Nicotine, Gypsies, Postcards, and Polish Boxers

Eduardo Halfon: The Polish Boxer

"I bit down lightly on my cigarette..."
"I lit another cigarette..."
"I bought a pack of cigarettes and, after lighting one, went back out to the street...."
"....we began a liturgy of smoking...."

When I was in college I smoked Old Golds--all the pseudo-intellectuals at my college smoked Old Golds.  We called them "ogs" and would congregate in the smoking room of the library with our well-read and fully misunderstood books of Kierkegaard and Heidegger and Nietzsche (I was majoring in philosophy that year) and say things like--"Can I bum an og?" 

A few years later, in the Army, I'd open my little olive drab box of MRE's ("meals, ready to eat") and pull out a can (I hoped) of peaches and a three-pack of stale Lucky Strikes, crumbly tobacco packed away since the Korean War but something to do on smoke breaks. 

Of course, in grad school I smoked a pipe--Balkan Sobranie--powerful black tobacco that burned my tongue but went well with black coffee and marathon readings of the 'Pentagon Papers.'  Those were the days.

Many years later, having long before given up tobacco, a former friend offered me a Cuban cigar in The Guards Bar on M Street in Georgetown.  I smoked it while urbanely sipping a glass of Scotch, then walked outside and vomited on the sidewalk.

And that, dear reader, is the story of my smoking career.

There's a lot of smoking in The Polish Boxer, and I only mention such a trivial fact to drive home the point that Eduardo Halfon's first novel to be translated into English (and his ninth over all) is textured--complexly, intricately--around rituals, habits of thought and behavior symbolized, on the one hand, by the narrator's ("Eduardo Halfon") lighting up a Camel, but also by his evocation of his grandfather's life (a Polish-Guatemalan Jew and Holocaust survivor), his girlfriend's orgasms, the lives of gypsies, and the music of Saban Bajramovic.  I believe The Polish Boxer is a novel--a single unified narrative--but it is also, and magically, a collection of short stories, each one standing on its own thematic feet, wreathed in smoke and addictive prose:

"As we write, we know that there is something very important to be said about reality, that we have this something within reach, just there, so close, on the tip of our tongue, and that we mustn't forget it. But always, without fail, we do." ("A Speech at Povoa")

I always feel a little sad these days when I see a cluster of people standing (far) outside their place of employment puffing away, looking furtive and sinful.  So far has the stigmatization of smoking gone that my first thought upon seeing such a group is (forgive me)--what losers.  But then again, imagine Rothko with a carrot stick or a lollipop in his mouth--no, you only see the genius of abstract expressionism with a cigarette--and you think, or I do anyway, of all those wonderful contemplative hours of quietly puffing away (in your study, in a café, in a bookstore or library), as you punctuated your thoughts with the innocuous ritual of lighting up.

The character and probably the man Eduardo Halfon is the sort of wise-guy intellectual I've always admired--the guy who, like Saul Bellow or Bob Creeley (himself a prodigious smoker), Julio Cortazar (ditto) or David Foster Wallace (he dipped) bristles with ideas but isn't above making a joke, laughing at the pieties of the fatuous and smug--Mark Twain (who figures prominently in The Polish Boxer and loved cigars) is the touchstone for this sort of figure, our own Voltaire.  Halfon drew me in at once with his irreverent view of the teaching profession ("Distant") and by the time he'd attended an academic conference--where the only smoking room available was the handicapped suite--and described Milan Rakic's bizarre concertizing (in "Epistrophy"), I was enraptured by the book and wishing, God help me, that I had a cigarette.

And then, of course, there is the fact that Halfon, though mostly educated in the US and now a professor someplace in Nebraska, is in fact a Guatemalan Jew with Polish ancestors.  The complexity of his background is also at the heart of The Polish Boxer, especially manifested in the hidden life of his grandfather, the secret of whose survival links the disparate tales of the book.  In fact, if I were to be asked what the book is "about," I would probably mention that more than anything else Halfon has poetically rendered the ways in which people endure the hostile circumstances of their lives.   Guatemalan indios, gypsies, Polish Jews, Yugoslavians, chain-smoking writers, one and all share the secret of the Polish Boxer, the words one must speak or not speak in order to go on living.  The cryptic postcards that Eduardo receives from all over the world (from Milan, the pianist) are a code that Eduardo must crack ("Ghosts") just as he must quietly elicit from his grandfather the meaning of the numbers 69752 inscribed on the old man's wrist (he's told his grandson this is his phone number).  In the same way that Halfon's students are asked to decipher the codes hidden in famous stories, Halfon searches for the meaning of the postcards, the gypsy songs, the impossible survival of Oitze (his grandfather) in Auschwitz.  Best of all, we believe him, we take Halfon at his word--The Polish Boxer is a story collection, a novel, a memoir:

"I want readers to have a visceral experience. I want them to believe what is going on in the story, that all this really happened. So if the author Eduardo Halfon has the same name as the narrator in the story then the reader is lulled into thinking that the events in the story are probably real. In writing them, they all start off as real in some way, and then they go somewhere else, somewhere less real, but just as true. Or perhaps even more so.’*

I haven't been able to get this Creeley poem out of my mind since I finished The Polish Boxer:

As I sd to my   

friend, because I am   

always talking,—John, I

sd, which was not his   

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against

it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for   

christ’s sake, look   

out where yr going.

 

For god's sake, Eduardo is telling us, watch where you're going.   

 

 

*I happened upon a fine interview with Halfon in the on-line magazine 3 a.m.  It turns out that Halfon isn't much of a smoker after all.
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/eduardo-halfon-and-the-polish-boxer/

The Polish Boxer is published by the good people at Pushkin Press and translated by a committee of five.  All of the rest of Halfon's work is untranslated and one hopes this situation will be rectified soon.

