by Norman Manea
But what was it that distinguished the dark years of 1934 and 1935 from all the others? Ariel would reply to this question in the same way that Joseph Hechter had: they were Hooligan Years. Delighted with the word “hooligan,” he waved Hechter-Sebastian’s pocket-sized booklet at his audience, showing off the pink cover with black lettering, presided over by an owl, the logo of the Cultura Naţională Publishers, Bucharest, Macca Arcade 2. Of course, Librăria Noastră in Burdujeni had ordered several copies of How I Became a Hooligan, more copies than it had ordered of the notorious novel by the same author the previous year. “In general,” the author had written, “Romanian anti-Semitism is a fact rather than an idea, which it occasionally becomes.” But what about love for his motherland? “Show me the anti-Semitic law that will eradicate the undeniable fact that I was born on the banks of the Danube and love this land,” the author bravely declared.
“Is it true, then, that anti-Semitic legislation will not shake your love for your native land?” our unstoppable cousin Ariel, sweating profusely, asked the unseen author. “Remember, we Jews have moved continually from one rocky precipice to another, all over this world!” His own family, now listening attentively, should have been rolling with laughter— or so he thought — at that Joseph Hechter-Mihaii Sebastian. But they were not laughing at all. They merely smiled at what they regarded as the youthful musings of the young orator. They knew Mr. Hechter-Sebastian had left the ghetto and moved freely around on the wide and colorful Bucharest stage, but their small town — eternal as the blue heavens — did not understand what it meant to walk away from one’s kin and still claim kinship.
“The dictionaries in your bookshop are wrong!” the all-knowing Ariel shouted, pointing at the bookshelves. What he meant was that Hechter-Sebastian had not used the word “hooligan” in its English sense, or in the sense used by the Hindus for their spring festival, or in the Slavic sense of the word, meaning “blasphemer.” What Ariel intended was the French troublion, or, as the American put it, “troublemaker.”
What the author of the 1935 booklet had in mind, in fact, was the new hooliganism: a mixture of scandal-mongering, buffoonery, and lampooning, all united by the sense of a new mission, as formulated by another of Joseph Hechter’s friends, Mircea Eliade, in his novel The Hooligans, published in the same year and displayed in the bookshop’s window. Was rebellion a rite of passage on the way toward the Great Ecstasy, Death? “There is only one promising path in life: hooliganism.” Youth itself is a vehicle for the hooligan hero. “The human species will gain its freedom only when organized in regiments, perfectly and uniformly intoxicated with a collective myth”—militias and assault battalions, the legions of the present-day world, youthful crowds joined by the same destiny, collective death.
“The Legionnaires have even claimed the national poet Mihai Emi-nescu as the great hooligan of the nation, as a sacred forerunner of the martyrs in green shirts, chanting the glory of the Cross and the Captain Codreanu!” Ariel ranted on, oblivious to the fact that his audience had stopped paying attention once he had abandoned Judas for his more complicated ramblings.
“Collective death!” Ariel shouted. “Whatever he chooses to become, whether an atheist, a converted Jew, even an anti-Semite, Mr. Hechter cannot avoid the darkness threatened by the hooligans. ‘Inner adversity,’ he says. Now, while his friends are applauding assault and collective death, this is what’s on the mind of Yosele Hechter from Brăila. Admittedly, we can be excessive, suspicious, agitated. But these ancestral maladies are enough, we don’t need new enemies, we’ve got ourselves to cope with. Is anybody asking us whether we prefer the ‘inner adversity’ of Mr. Sebastian or the adversity of the legionaria? It was hard to tell whether they were still listening to him, the relatives and the relatives’ relatives gathered in old Avram’s bookshop. Then, as later in life, Ariel was talking more to himself. They were probably still listening, but without much pleasure, irritated by the prodigy who believed they were all half-asleep morons.
Sebastian’s novel Two Thousand Years, with Nae Ionescu’s preface, published in 1934, and the booklet How I Became a Hooligan, published in 1935 at the same time as the two-volume The Hooligans by Mircea Eliade — these publications were all on display on the shelves of the Librăria Noastră in Burdujeni. Indeed, all the major periodicals and books reached that shtetl metropolis. Avram even ordered French and German publications, if any of his customers were interested. Ariel, the son of his sister Fanny, took care to alert him to special titles and was the first to read the exotic acquisitions.
