by Norman Manea
Bukovina
No less now than in 1945, Bukovina was about an hour’s journey from that dreamlike place in Moldavia — Fălticeni — where I rediscovered normality. Some 170 years earlier — or so my mother’s aunt Leah Riemer would tell me in her slow drawl — the Austrian Emperor Joseph, visiting Transylvania, was so taken by the grandeur of the Ţara de Sus (Upper Country), as it was known, that he sought to incorporate it into his empire. In 1777, the population of the newly acquired Austrian province of Bukovina swore an oath of allegiance to Vienna, an occasion that was celebrated with great pomp and ceremony in Czernowitz. The Romanian Prince Grigore Ghica, a fierce opponent of the acquisition, was assassinated by Turkish conspirators on the very day of the celebration.
“We are from Bukovina, young man, Bukovina,” Mr. Bogen would say to me. Mr. Bogen was himself from Bukovina, and had settled in Fălticeni when love beckoned. “You’ll soon go back to Bukovina,” he reassured me. Apparently, Bukovina was to have been renamed Graftschaft, so said Mr. Bogen, a jovial history teacher who was married to the beautiful mathematics teacher, Otilia Riemer, daughter of Leah Riemer, sister of bookseller Avram, my grandfather. I had met Leah and her daughter and sons — hardworking children of the ghetto and recent graduates in mathematics, turned overnight into passionate champions of the revolution — as well as Mr. Bogen, in the happy months after our return from Transnistria.
“Bukovina was to be named Graftschaft, like the Austrian Tirol,” Berl Bogen, my mother’s new cousin, said in his German-tinged Buko-vinan accent. “The name derives from the famous beeches of the Upper Country, Latin name, Silvae Faginales, buk in Slavonic, bucovine in the old Romanian chronicles.” The lesson continued with recitals whose importance I could only guess at from the way Mr. Bogen punctuated the key words. “In 1872, General Enzenberg issued a decree requiring those Jews who had sneaked into, I repeat, sneaked into, Bukovina from 1769 onward and had not paid the annual tax of four gulden, four gulden, to be expelled, expelled. “I think our young guest”—said Mr. Bogen, turning to me—”knows what this means. By 1872, there were thirteen Jewish deputies in the Bukovina Diet, thirteen, young gentleman, thirteenl They all signed a protest against the expulsion order addressed to the government in Vienna.”
I had already learned some strange things from Mr. Bogen. For instance, in Bukovina’s Diet, in 1904, the Romanians (who, as an Austrian officer had written, spoke a “corrupt Latin”) held a majority of the seats, twenty-two. “However,” Mr. Bogen emphasized, “all the minorities were also generously represented, according to the Austrian model: seventeen Ukrainians, ten Jews, six Germans, four Poles.” Why however?
“We are from Suceava, young man, from Suceava in Bukovina, the princely seat of Ştefan the Great!” said Mr. Bogen, wagging his finger at me. “After 1918, when Bukovina was returned to Romania, conciliation with the new Romanian administration went more smoothly in Suceava than it did in Bukovina’s capital, Czernowitz. The Jews of Suceava spoke Romanian, as well as German, and enjoyed uninterrupted contact with the Romanian population. The opening of the border from Burdujeni to the Kingdom of Romania, now Greater Romania, promised to speed up trade and investment for the landowners and industrialists who retained the citizenship rights they had under the Austrians. The Jewish civil servants were kept on, but the new Romanian administration stopped appointing more,” my new cousin Berl Bogen continued to inform me.
Four years previously, my father recounted, we had been expelled from “sweet Bukovina, that delightful garden,” as the poets called it. “But, in fact, we’re not really from Bukovina,” my father said to me. “Your mother and her parents were born in the old Kingdom of Romania, in Burdujeni, near the border, it is true, but on the other side. And I was born in Lespezi, not far from here, where my parents lived.”
