My first story, “Pressing Love,” published in 1966 in a small avantgarde literary journal banned after six issues, was filled with coded erotic anxiety. I had timidly tried to re-establish a thematic and linguistic normality. The official press immediately condemned the text as apolitical, absurd, aestheticizing, and cosmopolitan.
Soon after, I finally heard my voice in my own book, which coincidentally also had a cover as green as that of the folktale book I discovered on my return, in 1945, from my first exile.
I found the refuge I had so long desired. I was finally at home. I had protected my language as well as I could from the pressures of official speech; now I had to defend it from suspicious and hostile censors who would massacre or eliminate sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in the books that followed. In that period, the tedious jargon of power that had reigned for years gradually opened the floodgates to the dictator’s endless stream of a new-old nationalism. Everything was oriented toward the head clown: television, the press, laws, the Party “debates,” preschool education, cheering and athletic events, philatelist conferences.
Twenty years after my first published story, an apolitical, strictly literary text, and before my flight to the West, in 1986, my allegorical novel The Black Envelope gave strong political accents to daily life under socialist misery and terror at a time when the propagandists and censors were encouraging the “aesthetical” approach to writing in order to abandon daily reality for a more magnificent one.
I left the socialist “penal colony” much too late, because I was childish enough to believe that I did not live in a country, but in a language. Liberation, I knew, entailed a malignant curtailing of freedom itself. In December 1986, I boarded a flight to Berlin knowing full well that I might have traded my tongue for a passport. But I didn’t feel, even in this extreme situation, that my language was “the usurpation of an alien property,” as Kafka thought. It was, in fact, my only property, and the willingness to accept this loss speaks volumes about the “flaming brothel,” as Cioran called the region he himself left behind, not suspecting the horrors the socialist combination of brothel, circus, and prison would bring.
For the writer, language is a placenta. Language is not only a sweet and glorious conquest, but legitimization, a home. Being driven out of this essential lair, his creativity is burned to the core.
My second exile (this time at the age of 50 instead of 5) gave expropriation and delegitimization new meaning. The honor of being expelled was inseparable from being silenced as a writer. Nonetheless, I did take my nomadic language with me, like a snail its house.
The sacred text was, as we know, the instrument of exilic Jewish survival. In my case, it was not the old, sacred text of the Bible that accompanied me in exile. It was a secular language, my very inner language, the language of writing.
Is the Jew in exile “restored” to his nativity of dispersal, as George Steiner says? Does this “chosen foreignness” become “ontological,” as Hegel argues? The house I was carrying was my language, and my language happened to be Romanian. Nazism and then communism robbed me of connections to a real Jewish tradition, yet I was what I am always told I am: not only a Jew but “the Jew,” housed not in place but in time and, as usual, in a not very hospitable time. I would have liked to have believed that my case proves again that “truth is homeless,” as Steiner kept repeating, that exile is the only realm of truth, but I wasn’t yet sure about this.
At the time of my first exiled year in Berlin when I was overwhelmed with this and many other questions, I didn’t know Steiner’s essay “Our Homeland the Text.” I only recently discovered that I was then putting to myself the same questions he was asking at precisely that period. “Plato records the hunter’s halloo when a truth is cornered — even if this hunt should lead to his own destruction or that of his community. It is here that the creed of Spinoza and of Kafka meets with the conduct of Socrates,” Steiner says.
A true thinker, a truth-thinker … must know that no nation, no body politic, no creed, no moral ideal and necessity, be it that of human survival, is worth falsehood, a willed self-deception or the manipulation of a text. This knowledge and observance are his homeland. It is the false reading, the erratum that make him homeless …. The man or woman at home in the text is, by definition, a conscientious objector: to the vulgar mystique of the flag and the anthem, to the sleep of reason which proclaims “my country, right or wrong,” to the pathos and eloquence of collective mendacities on which the nation-state — be it a mass-consumer mercantile technocracy or a totalitarian oligarchy — builds its power and aggressions. The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma.2
Paradoxically, German was soon to become my first linguistic asylum in the West. In 1987, during my fellowship in West Berlin, my first translated book, Composite Biography, was published as A Robot Biography by Steidl Verlag. My familiarity with the German language eased the trauma of uprooting, which was fraught with discouragement and confusion. German, spoken by my friends and my parents’ friends, had survived the decades of socialism in Bukovina, once part of the Habsburg realm. In 1987, I was overjoyed to discover that the German language, so long dormant in me, was ready to be resurrected.
When I arrived in Göttingen for the final editing of my German book, my editor and I knocked our heads together over the manuscript until midnight. He tried to console me. “I assure you, we can translate anything. In Goethe’s language there are equivalents for everything! Absolutely everything! Even the most unusual, astonishing turns of phrase. All you need is talent, dedication, and work. Hard work and then more work. And, of course, money.”
Yes, translation is badly paid in the capitalist markets. Unlike Günter Grass, not every author can offer his translators the extended working visits that can help circumvent the semantic obstacles that arise in moving from one language to another.
My first public appearance in New York in the fall of 1989, when the East’s implosion gripped the world’s attention, was as one of a panel on Romanian literature sponsored by the American chapter of PEN on “The Word as Weapon.” Suspicious of the topic’s belligerence, I chose to speak about “The Word as Miracle.” Naturally I evoked that July afternoon in 1945 when I discovered the marvelous Romanian folktale by Ion Creang
. A few days later I received a letter from a distinguished writer and translator of Romanian descent who had attended the event. She mentioned Ion Creang’s anti-Semitic writings and comments.
I knew that German was not only the language of Schiller and Goethe but of Hitler and the SS; that the Romanian of Caragiale and Bacovia was also that of Zelea Codreanu. It is unfortunate and very disturbing when great writers and intellectuals become accomplices of the ideology and language of hatred; but, again, Romanian was for me also the language of love and friendship and literary apprenticeship, the language my parents and grandparents speak to me even though they are dead.