The book Two Thousand Years had left no one indifferent. It was no accident that I came across the volume in 1950, when the hooligans’ war was over and the hooligans’ peace was in force. It was one of only three or four books I found in the house of my aunt — my mother’s older sister — a simple woman of little education. I was about thirteen or fourteen years old and paying a short visit to relatives in Tîrgu Frumos, when I found, where least expected, a first edition of the novel, with its blue-gray covers and diagonal lettering. No socialist publishers or public library would have dared promote such a title and such themes. But there was the book, in the home of the other daughter of the bookseller from Burdujeni, a relic of the old times and a guide to the new. My aunt Rebecca was one of those who had listened to cousin Ariel’s tirades against Hechter-Sebastian, who himself had used the term “hooligan” against everybody, including those of his fellow Jews who had attacked him. “He has the right to say what he wants. But death — how could he traffic with death?” Ariel would shout. “The delicate Hechter-Sebastian, unwilling to offend his mentor, accepted the Legionnaire’s preface and, with it, his death sentence. And, delicate as ever, he responded to the hooligans by declaring himself a hooligan, too. Mere irony? Well, that’s his business. But death … the cult of death? The ecstasy of death, the chill and darkness of death? These are no jokes, and Hechter-Sebastian should know better. This is where irony itself ceases to operate. What shall we do with the Legionnaire hooligan, with death’s hero, sanctified by the magic of death? Mr. Sebastian, the atheist, the assimilated citizen of Romania, should have been aware of all this.” Indeed, Aunt Rebecca explained, for the benefit of the freshly minted thirteen-year-old Communist I had become, “we cultivate life, not death. Life as proclaimed by the Torah, again and again, unique, nonrepeatable, invaluable.” The urgency of this refrain was exasperating, and its reverse was no less maddening. We knew only too well what the cult of death had led to, Aunt Rebecca reminded me. The far-seeing Ariel was right. My grandfather’s family — the Braunsteins — and all the other families in that market town, vibrating with the whirlwinds and the turmoil and the buzzing of the beehive called life, did not seem at all interested in the “transformation of anti-Semitism into idea,” as quoted by Ariel from the wisdom of Hechter-Sebastian. But the chill and darkness of death … Such words were not to be taken lightly.
In the small market towns relations with neighbors and authorities were friendly. The peasants would come to old Avram for advice on legal and even religious matters, or to borrow small sums of money. The family loved Maria like a daughter, the orphan girl whom the bookseller had taken off the streets and brought into his home as a member of the family, where she happily remained. Maria was beyond suspicion, but all around them, in books, newspapers, in the eyes of customers, suspicions were arising. One had to be vigilant, extremely vigilant.
Avram the bookseller maintained a good-humored and skeptical detachment from these ancestral obsessions, as if decency and piety could ward off evil. However, his youngest daughter, my mother, reacted promptly to any dubious sign. Aunt Rebecca reminded me of the details, already familiar to me from family lore.
Marcu, the accountant from Iţcani, my future father, remained unperturbed, friendly, and prudent in his relations with everybody. He did not have many friends, but he had no enemies either. He was easy in his dealings with colleagues of any sort, although he felt more comfortable among his own
kin. He was always baffled by his happy-go-lucky non-Jewish friend Zaharia, the party-loving, womanizing, hunting, and horse-riding local Don Juan, who went through life with a smile on his lips and his hat tipped at a rakish angle. They had always been firm friends. He could not imagine Zaharia taking any interest in frenzied slogans and parades of chanting Legionnaires.