The people of Bukovina — pedantic, calculating, proud of their German language and the customs they had borrowed from those who proved to be our most brutal enemies — had been the butts of perpetual jokes in our home. I remembered this distinctly. Although we were consumers of Butterbrod und Kaffee mit Milch ourselves, neither my mother nor my father was born in Bukovina. At home, we all spoke Romanian, not German. My father had been born, as I now learned, not far from Fălticeni. My mother’s brother and sister had lived in that house in Burdujeni where I was born, as had my great-grandfather, his parents, and his grandparents. Burdujeni was a typical East European market town, adjoining a similar town, Iţcani, which differed from its neighbor only in the Austrian influences that could be seen there. Both gradually evolved as suburbs of the city of Suceava.
It was from Iţcani and its sugar factory that the young accountant came, the young man who, on that crowded bus returning from the St. Elias fair in July 1932, made the acquaintance of the beautiful Janeta Braunstein, the bookseller’s daughter from Burdujeni. He had been struck by her resemblance to Leah Riemer, in whose house we now lived in the first postwar months. It was also in Iţcani where the young couple settled after their marriage and where we all lived before we were deported.
The two towns, Iţcani and Burdujeni, and the city of Suceava, situated at the top of a hill on the site of an ancient medieval citadel, marked the points of a triangle three kilometers long. The differences between the towns were important, however, as were those between Romanian Bukovina and Austrian Bukovina. Romanian Burdujeni had received only minor influences from its neighboring “Austrian” Bukovina, where Iţcani and Suceava were located. Iţcani’s unassuming railway station, near the border, was overshadowed by the sumptuous railway station of its neighbor on the Romanian side, Burdujeni. Both stations survived all the vicissitudes of the times and stand intact to this day, witnesses of the past.
Before the war, Iţcani, unlike Burdujeni, boasted a skating rink and was host to all the philanthropic balls, held to raise money for the building of a school, a club, or a hospital. The Czech, German, and Italian “foreigners” all worked in Iţcani’s sugar and oil factories. My greatgrandfather from Burdujeni would walk about on the Sabbath in his festive Hasidic garb, a black satin caftan, breeches, a round fur-trimmed hat, knee-length white stockings, looking like a majestic Assyrian king to the astonished natives of Burdujeni, so my mother told me, her eyes shining with pride and tears. To the Westernized inhabitants of neighboring Iţcani, my great-grandfather must have looked like some ghost from the Polish provinces of Galicia.
Burdujeni, a typical, bustling shtetl, vibrated with all the great debates and major tragedies of the ghetto. The latest Parisian scandal, reported in the press, jostled for attention with the suicide-threatening romances of the neighboring street. The social divide between those who lived along the main street and those crammed into the narrow side streets marked a centuries-old hierarchy. Religious and political passions grouped and regrouped. Respect paid to learning and living decently competed with the chase after money. Yearning for grand adventure pulsated in every cloud drifting over the Chagallian sky of that swarming ant heap.
The German atmosphere of Iţcani was less picturesque and more formal. A major crossroads, Iţcani had opened up, like the whole empire to which it belonged, to the “foreigners,” gradually assimilating them into a wider cosmopolitan community that belonged no longer to the East but to the West. Jews were not a majority in Iţcani, but it often elected Jewish mayors, as I learned from my father and from Mr. Bogen. This would have been hard to imagine in nearby Burdujeni. Frau Doktor Helmann, who, in that first terrible winter in Transnistria, demanded a lot of money from my mother for a small bottle of ordinary medicine— which proved of little help to my dying grandfather — came from a family of such mayors. Her ancestors Dische and Samuel Helmann were listed on the honor roll in the town’s archives.
The deportation order of October 1941 abruptly erased the differences between Iţcani and Burdujeni. Those from Burdujeni, from the Old Romanian Kingdom, that is, my grandfather, uncle, and aunt, were placed in the same category as us, their “Germanicized” co-religi
onists from Iţcani. This served to cure the Bukovinans of the airs and graces of the Austrian Empire, they who, in happier times, had looked down their noses at their picturesque, noisy neighbors in Burdujeni, on the Romanian side of the frontier, who, in their turn, mistrusted the others’ frosty civility.
