The Hooligan's Return

by Norman Manea

  Should you describe your impasse to him, or should you simply use him as a starting point for the falsifications to follow? You had to persuade him that he was, in fact, participating in a friendly cooperative venture, not in a medical consultation.

  “Fine, grade two, then,” you muttered, halfheartedly.

  The advantage of suddenly becoming the owner of your own time in a society where even time was state property came with a built-in trap: either you collaborate with the powers that be or else we isolate you as the irresponsible person that you pretend to be. Ready to risk the new Initiation, you had gone through the motions as required by protocol, and the doctor signed the necessary papers.

  What if the symptoms described in the medical report were really the case? You refused to think of yourself as a patient, and you preferred the lesser role of falsifier. Was falsification itself a sign of the disease? You had come not for treatment but for a way outside the purgatory in which a diseased authority was chained to its diseased subjects.

  You never trusted psychoanalysts. You would rather read them than consult with them. When Dr. Sigmund Freud asked, What remains Jewish in a Jew who is neither religious nor a nationalist and who is ignorant of the Bible’s tongue, you managed to mutter the answer he had himself given: Much. You did not explain what that meant, since he had been careful enough not to offer explication.

  Question and answer were shockingly joined by one single word — Jew. Nonreligious, non-nationalist, non-speaker of the sacred language, was Dr. Freud speaking about himself, without defining the term? Was the definition of a Jew to be found only in the triad of religion, nationalism, and language? Could it be that the founder of psychoanalysis, so concerned with sexuality and the Oedipus complex, ignored circumcision, the covenant carved in the flesh on the eighth day after the male infant’s birth? Inscribed in the flesh, circumcision cannot be revoked.

  With Grandfather Avram’s blessing, you became, through circumcision, Noah, a biblical code name, not for public use. After all, you don’t unzip your trousers in public. Isn’t Dr. Freud interested in knowing more about the circumcised Noah, who carries on a dialogue with the “double” concealed in his trousers, with its hidden, parallel life? This double life, no less comic or revealing than the life of an individual with or without religion, ethnicity, or sacred language — should that not interest Herr Doktor Freud?

  In the meantime, you had acquired quotation marks, just like Dr. Freud. Jean-François Lyotard, for instance, believes that Sigmund Freud is a “Jew” rather than a Jew, and that so are his confrères Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. As there are non-German Germans, so there are non-Jewish Jews, the Frenchman helpfully explains. They are the ones who have doubts about tradition, mimesis, immanence, but also “emigration, dispersion, and the impossibility of integration”—in other words, “the double impotence of nonchange and of change.”

  At the age of five, in Transnistria, the little Jew was known as Noah, not Norman. At the age of fifty, on the eve of the new exile, the relation between self and Jew had become a complicated knot, one that could not fail to interest Dr. Freud. The psychoanalyst should be asked, finally, to answer not only the questions he himself has asked but also the questions posed by posterity: not necessarily what is left after you have lost what you did not possess, but how you become a Jew after the Holocaust, after Communism and exile. Are these, by definition, essentially Jewish traumas? Are these initiations carved in your soul, not only your body, that make you a Jew even when you are not one? A “non-people of survivors” is the name Lyotard gives the category of non-Jewish Jews, whose sense of communion depends, according to him, on “a unique profoundness of an endless anamnesis,” an endless recalling of things past.

  Anamnesis in front of the mirror? Why are you frowning, Dr. Freud? Franz Kafka — not a great admirer of Freudian anamnesis — is not listed among the company in Lyotard’s quotation marks. Having asked himself, “What have I got to do with the Jews?” Kafka replied, “I have got hardly anything to do with myself.”

  Kafka is, however, not a non-Jewish Jew but a genuine Jew, although he was not proficient in Hebrew — he did, however, make several attempts to learn the sacred tongue — did not practice religion, and was not a nationalist. There is a scene in which he tries to cram the whole of the Chosen People into a drawer. “Including myself to the very end,” he had added. That was an unmistakably Jewish profession of faith, replacing religion, ethnicity, and the sacred tongue.

