Our quarrel took place at dinner. Someone asked me to describe the situation of writers in Romania during Ceau
sescu’s last decade, and as I began to speak I heard, across the table, a voice interrupting me: “But how can anyone be a Romanian writer? Is there such a thing as Romanian literature?”
Two quotations immediately came to my mind: Montesquieu’s famous question of the eighteenth century—“How can anyone be Persian?”—and the words of Camil Petrescu, a Romanian writer of the 1930s—“With heroes who eat five olives in three weeks and smoke one cigarette in two years, with a little market tavern in the mountains and a farm with three pigsties belonging to a teacher in Moldova, no novel or even literature can be made.”
“When did you leave Romania?” I heard myself heatedly ask.
“In the thirties,” the Romanian replied.
“In those days there was already a generation of distinguished modern writers,” I said, and I went on to name a number of important Romanians, among them Rebreanu, Blecher, Urmuz, and, of course, Ionescu.
“Maybe, maybe,” he replied. “It’s been many years since then. I’m not up to date on Romania.”
That was probably the beginning of our friendship. It would seem that Saul regretted his rudeness that evening. Several times he gave me to understand that his affront had been one of those stupid social games he usually despised, although he sometimes fell back on them at parties because they had won him pleasant, if temporary, female company.
He grew lonelier with age, as the number of people with whom he kept in touch continued to diminish. He went through periods of depression. I really drew closer to Saul Steinberg, I suppose, on the morning when he called me and, having asked how I was, commented on my conventional reply in a way that cast a different light on the evening of our argument. “You can’t be well. I know you can’t. We carry a curse — the place we come from — we carry it inside us. It doesn’t heal easily. Maybe never.”
I was surprised to hear this near-confession on his part. He had been in America for more than half a century, happy to have come and to have found here purpose and fame. Yet the Romanian wound did not seem to have healed, although, as I later discovered, there was more to it than merely the horror, scorn, and resentment evident in his crude opinions the evening of our confrontation.
Anti-Semitism was one theme he did not fail to mention, as if it were an inseparable part of his native geography. He treated it with disgust, as a hideous and incurable disease or an emanation from natural waste seeping into every pore of social life; it poisoned its victims, too, inuring them to the surrounding hatred, training them in a constant bargaining that deformed their characters forever. He spoke with acrimony of both the primitive aggression of the persecutors and the humbleness of the persecuted, with their grotesque accommodation that combined pitiful little domestic pleasures and oozing hypocrisy.
As we became friends, he also began to tell me about his family, his school, and his schoolmates. Neither his relatives nor his friends were safe from his irony, and this irony also seemed to contain selfpity for the misfortune of his ridiculous place of origin; an attachment that passed insidiously, one might say, into a view of the world in general, including even the America he so much admired. One name alone enjoyed the perfect intangibility of love: that of his adored sister, Lica. He did everything he could to get her out of the communist hell of 1950s Romania and, subsequently, to make her life easier in France.
“The Land of Dada,” as he called Romania, reappeared more and more often in recent years, not only as “the dark land” or “the land of exile” (as he wrote in a letter to his old school friend Eugen Campus) but also as the land of his childhood, that “miraculous time” beyond recall even for a childlike artist fascinated by the magic of its set pieces and clowning.
The street of Calea Grivitei, where an uncle of his apparently had a watchmaker’s shop, came back to life as a bewildering initiatory realm. Even eighty years later, he remembered vividly the smells of cobblers’ workshops and shoeshine booths, spice stores, dust and perspiration and a nearby railway station, pickles and pies and Romanian-style kebabs and the hairdresser’s shop.
He frequently woke me with a ’phone call, presumably holding a Romanian dictionary on his knees. “Cacialma. What would you think?” he would ask about the word for “bluff.” “Obviously a Turkish word, no? Like mahala [slum district], like sarma [stuffed cabbage], narghilea [hookah], or ciulama [chicken in white sauce]. But what about cic
[a contracted form of ‘it is said that’]? And then there’s cicleal [teasing]. Or cismea [fountain]. Turkish, both of them, right? Colib [hut] is Slavic. And the linguistic influences of these words: professions are German, flowers French, but rastel [gun rack] comes from the Italian rastello [rake], or rastellum in Latin. And sear [evening] and searbd [tasteless] and zi [day] and ziar [newspaper] and zîn [fairy]. But zid [wall] is Slavic, and so is zîmbet [smile] ….”
He discovered strange words whose exotic sound seemed suddenly to bring back the time and place that had formed and deformed us. “I can’t manage to make my peace with the language,” he wrote in 1988 to Eugen Campus, who was living in Israel. And in another letter that same year, referring to his relations with his native country, he recognized “a complexity that caused me confusion in my childhood — I should have liked to be normal, that is, primitive.”
In his last years, more and more frequent incursions into Romanian confirmed his fascination with the language and the aura of his early life. To me, too, he said that in his youth he had wanted to become a writer but that lacking a language even later on, he had turned to writing through images. We were joined in our plight, he was saying, but the suggestion of kinship did not stop there. “We can’t be Americans,” I was told more than once.
The Romanian archives that Saul kept in his apartment and that I consulted after his death show a far from dimmed memory of the inaugural place and time.
The genealogical tree sketched in his hand on large drawing boards maps a large Jewish-Romanian family. His paternal grandfather, Nathan, who had children from both of his two marriages, was born in Russia and lived in Buzu, Romania, where he worked as an army tailor, and where Saul himself spent his early childhood. His only son from the first marriage emigrated to America and founded a new family there, while the children from his second marriage, two sons — Martin and Harry — took the same course and went off, respectively, to New York (as a printer) and Denver, each eventually producing a sizable family of his own.
Most of Nathan’s offspring, however, stayed in Romania. Saul’s maternal grandfather, Iancu Itic Jacobson, lived all his life in Buzu as a wine merchant; some of his sixteen children died young, but the others spread to France, America, Israel, and, above all, to different parts of Romania, as typographers, watchmakers, engineers, binders or sellers of books, one even as a croupier. In the graphics of this meticulously documented genealogy, Saul appears with his arms outstretched toward Hedda Sterne (the wife from whom he was separated but not divorced) and Sigrid, his companion of many decades.