The provisional certificate, issued by the Inspectorate of the Iaşi Police on April 18, 1945, which my father would often show to me, simply confirmed that “Mr. Marcu Manea, together with his family, comprising Janeta, Norman, and Ruti, is hereby repatriated from the U.S.S.R. through the customs point at Ungheni-Iaşi, on April 14, 1945. His destination is the commune Fălticeni, county of Baia, Cuza Vodă Street. The present document is valid until his arrival at his new address, where he will conform to the regulations established by the Population Bureau.” No information was given concerning the reasons for repatriation in 1945, or for the expatriation of 1941. “We have no other documentary evidence of our expulsion,” Father said tersely.
The ground for the shock of 1941 had been well prepared by the previous Hooligan Years, as I now learned, and by events that only the deaf and the blind could have ignored. In September 1940, Marshal Ion An-tonescu proclaimed the National Legionnaire state. This was soon followed by the Legionnaire Rebellion. The Green Shirts marched through the streets, occupied the sugar factory in Iţcani, where my father was prevented from going to work, and hanged the musician Jacob Katz from Suceava. The people of Bukovina heard rumors about the “ritual” killings at the slaughterhouse in Bucharest, where the Legionnaires had hung the corpses of murdered Jews under signs reading KOSHER. Jews were being subject to forced labor, taken as hostages in synagogues. German officers, from the troops massed near the Soviet border, taunted Jews with threats of the Führer’s Final Solution. The ordinance of the morning of October 9, 1941, required the town’s Jews “to hand in immediately at the National Bank all the gold, currency, shares, diamonds, and precious stones they owned and to report on the same day in Burdujeni with their hand luggage.” The concentration camp in Suceava, where 120 Jews had already been locked up, was immediately dismantled, in light of the new measures. The drums were beating out their message on that day, October 9, 1941, on the main street: “The Jewish population is to leave the town immediately. All personal belongings must be left behind. Anyone who does not comply risks penalty of death.”
“This is how it all began, during the week of the Sukkot festival,” my father would recount, “the march, that infamous procession familiar from so many films made after the war. Suddenly we lost all our rights and were left with just one duty, death. There we went, shivering from the cold, with our knapsacks on our backs, slowly descending the hill. Disorderly lines of people, marching along the three kilometers of that road lined with poplars.” Yes, the same poplar-lined road to and from the Burdujeni railway station, along which bookseller Avram Braunstein used to carry his daily burden of newspapers.
From the Burdujeni station, the trains left for their all-too-predictable destination. The Dniester was our river Styx, across which we were ferried to such places as Ataki, Moghilev, Shargorod, Murafa, Bershad, Bug. These exotic names were often recalled in conversations in the spring and summer of 1945. In contrast, names such as Burdujeni, Itcani, Suceava were rarely mentioned, as if they were shrouded in shame.
That unresolved conflict between nostalgia and resentment translated as silence. The oppressors had not, when all was said and done, managed to annihilate us, and furthermore, they had lost the war. Only this seemed important at the time. The new era already had its new missionaries. Among them — who would have believed it? — the new husband of our gentle Maria. “A Communist,” it was whispered. The couple lived in Suceava, but for us there was no talk of returning to, or even visiting, our old haunt, which was only an hour away. Going back to the place from which we had been expelled seemed taboo. My parents did not speak about the future, and for their offspring, life in the present was a Paradise, without past or future. We were repatriated on the eighteenth of April, the day on which we registered with the Iasi police and decided to go to Fălticeni. At first, we stayed with the family of my father’s brother, Uncle Aron, then with the Riemers. For the next two years we lived in Rădăuţi, a charming small town in Bukovina, not far from the Soviet border.
The name of Suceava was to reappear on the map of our conversations only in 1947, the year when the circle closed and we were back where we had started.
Chernobyl, 1986
April 1945. The truck stops at the intersection of two streets. The wooden tailgate is removed, to allow the passengers to get out. Another moment’s wait, an endless moment of disruption. When it passes, everything begins to move again, quickly. The dead street suddenly becomes alive with a crowd of strangers, men and women running toward the truck. Within seconds, they reach the ghosts who had already alighted from the truck onto the sidewalk — into the world. Embraces follow, lamentations, tears.
Out of the void a new world has been born. The boy stares at his parents with the same bewilderment with which he gazed at the strangers. Another second or two, and it is his turn to be hugged and kissed by the possessors of unknown, freckled faces, big, rough hands, and guttural voices — uncles, aunts, cousins. The excitement of reunion! Reunion? He does not recollect ever having met these people. The world, however, has just been brought back to life, and with such people in it.
