"Pushed Into a Kind of Nightmare"

The Black Envelope by Norman Manea

“I never wished to be a ‘political’ writer, and I hope I wasn’t only that, even when I was forced to write about a nightmarish politicized reality.”

The opacity of parts of The Black Envelope may be attributable to the reality about which Norman Manea writes--the reality, or rather the unreality, of the Ceausescu years, the farcical (one is tempted to say 'Kafkaesque,' but the dictatorships installed in Eastern Europe after World War II lacked the wit of Kafka's fictional world) injustices, petty indignities, and unremitting terror of an arbitrary political system.  I remember the stories that were circulating in the early 1990's, right after  Ceausescu and his wife Elena were executed by firing squad, stories about Ceausescu's mad version of "democratic socialism," his discredited claims that, unlike his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, a die-hard Stalinist, he, Ceausescu, had brought justice, peace, and democracy to Romania. The reality was that Ceausescu's secret police maintained rigid controls over political and artistic speech and tolerated no dissent or opposition. Opponents of the regime were arrested, tortured, and executed in a manner that had become commonplace in Eastern Europe, especially beginning with the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

Manea has been mentioned as a potential Nobel Prize winner; his books are, if not overtly political, a reflection of a life engaged, or perhaps victimized, by the tragedies of his country.  As a Romanian Jew, Manea was deported, along with most other Romanian Jews, to a concentration camp at Transnistria, in the Ukraine, when he five years old.  After his repatriation in 1945, Manea attended school and university, trained as a hydro-engineer, and began  to write fiction in the early 70's.  All of  his books were banned and he was forced into exile in 1986. 

 

Manea describes his own youthful deportation as being "pushed into a kind of nightmare," into a terrible Russian winter during which his grandparents and many of his family's friends and neighbors died and his father was reduced to believing that life was no longer worth living.  In his autobiographical statements and his memoir-novel The Hooligan's Return, Manea attributes to his 'iron-willed' mother his own and his father's survival. 

 In The Black Envelope, Tolea, a high school teacher, who has apparently lost his job for an ill-defined sexual transgression, seeks to unravel the story of his father's mysterious death, but not with much diligence.  In fact, the novel is a patchwork of enigmatic and truncated scenes--a loosely constructed amalgam of fragmented action and broken bits of internal monologue--including an account of Tolea's ill-fated job as a hotel clerk, his encounters with characters from across the social spectrum of 1980's Bucharest, and  his mockery of a corrupt society which he seeks to escape through ironic critique and dreamy disengagement.  The novel is populated with black marketers, sycophants, political operatives, fools and fiends--in other words, part of The Black Envelope's  purpose is to offer a  'General Prologue' to the sordid tales of Communist Romania's dupes and crooks. It struck me halfway through the novel that Tolea's musings, which are often disjointed and difficult to follow, have the feeling of an interrogation--they circle implicit questions and offer only evasive answers.  It is as if the book were written to fool the censors--as it was.

It also struck me that one could write such a book today, about this country, my beloved America--increasingly a sham "peoples' republic" dominated by dupes and crooks, lobbyists and PACS, with a government controlled by a corrupt ruling class, with its ideals perverted by greed and with propaganda having replaced reasoned civil discourse.  Of course, I'm exaggerating, but The Black Envelope felt especially poignant as its sordid tales of moral corruption unfolded against the background of Congressional 'debates' about the budget, gun control, and sequestration--a  newspeak term if ever there were one.  It is unfair to Manea's history of suffering and persecution to make this comparison, but one cannot help but do so; this is the power of incisive political fiction--it evokes sympathetic comparisons to one's own situation.

I spent two months slowly making my way through The Black Envelope--it is, to say the least, a challenging book, not one that I could say I "liked" in the way I often like a book--it is full of malaise and bitterness, a rather hopeless vision of a lost era in a benighted country.  But Manea is a great writer, a passionate intellectual witness to his own and his country's tragedy, and perhaps to ours as well.

 

The Black Envelope is translated by Patrick Camiller and published by Yale University Press in their Margellos World Republic of Letters series.