In 1935, old Avram paid no attention to Ariel’s fiery calls for caution. Hostility and danger were, to him, part of the natural order of things. Since they could not be avoided, they were not worth worrying about. One had to get through the day’s work and accept the surrounding stupidity and suffering, that was all; people always remembered a kind, decent man — there was no other way. Ariel, after all, had won a dubious notoriety for himself with his extravagant dress and exaggerated language. The family had other concerns apart from Sebastian’s scandal, or theorizing about the confrontation between inner and outer adversity. Engrossed as they were in their wedding plans, their daily lives were dominated by other thoughts. In fact, the bustle of the preparations served as a reminder that they were at ease in the place where they had been living for as many generations as they could remember. True, they had not been born on the banks of the Danube, like Joseph Hechter, but then, the hills of Bukovina were not to be sneezed at, either. They loved their native land no less than Joseph Hechter-Mihail Sebastian, and did not have the inclination or the time to philosophize about such matters as — the diminutive, for example, Ariel’s latest obsession.
Normally, diminutives may be thought of as agreeable things; they have a charming sweetness and naïveté about them. Only zany Ariel, the bookseller’s nephew and cousin of the bride, could argue that they were bad omens. They distill poisons, poisons that could only be temporarily domesticated. Diminutives can spell disaster when you least expect it! “Here, anything can happen, nothing is incompatible,” the young man recited, quoting from Sebastian. Ariel devoured everything, memorized everything, twisted words in any way he chose. “Evasiveness,” that’s what he called it. Evasiveness! The term found an audience, it inspired trust. Fatalism, a sense of humor, hedonism and melancholy, corruption and lyricism, all played their part, the excited Ariel claimed, in this, the supreme technique of survival: evasiveness. This is what he kept repeating, with his usual contempt and arrogance. But who was listening? Rejoicing in the preparations for the wedding, his audience felt they had no reason to reject pleasure, or lyricism, or confidence in their destiny, all denounced by the youthful Ariel.
The so-called Hooligan Year of 1934 had been a happy one, so why should the next be any different? The bookseller’s favorite daughter had blossomed, joy had entered the household, the heightened emotions were a reminder that the place where they had been living for so many generations was no worse than any other. The landscape and the people, the climate and the language — all belonged to them. They lived in harmony with their neighbors. Adversity? There was no particular reason to be suspicious of the way people looked at you or to bridle at the odd world; after all, their co-religionists were no saints either. Occasionally, they even wondered whether the evil might not, after all, be in themselves, as they seemed to attract hostility wherever they went.
Did life necessarily need the galvanizing force of poison? Often diluted and almost absent, it was always ready, nevertheless, to erupt in sudden, terrible outbreaks, smashing the sweet little nothings — yesterday’s tender diminutives — and heralding disaster. That was precisely what zany Ariel did, throwing names and quotations at them that were designed to alert them to the traps they themselves no longer heeded. “Even Tolstoy allowed himself to be fooled. He liked it here during his brief Romanian sojourn. The charm of the place and its inhabitants … the old sage was young and naïve,” young Ariel pontificated. Ariel, the bookseller’s nephew, son of his sister from Buhusi, madcap Ariel, with his blue-dyed hair, reciting Rimbaud and capable of walking twenty-five kilometers every other week to play chess with his uncle, Kiva Riemer, making impassioned speeches on Jabotinsky and on the forthcoming Jewish state in the Mediterranean — this was a man who believed himself to be in a better position than Hechter-Sebastian. “Assimilation? Assimilation for what?” the young man fulminated. “To become like everybody else? Everything compatible with everything else? Do we live in the country of all compatibilities, as the author from Bucharest claims?” He did not seem to care that Uncle Avram smiled in amusement, or that Avram’s daughter listened too attentively to be actually listening.
“Would we have been able to survive for so long if we had been just like these, or like those, or like the others? Five thousand years! Not two thousand, as the gentleman from Bucharest believes! Let’s see how compatible Mr. Hooligan will prove to be with his hooligan friends!” Old Avram and his daughter, the speaker himself, and even the wretched Nathan, the Communist tailor who could not decide in favor of Stalin or Trotsky — they all seemed to be in a better situation than the assimilated Sebastian. And, of course, Rabbi Yossel Wijnitzer, too, the town’s spiritual leader, was in a clearer and better situation than Hechter-Sebastian. Their home was illusion! The illusion of home was what Mr. Sebastian no longer had.