This had been the real return, the descent from the truck that had brought us back, in April 1945, from Iasi to Fălticeni, the small Moldavian town, all flowers and picture-postcard views, where my father’s older brother lived. Uncle Aron, short, stumpy, with red cheeks, an intense gaze, and quick speech, was one of those creatures shaking with tears and laughter. He kept squeezing us, one by one, with great warmth, in his strong arms. As they lived in Fălticeni, Moldavia, rather than in Suceava, Bukovina, this branch of the family had not been deported. The distance between Fălticeni and Suceava was only twenty-five kilometers, but of such trifles is the stuff of which history’s farces are made.
It was almost four years since we had been driven into the wilderness, and less than a month before the official end of the war. The curtains were about to close on the nightmare. On that early spring afternoon the future reappeared, a colored bubble into which I was invited to blow as hard as I could and fill with tears and saliva and moans, thereby saving myself from the clutch of the past. Here was this little actor, starving for recognition and eager for new experiences. He was alive, he had survived, the surroundings themselves existed — unbelievable! There were trees and skies, words and a variety of foods, and, above all, the joy of the place.
In April 1945 I was an old man of nine. Forty years later, in the spring of 1986, 1 found myself in the Piaţa Unirii Market in Bucharest. I was watching a truck being unloaded of its cargo of apples in front of a mansionlike white building, Manuc’s Inn. The tailgate of the truck had been removed and two swarthy young men were pushing the mountain of apples onto the sidewalk. There was a shortage of almost everything in Bucharest that spring of 1986, but there were plenty of apples, and they were splendid.
In a few months’ time I was to reach the young age of fifty. Over the years I had acquired enough reasons to be skeptical about anniversaries and coincidences. But on that spring morning in the marketplace, forty years later, I was suddenly transfixed in front of the apple-laden truck that seemed to have emerged out of the blue. I was staring, without really seeing, at the truck and its load of golden apples. I lived nearby, just a few minutes away. The nuclear accident in Chernobyl had occurred only a few days previously. I rarely went out, avoided parks, stadiums, and squares. The windows of my apartment had remained shut for several days.
However, it is not Chernobyl that claims the attention of the three people in the room — my mother, sitting on the couch, myself, and Ruti, the cousin just arrived from Israel, both in facing armchairs.
“Marcu became orphaned when he was very young,” the blind woman on
the couch is saying. “His father died in ‘45, you’re right. He had nine children. My grandfather, your great-grandfather, had ten children. People had lots of children in those days.”
“Our fathers’ father, our grandfather, was a sort of peasant,” I explain to Ruti, although she has already heard this story many times. But maybe in the ten years since she settled far away, in the Holy Land, she has forgotten all these old East European tales. “He was the village baker. He owned a farmhouse, with cattle, sheep, horses. Our grandmother died when our fathers were children. She left three orphaned boys, Aron; Marcu, my father; and Nuca, the youngest, your father. Grandfather remarried and had six more children. I saw him in 1945, when we returned from the deportation.”
The blind woman is waiting patiently for her turn to continue the storytelling — an old, tired voice, slowly penetrating the listeners’ memory.
“He was only eighteen, my grandfather, your great-grandfather, and there he was, already a widower. He remarried, grandmother’s sister, who was fourteen at the time. At fifteen, she gave birth to her first child, Adela, mother of Esther. You’ve probably heard of Esther, she had a son, an only son; he died in the Six-Day War. After Esther came my father— Abraham, Avram — followed by two boys and a daughter, Fanny, Ariel’s mother. You met Ariel in Paris,” she said, turning to me. “Then came Noah, you were named after him. Then another one, whose name I forget. He died young a long time ago. Then Aunt Leah, Leah Riemer, in whose house we lived when we came back. There was another son; he went to America and died there, of cancer, at nineteen. There was also, of course, the child by his first wife. So, there were ten of them, my grandfather’s children, ten starving children. They were very poor, extremely poor, but not a week passed without some pauper or beggar joining them at table on a Friday evening.”