George Ovitt (6/1/13)

 

"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)

Poland, 1945

Jerzy Andrzejewski, Ashes and Diamonds (1948)

As a historian, there are particular moments in European history that I especially want to understand; among them, preeminent even, is the passage of Eastern Europe from Nazi Occupation to Soviet-dominated governments.  What events precipitated the defeat of nationalist aspirations in Poland (for example) during the critical years between the end of the war and the establishment of the Polish United Workers' Party under Boleslaw Bierut? The facts aren't difficult to come by; what is wanted is the feeling of these years, impressions of the primary participants in the nation's reluctant embrace of Stalinism, a sense of the human cost to a nation already dismantled by the Nazi Occupation, Hans Franks' systematic terror, and the extermination of Polish Jews.  As usual, one must turn to works of literary art to gain insights, however limited, into the tragedy of post-war Poland. 

Often the 'whys' of history are neglected in the standard textbooks. We might say, for example, that given the horrors of Nazism, the Soviet Union was a natural ally for Polish nationalists who survived the camps (non-Jewish Poles were sent to Arbeitslager or German slave labor camps like Gross-Rosen, which figures prominently in Ashes and Diamonds) and were liberated by the Red Army.  But one suspects that this explanation is too simple; the truth, it would appear from Andrzejewski's brilliant and compelling novel, is that men and women were drawn into the sphere of Soviet influence, seduced by promises of brotherhood and Polish solidarity, for all sorts of reasons--out of patriotism, despair, personal ambition, greed, and idealism.  Andrzejewski's remarkably well-drawn characters embrace or reject communism only in part because of their experiences in the war; a great strength of this novel is that it depicts the power of an individual's will even at the most "world historical" of moments.



Barracks at Gross-Rosen



At the beginning of Ashes and Diamonds, the war has just ended--or has it? One of Andrzejewski's narrative talents is the blurring of time.  The novel transpires over some undefined period of days or weeks, and the events of the war, once so visceral to its survivors, are now receding from the memories of some characters (by choice) and defining the actions of others, especially those who hope to create a communist nation--a brotherhood of equals--in Poland. In other words, history isn't experienced in the same way by every person, and this is not only true, but a brilliant novelistic observation that enriches and deepens Andrzejewski's great book.

The deftness with which Andrzejewski sketches his characters is remarkable.  During a briefing that will lead to the murder of a member of the Communist Party by a Polish nationalist, the Colonel, who has ordered the assassination, calms a young man's qualms by saying:

"We're living and fighting under very difficult and complex circumstances. But the war years, which were the testing years for everyone, have taught us that things have to be regarded in their elementary, basic set up. There's no time for subtle discrimination. If there had to be any discrimination, it must be simple and clear. Good is good, and evil evil. You agree?"

But of course nothing is ever so clear.  For the socialist Podgorski, the world isn't divided into Manichean absolutes but gray with ethical questions and humane concerns; for the ambitious Mayor Swiecki the tragedy of Poland has served only to feed his ego--a mediocre man in peacetime, Swiecki remakes himself into the perfect Party toady, a yes-man for the cynical and brutal.  For Kossecki, at one time a prisoner at Gross-Rosen, the aftermath of the war is fraught with fear and self-loathing for what he allowed himself to become in the camp.  Opportunists like Drewnowski and Pieniazek (yes the names will give you fits!) have no allegiance to party or nation, while others, like the richly- drawn Communist Szczuka, have complex feelings about the meaning of commitment in the face of Poland's apocalypse (six million Poles, including over 90% of Polish Jews, perished in the war, out of a pre-war population of 35 million). 

Among Andrzejewski's many narrative talents is the subtlety with which he moves his story forward.  Much of the action of the book takes place in the Monopole, the central hotel and restaurant in the town of Ostrowiec, an establishment previously owned, we are offhandedly informed, "by Lewkowicz...one of the wealthiest men in Ostrowiec, [who] died with the rest of his family at Treblinka." Slomka, the new manager of the Hotel Monopole, has been the beneficiary of Nazi racial policies, but no further mention of this fact is made. In 1945 there is emerging a new order, a world that is a blank slate for the ambitions, idealism, and cruelty of every man and woman. When the new world (of communism or of Polish nationalism? That remains to be seen, at least in the novel) has been created, will it be "only ashes and confusion" or "a star-like diamond./The dawning of eternal victory?"  [from the epigram by Cyrpian Norwid].  We know the answer of course--Poland's story since the war has been far more a tale of ashes than of diamonds.  And Andrzejewski as well seems to have been fully aware of the historical situation of his country:

"The fact is I don't know what this new Poland is, just yet."
"How can I put it in a few words? It's difficult, that's probably the best way to describe the tangle of conflicts and contrasts which we're faced with at every step and which we certainly shan't resolve tomorrow or the day after. ...the war is over, but the fight here is only beginning." 

Ashes and Diamonds was the third film in Andrzej Wajda's great trilogy which included A Generation (1954) and the unforgettable Kanal (1956) [Ashes and Diamonds appeared in 1958].  I saw the entire trilogy over one long, rather depressing weekend while in college.  Andrzejewski wrote the screenplay for Ashes and Diamond; the films are available through Janus and provide an emotional immersion in both wartime and post-war Polish history.

Ashes and Diamonds, the novel, is brought to us by the wonderful folks at Northwestern University Press whose series of European Classics includes novels by Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Vladimir Voinovich, and the incomparable Heinrich Boll, who has written the introduction of Andrzejewski's novel. 

http://www.nupress.northwestern.edu/Home/AllTitles/tabid/86/Default.aspx


George Ovitt (4/16/13)