  Only a Jew could choose this way of releasing the self-loathing and hatred that had been his fate for millennia. These echoes can be heard when Kafka describes to Milena the invectives of the “dirty mob,” chanted on a street in Prague, the Jew-hatred of the street — and of the salons, too, as well as of academia. Hatred did not stop in Kafka’s Prague, or in Dr. Freud’s much-beloved Vienna, or in London, where hatred forced him to seek exile shortly before he died, or in less famous places. But can we also hear, as Kafka did, the echo of our own inner struggles? What is it we hear? Our own fatigue, as we stop defending ourselves? The perfection of others, who cannot accept our own imperfection?

  “In the struggle between yourself and the world, take the side of the world,” the unvanquished Kafka advised.

  The fatigue of belonging could be excused, Dr. Freud whispers, in our own continuing dialogue. Nobody could accuse you of trying to ignore adversity, he adds. One minute you defend your destiny; another minute, forget it, then defend it again, until you tire of all the futility. So give up taking the daily farce too seriously, stop honoring it with questions, be gracefully absentminded, bewildered, in accordance with the simplicity and absurdity of indifference — this should be your therapy, to become deaf, dumb, naïve, absentminded, inattentive.

  What — after the Holocaust and after Communism — has the exile to do with the Jews, when he is no longer certain he has anything to do with himself? Much, the Viennese doctor claims; whether you like it or not, you have a lot in common both with them and with yourself. When, at the age of five, you were joined to a collective destiny, Dr. Freud pronounces, you were given an accreditation which is more important than the covenant carved in the flesh.

  “We Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust,” a German Jewish writer wrote in the days when you took refuge, not from the Holocaust, but from Communism, and in Berlin of all places. Yes, there was too much evidence for the Holocaust to be denied, and that impertinence could not be forgiven. But it was not just the Holocaust, and not just Communism; it was Jewish guilt. There were plenty of other minor, more ambiguous guilts that could not be forgiven. Dr. Freud, guilty of founding psychoanalysis, the “Jewish science,” knew this only too well.

  However, even if it were possible, one cannot simply renounce the honor of being suspect, outcast, decried as the embodiment of evil, from the beginning of time to its end — this is some glory! We cannot simply reject such privilege, not even when the stereotypes themselves are not easy to bear — victim, avenger, conspirator, to which the latter-day Elders of Zion have added a new protocol: “the Jewish monopoly on suffering.”

  The trivialization of suffering … mankind’s endless enterprise. Only when it becomes a cliché does tragedy find a home in the collective memory. Memory must keep watch so that the horror is not repeated, we have been told over and over. We must hold on to identity, shared memory, race, ethnicity, religion, ideology. Having finally landed on the planet of pragmatism, you thought you might escape your past and your identity and become just a simple entity, as Gertrude Stein, the American in Paris, dreamed — only to find that Thursday’s atrocities have become grist for the mottoes on Friday’s T-shirts, an instantly marketable product for the collective memory.

  Sigmund Freud would have understood the confusions of exile and its dispossessions, its discontents, you might say, as well as its freedoms. He would know the significance of an impersonal home in some anonymous hotel room, the exile’s ultimate refuge, h
is democratic homeland for-rent-by-the-day, hospitable and indifferent, as a homeland should be.

  You are looking at a small photograph, wrinkled and yellowed with time, now serving as a mirror. It is June 1945, in the pastoral town of Fălticeni, in northern Romania, two months after the initiate’s return from the Transnistria expedition and two hours after the close of the end-of-year school festivities.

  The adorable little boy, in white trousers and shirt, is standing a quarter of a step ahead of the other prize winners, three little boys and three little girls. The only thing that distinguishes him from the other prize winners, who have not benefited from the privileges of the Initiation, seems to be his victorious bearing, his status as survivor now validated by his winner’s laurels. Immaculately groomed, left foot forward, hand on hip, a wide smile on his face, he is every inch a star, performing knowingly before the camera.