There is a fine interview with Manea, produced by Bard College, available here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsU2RUDUiyE

George Ovitt (4/28/13)

The Other Europe

Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Emery George

How many Eastern European poets can you name? Until some months ago I myself could name but three: the Polish and widely-feted Milosz, Szymborska, and Zagajewski. Great poets, surely but hardly representative when it comes to the dazzling multitude of nations, languages, and cultures that comprise this historically rich, politically charged region, a fact made plain to me one evening when I happened upon a copy of this extraordinary anthology in a local bookstore. “Eastern Europe is one half of Europe,” writes the editor, Emery George, in his introduction to the collection. “It is a vast and vital realm of society and culture which, for all the attention lavished on it since World War II, remains for many Americans either that sinister expanse ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ or, at best, ‘the old country,’ where tales of Dracula, ethnic grandmothers, and good recipes come from.” 

Offering readers a sampling of the work of no less than 162 contemporary poets, both men and women, from at least fifteen different languages, this volume is astonishing both in its breadth and resonance, stamping the names and homelands of these poets on the cluttered, workaday maps in our brains. Including writers from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Poland, Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, as well as former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, editor Emery George also provides a short if illuminating section on Yiddish poets still writing today. Here, from the anthology, is my own brief sampling:

In Chalk Rooms

                                                                 let all the walls

                                                                 about me be green

                                                                 like a whole harvest

                                                                 of summer’s meadows

walls like light

        sliding through green bottle-glass

walls like forest

       moss-grown and damp

walls like mouldy

       cheese on a knife

and walls like frogs

       so cool and loud

walls with gentleness

        like budding leaves

walls of juiciness

        as of chopped turnip tops

walls in that tone

        in which rain soaks moss

and yellowed like cabbage

        butterflies abandoning cocoon

walls hard and green

        corrugated wet

encompassing me

                                                                 as have only woods and waters.

                                                                 but the world listens

                                                                 to me as to a gnat’s song

                                                                 though I suffer terrible

                                                                 famine for greenness

 Aina Kraujiete (Translated by Inara Cedrins)

Father’s Winter

The birds have all left

my father’s tall trees.

Now only frozen stars

cling to the black branches.

Old farm tools stand stagnant:

plows, scythes, hands and hoes.

It seems there is nowhere to go,

nothing to make us wonder.

The wonders of Father’s life

have passed unnoted and expected—

who will marvel at the water or grass,

or write down the spring or winter?

If you listen, at night

you can hear the deep and heavy sighs

of the senile, faithful Guernsey 
passing up from the cattle-shed.

All thoughts, like snow, blend to one.

Justinas Marcinkevičious (Translated by  Irene Pogožzelskyte Suboczewski)

The Early Chaplin

We know the early Chaplin but before him

was an earlier Chaplin   Those films

are already forgotten   Chaplin

had the face of a brute he bared his teeth

like a wildcat readying to spring and had no

scruples he seduced women hired gangsters

to rub out his rivals rejected he sought revenge

by all means fair and foul when the lovely Mabel

Normand was in an auto race this blackguard

wetted down the pavement switched around the signs sending

the car to the precipice planted dynamite despite

everything Mabel survived and won he almost

burst with fury the audience

was bursting with laughter and of course showed

him no sympathy at all   He did not yet have

his dress suit cane mustache   He had

a monocle and goatee   His name was not

Charlie but Chas   This went on

for some time  But in time

his face figure and inner self began to change  This

happens not only to actors but

to apostles and mere mortals   More than one

person has lived through this in his youth wondering

and suffering when his skin

hardened in a grimace which

seemed to be an exact replica

of the inner self when it crumbled and again froze

in another mould    No one knows

how all this happens   This is no

run-of-the mill decision  Maybe inspiration   Thus Chaplin

after making thirty-five films went ahead and

changed from Chas to Charlie   In the last

of these films they both were there Charlie

dreamed of being Chas   From sleep

the loiterer was wakened by the policeman’s stick   He got up

from the park bench and hobbled

into the distance with an embarrassed smile   There was no

anger in him only hope   No craving

for success but a desire

to defend human dignity   From the pursuer

he became the pursued   And this was now

the early Chaplin whom

we came to love without ceasing to laugh

Wiktor Worosylski (Translated by Magnus J. Kryńnski and Robert A. Maguire)

Emory George is the author of sixteen books, including seven of his own poetry and two collections of the work of Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti.  Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology is published by Oxford University Press.

Peter Adam Nash