve, sel f-servi ng specula tion. The d ia logue between these
two parts, one related to the past, and one related to the present, may
in the end give the correct assessment of my relationship with the
beloved and hated homeland, and the liberating and oppressive exile.
I certainly know now more about autobiographical writing, which I
used to avoid in my Romanian years. America, in the end, pushed me
into it, and therefore I also decided
to
come here
to
this conference.
Geoffrey Hartman:
Thank you, Norman. The writer Leonard Michaels,
long a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley, is
the author of
The Men's Club, Syluia:
A
r'ictional MemOir, Time Ollt of
Mind: The Diaries of Leonard Michaels,
196/-199'),
and most recently,
A
Girl With a Monkey.
He was also co-editor of
The State of Language.