  The boy seems to have forgotten everything of the apprenticeship he has served among the thousands of starving and ragged people, the playthings of death’s producers and directors. Little Augustus the Fool has instantly turned into his opposite, the White Clown, the knight crowned with laurels and applauded by the melodrama’s players. The years of absence from the world have been annulled. He has recrossed the Styx and finds himself back on the original shore, alive, certifiably alive, back in the Eden that was his and is now regained.

  The Eden finally turned into a penal colony. You crossed the Styx again, this time across an ocean. Now you are on a different shore, your hair is gray and receding, your appearance less immaculate. Lost is the juvenile candor. The aura of survival that surrounds you is now a prop in the more recent dramas staged by memory.

  Would the process of anamnesis — this endless probing with the scalpel, this fencing match with yourself — be accelerated by pondering the photograph of the little boy at age nine? Even then, you felt like withdrawing and busying yourself in a corner of the room, forever forgotten by everyone — the vast solitude of the entity, Gertrude Stein would say, the exalted joy of finding yourself as you lose yourself in the endless flow of that confusing I.

  Over your father’s immobile, abstracted face there would sometimes pass an expression of sudden aging, the paralysis of solitude. You would watch in terror but quickly resume your place on the stage of the living, where there were teachers, parents, schoolmates, friends. The end of childhood did not signal an end to these alternations of ecstasy and terror, always pondering the same questions: What if you suddenly stopped functioning and crumbled into remote unconnectedness? Still, you maintained the illusion of escape, the possibility of last-minute rescue from the danger lurking everywhere in the dark.

  The unknown could at any moment become hostile. It did yesterday, on October 9, 1941, when the appearances collapsed one by one, shattering the masks of daily life. On the platform of the Burdujeni railway station, the drama could not be stopped. Often, in your sleep, you would continue to see the great cast of hungry, shivering, and frightened prisoners, entertaining their executioners sitting in their boxes. Caution was the watchword of those days. Afterward, you feared chaos, hesitant to challenge the unknown. You nestled, finally, in the fluid shelter of language, the ultimate, essential refuge. But was this all you were looking for, a refuge?

  Dr. Freud could not fail but be interested in such exercises of recall. Be yourself, said Pindar, echoed by Nietzsche, and by the Viennese doctor himself. But what is this, Dr. Freud: the anamnesis of the collective tragedy or the inability of this solitary individual to don the uniform of tragedy, for sale one every street corner? And what would Dr. Freud say about those who negate the horrors that happened, who routinely ridicule them in their boredom? Could trivialization, in the final analysis, be a necessary function, like digestion and excretion, the only way of keeping the human comedy alive? Otherwise, how could the poor actors still enjoy the fruits of the earth? Bear in mind the case of Primo Levi, who became a writer because of Auschwitz and was subsequently unable to write a simple love story as serene as the Italian skies.

  The humiliation of being defined by a collective act of negation and by a collective catastrophe is not negligible, Dr. Freud. However, we are not simply the sum of collective catastrophes, whatever they may be. We are more than that, and each of us is also different. Yes, different, we should be shouting, in all the languages of the earth, shouting endlessly, like a record that cannot be turned off.

  Suffering does not make us better people or heroes. Suffering, like all things human, corrupts, and suffering peddled publicly corrupts absolutely.

  Nevertheless, one cannot renounce the honor of being despised and mocked, nor should we discard the honor of being an exile. After all, what other possessions do we have, apart from exile? Dispossession should not be deplored, it is preparation for the final dispossession.

  When all is gone, there is still Hotel Noah’s Ark and the art of pragmatism.