The Braunstein family was happy in that Hooligan Year of 1934, and happy, too, in 1935, when the wedding was to take place, and in 1936, when their heir was expected. In the town of Burdujeni, these were not Hooligan Years, as Sebastian, his critic Ariel, and newspapers proclaimed worldwide. The hooligan times are upon us, or rather, they’re already here, declared the Romanian, Yiddish, German, and French newspapers that old Avram carried on his back from the station to his bookstore in Burdujeni. Everywhere there was the morbid delight in blaspheming, but in that small East European market town, the bookseller’s family lived their happy lives.
Had I been able to ask the old Chinese sage, half a century after the Hooligan Year, about what I looked like in the year before I was born, he probably would have answered with a cliché. He would probably have told me what I already knew and what time subsequently confirmed: as a mere hypothesis, as nonreality, one can have only the face that one will have later on, in actual life. I could not, for instance, become the Jewish-Romanian Anna Pauker, the star of world Communism, who left the ghetto and went straight through the red gates of proletarian internationalism; nor could I have become the worldly Jewish-Romanian Nicu Steinhardt, convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, even Legionnairism; I could not even have become Avram or his daughter Janeta Braunstein, and least of all Rabbi Yossel, their wise adviser. Likewise, I could not have been their rebellious relative, the Zionist Ariel. Rather, in 1935, the year before I was born, I was the hooligan Sebastian — and so I would be fifty years after and then ten more years after that and another ten and all the years between.
But I was unaware of all this on that Saturday in 1950 when, as a young Stalinist-Leninist pioneer, sitting in that small room in my aunt’s dark house in Tîrgu Frumos, near Iasi, I, in my turn, opened the volume Two Thousand Years.
My grandfather and my future parents were equally unaware, in 1935, of the Chinese brushstrokes painting themselves on that illegible sky, slumbering over Burdujeni in the calm before the storm. They were all gripped — and who could have blamed them — by the joy of the wedding preparations. They were busy drawing up lists of names and menus and clothes and addresses, checking and double-checking complex calculations. Grand plans were being discussed in detail: how to rent the house of the pharmacist in Iţcani, next to the sugar factory, for the young couple to live in, with room for Maria, the good fairy of the Braunstein household; what new furniture to buy; how to settle the debts incurred in a recent lawsuit, following which the bookseller had lost his house. Bookseller Avram Braunstein was not wealthy — although he worked hard from morning till night — but a wedding, after all, was a wedding and it would be celebrated by the book. The guest list grew in number: the brothers and sisters of Avram and his wife, from Botosani and Fălticeni and Iaşi, all with their children and grandchildren; the parents, sisters, and
brothers of the groom, from Fălticeni and Roman and Focsani, with their own children and grandchildren; neighbors and friends and officials — the mayor, the police chief, Judge Boscoianu, the veterinarian Manoliu; the notary Dumitrescu; and even the insufferable Wechsler, the rival bookseller, who never lost an opportunity to stab his competitor in the back. There were endless consultations, conducted by the bride herself, with Surah the cook — an expert on weddings — with the Bart-feld photographer, and with the invaluable Wanda Waslowitz, the seamstress. Indeed, the bride took charge of everything, displaying unequaled energy and proving hard to please. Mrs. Waslowitz had already made and remade the bridal dress three times. A large woman, with a determined air, the Polish seamstress had not yet acquired the bulk and the short temper of her later years, when only her steely blue eyes, delicate fingers, and hoarse voice recalled her younger self. She was annoyed then, as later, by unreasonable demands. She could not, however, refuse an old and faithful customer, with whom she had had so many successes and who, she had to admit, won her admiration many times over with her novel suggestions for new designs, for which she had found inspiration, goodness knows where, perhaps in her own perpetually restless and inquisitive imagination. She had even managed to acquire a copy of the fashion magazine Modisch, ordered from Czernowitz. The color of the dress, the fabric, the accessories, all these had to be more special than usual. What was called for in this instance was sober elegance, not the usual provincial outfitting.
There was no time for debates on Judas’ sufferings. Life, not death, now dominated the stage. Death, however, was waiting in the wings, preparing its revenge, ready, in its turn, to offer its services.