Verses like this from L’Exode / Exodus—
— have a resonance surprisingly similar to the motto Primo Levi affixed to his memories of Auschwitz (“You who live in the safety / of warm houses / You who find, on coming home, / at dusk / warm food and the faces of friendship”11). Those at home are summoned to ask themselves if the one sacrificed isn’t “still a human being.” The poets’ attempts to escape the names Wechsler and Antschel, uttered with disgust and spat upon, manifests the same mise-en-question and mise-en-abîme (putting so many values into question in a way that creates a story within a story as well as the sensation of infinite depth one has in the presence of one mirror reflecting another) for the generic (Jewish) human being considered as inhuman.
Fondane’s Parisian exile in the existentialism and frenzy of the convulsive moment before the Nazi storm had deepened the poet’s dramatic recovery and restitution of his Jewishness. The “Jewish Ulysses” (as the poet called himself) had finalized his old Chestovian Athens — Jerusalem obsession, as well as his moving fraternization with the wanderers and the refused of the world: “An unseen hand rips out my lids / I cannot close an eye / And I must raise my ceaseless cry / Until the end of the world.”
Fondane’s death may be considered a suicide, as well, if we keep in view his decision to refuse the salvation he had been offered so as to assume his sister Lina and the other martyrs’ fate. Among these would have to be counted the death of his confrere, Celan, who committed suicide in the Seine two decades later.
If Ia
si was the starting place for Goldfaden’s Yiddish theater and A.I. Cuza’s anti-Semitism, Cernauti was the place where the International Jewish Congress of 1908 took place. That Congress decided the apparently definitive (but in reality utterly temporary) victory of Yiddish in its long fratricidal war with Hebrew. Despite the regeneration of Romanian nationalism that flowered after the restitution of Bukovina to the mother country in 1918, the city’s cosmopolitan character and its Habsburg tradition of multinational cooperation would maintain the atmosphere of intense cultural stimulation. In “the last Alexandria of Europe,” as Zbignew Herbert would call the capital of Bukovina, that eastern enclave of German-Austrian language and culture irradiated Romanian, Jewish (Yiddish and Hebrew), Ukrainian and Polish cultures, which re-experienced in their turn the inevitable influence of the Habsburg mentality.
In Iasi, the Jewish community met with a rich Romanian culture (Fondane’s mother frequented the famous Junimea literary circle, the classic Romanian writer Ion Creanga was a guest of the family, the “Viata Romaneasca”—Romanian Life — circle hosted the poet in a truly friendly way) and with a marked French influence. In Cernauti, eyes were fixed on Vienna and Berlin.
“Die Landschaft aus der ich zu Ihnen komme, dürfte den meisten von Ihnen unbekannt sein”—The landscape from which I come must be unknown to the majority of you, Celan told the audience present at the granting of the Bremen City Prize for Literature. “Es war eine Gegend, in der Menschen und Bücher lebten”—It was a province where people and books lived.
It was a definition of belonging that Fondane would have been able to pronounce facing his Parisian or Argentine hosts or, at the last moment, when he was thrown on the pyre, as in the hypothetical post-mortem dialogue “in the mountains” with the Bukovinian Celan.
To write in “the language of the executioners” means much more than the contradiction it announces with such vehemence. This possible impossibility conveys the history of centuries of persecution and their convergence in “the Final Solution” as well as the cultural venom that the national creative geniuses conveyed — not just once — with guilty ease and which (an ever repeated and incomprehensible paradox) those sent away carried on — in their case, however, to maintain the admiration of readers and apprenticed writers. The poet can only write in the language of his poetry, even when, as Celan says, “the language is German and the writer a Jew.” Here, there is an “impossibility” that art makes possible, necessary, and miraculous.
Why does “the unpronounceable name” remain a handicap? Both in Iasi, which hosted the oldest Romanian university and which was an effervescent center of culture and creativity, and in the cosmopolitan big-little metropolises: Cern
uti — Vienna — Berlin — Paris? Let’s leave the question to the ideologues of “multiculturalism” today.
Was Celan’s pseudonym only an anagram of his own name, as is often said, or was it the larkish invention of the student of Romance languages at the University of Cernuti who had recently discovered Thomas Celano, the Italian poet and philosopher of the thirteenth century and biographer of Francis of Assisi, as Israel Chalfen suggests? From the friend of his youth, Edith Silberman, we learn that the suggestion for the anagram came, in fact, from a whisper on the part of Frau Jessica Margul-Sperber, the wife of Celan’s literary mentor.
Celan passed through Romanian schools (“with regard to anti-Semitism in our school, I could write a book of around three hundred pages,” he wrote in a letter to his family) and Jewish and German schools as well. He began to study medicine in France and “came back home” to study Romance languages. He let Nazism and anti-Semitism push him toward communism. Confronted with the “Soviet liberators,” he emigrated from Ukrainian, Soviet Cernuti to Bucharest after the war where his unbearable retrospection (his mother having been killed in Transnistria would remain an obsessive guilty memory even in maturity) found much anticipated solace: the “Latin” joyfulness of his pals, reading and writing, contact with the Romanian Surrealists and with Alfred Margul-Sperber and the translations that he began from Russian literature. This was a happy period for the Pun, as Celan would call himself, and it blessed him with an affectionate and lasting memory.
He made his literary debut—“scandalous” for the dogmatic Stalinist period — with ‘Death Fugue’/‘Todesfuge’ in Contemporanul (The Contemporary) in 1947, an appearance that was largely due to able maneuvers in the wings by literary critic and historian Ovid. S. Crohmlniceanu (born Moise Cohen). This poem was translated into Romanian by his close friend Peter Solomon. It would become the perennial centerpiece of his later celebrity.
The exile of the two poets, joined for posterity in a conversation of silences, is both an eclipse and a liberation, as it was and is, too, for so many of their confreres before and after them. Debacle and drive (disorientation and springboard), exile offers an initial stimulating shock and then a state of persistent ambivalence in the face of the indeterminate and the unknown.
Aggressed in exile by upsets, mischances, and stupefaction, the center of being loses the ability to articulate within the premises of the time before. For Fondane and Celan, “the privileged trauma” of exile, as I once called it, was more privilege than trauma, though tragic endings hastened toward them. The long-awaited time when they freed themselves from the limitations and hostilities of their native environment signified for them the chance to become situated in a beneficent, “metropolitan” way in essential questions as well, for in their case alienation had destabilized the conventions of identity, reduced them to the solitary “entity” of the pilgrim to nowhere, and it turned each of them, more than once, toward the millenial exile of their ancestors. Even with the linguistic advantage of immigrating into a known language, Fondane did not become really French, or Celan German.