  …

  More time has now passed. You have learned the joys and the maladies of liberty. You have accepted the honor of exile. This is what you were telling your friends, in that pleasant place in the country not far from New York. You had finally accepted your destiny, you told them, but you continued to speak about ambiguity — the ambiguities of the labor camp, of the Communist penal colony, and of exile. You are suspicious of certitudes, even when you are the one uttering them. Still, you find yourself professing a certitude: “Exile begins as soon as we leave the womb.” The straightforwardness of the statement didn’t seem frightening. “One’s mother should be one’s real homeland. Only death finally frees us from this final belonging,” you continued to recite, as though from a manual. Of course, you were just trying to give yourself courage, on the eve of your return to the scenes of your former life, but the humorless tone was not a good omen.

  “The return to the homeland is but a return to the mother’s grave,” you concluded. It seemed you had really come to believe those words as a first step toward the impossible and inevitable return.

  One does not make statements about graves without a certain apprehension. Your friends continued to listen sympathetically, attentively. You were, you told yourself, in the living present, not in the ever-present past.

  It was a beautiful afternoon in the country. There was a hospitable silence — no thoughts, no questions, only the splendor of the day, the here and now.

  The Second Return (Posterity)

  En Route

  In the summer of 1988, a few months after my arrival in the New World, I received an unexpected phone call from Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College in upstate New York. He made some flattering comments about a book of mine, published in Germany, and wanted to know if I would be interested in teaching at the school. We finally met in the spring of 1989, when I was invited up to Bard. He turned out to be a tall, elegant man, wearing a bow tie and thick glasses, with something of the alchemist about him. He was also a well-known symphony conductor. I had expected to be offered the appointment forthwith, but instead, I was delivered to an interview panel. “Democracy,” the president explained.

  Eight more years had now passed. I had published books, been awarded prizes, and had become writer in residence and a professor at Bard College. Even in the motherland, my position had changed. My New Republic article on Mircea Eliade and the Iron Guard had promoted me to public enemy number one, international division. My return to Romania in the spring of 1997 might seem an exercise in bridge building.

  At 3:45 in the afternoon I am at Kennedy Airport, in the Lufthansa terminal, waiting for Leon. He has concerts in Bucharest and I am accompanying him. It is Sunday, April 20, the birthday of Adolf Hitler, as it happens. We are traveling first class, which entitles us to free pre-flight drinks in the lounge. We go over our schedule, and I tell Leon that the big issue in Bucharest at the moment is Romania’s entry into NATO.

  “You might be asked to give your opinion on a TV talk show,” I say to him.

  “Me? I’m not from the Pe
ntagon or the State Department.”

  I explain that acceptance into NATO was regarded in Romania not only as a matter of national pride but as essential to the country’s viability. A week before our departure, I had received, like other Romanians in America, a bulky envelope, from one of the Romanian President’s staff, containing several enclosures urging immediate action in favor of Romania’s entry into NATO. “Today, not tomorrow, and not the day after tomorrow, write to the White House. Please send a copy of your letter to the Presidential Palace in Bucharest, so that we know who our real friends are,” one such document read. Indeed, I had heard that the Romanian authorities had made plans to compile a list — in Bucharest such lists are no joke — of all Romanian Americans who had done their patriotic duty in this regard.

  “Is this to our advantage or not?” Leon asked. “What about the fact that you are accompanying me? Or is it I accompanying you?”

  In fact, NATO was not the only hot topic in Bucharest. Mihail Sebastian’s Journal 1935–1944 had just appeared and had become the subject of controversy. Leon might be asked to comment and should therefore be briefed. Perhaps a few sound bites would do it, just like on American television: “Jewish Romanian writer, died 1945. His Journal describes life under Fascism, a Romanian counterpart to Victor Klemperer’s just published I Will Bear Witness, which documents the life of a Jew in wartime Nazi Dresden. Bares the pro-Nazi sympathies and anti-Semitism of some Romanian intellectuals.” The name Klemperer might stimulate Leon to tell anecdotes about the other Klemperer, the conductor Otto, a cousin of Victor’s, and about his American career.