Exiles are always wondering if they might not be better off somewhere else, and Norman Manea (foto), the distinguished Romanian novelist, is no exception. His captivating memoir, ‘’The Hooligan’s Return,” opens on March 9, 1997, a day when, exactly nine years after he arrived in the United States, he should be celebrating the new life he has built for himself. Instead, as he walks the Upper West Side of Manhattan, we find him agonizing over whether he should accept an invitation to visit the land of his birth for the first time since he left it, a country that is now free of the sinister and buffoonish Nicolae Ceausescu but not of that dictator’s twisted legacy.
No longer concerned about his safety, Manea has, nevertheless, other worries. Is he ready to encounter again the man he used to be, the man he might have been had he stayed behind? What will happen to him when he meets the friends he deserted and the enemies he has not forgiven? Will this trip upset the delicate expatriate pact of love he has laboriously managed to establish with the native language in which he still writes his books? Is it not better to cultivate distance as an aesthetic weapon rather than wallow in the cloying closeness of the motherland? Was his country’s rejection a blessing or a curse? Does he love Romania or does he hate it?
But most crucially, like so many migrants who are given the chance toward the end of their lives to face the past and the streets they have abandoned, Norman Manea does not know whether that return will bring closure and peace or will reopen old wounds and destabilize his dream of settling down contentedly in a foreign land.
And yet, all these intellectual anxieties are not what finally decide him for rather than against the trip to Romania, but something far more touching and compelling. On that day of indecision in New York, Norman Manea spots the ghost of his mother (‘’my anxious, neurotic God”) on Amsterdam Avenue – and is reminded that he has unfinished business back home. In the autumn of 1986, just before he departed for exile, he had gone to say goodbye to his ailing progenitor and been unwilling to promise that he would return for her funeral. The pull of that now silent but still beckoning dead mother persuades him that he does indeed need to risk this visit, if only to accommodate her demand and say Kaddish over her grave.
By the end of the book, after a haunting 10 days in Romania, the ceremony has taken place in the Jewish cemetery of Suceava and the wayward son has a desolate epiphany among the tombstones, about forgiveness and transience and permanence. But the road that takes him and us there will turn out to be intricate and painful. Before Manea can reach a posthumous reconciliation with the woman who gave him birth, he will have to examine the life that sprang from that birth, try to understand the deeper meaning of that last farewell to both mother and motherland, how his many exiles are ways of preparing for the ultimate dispossession, the ‘’final rootlessness” of death.
It is that kaleidoscopic excursion into his recent and remote yesterdays that forms the bulk of ‘’The Hooligan’s Return,” peopled with many touching memories and characters. There is the train ride little Norman took when he was 5 years old – deported with his family in 1941 to a labor camp by the fascists who then governed his unfortunate country. And the moment when, as an adolescent and ardent Young Communist, he presides over the purging of a schoolmate at a public hate rally, an incident that will eventually move him to repudiate totalitarian rule. And a distressing visit years later to the prison where his father is unjustly incarcerated for political reasons. And the day that a close friend confesses that the secret police have demanded that he provide daily reports on the subversive Norman Manea.
All is recounted with the caustic dexterity and lyrical power we would expect from the accomplished novelist who gave us ‘’Compulsory Happiness” and ‘’The Black Envelope,” and superbly translated by Angela Jianu, as can be observed in the following description of the Yiddish the writer’s mother lapses into after she is hospitalized for eye surgery: ‘’It is a sort of hypnotic release of pain, in a nomadic language, the voice of an ancient oracle in exile, wrenching from eternity a message in turn morbid and unyielding, or gentle and forgiving, enhanced by the bizarre sounds of a barbaric, sectarian phonetics, electrifying the darkness. . . . oozing forth like some linguistic alluvial mud, carrying with it all the debris gathered along the way.”
As Manea resurrects the past, he also submits it to an incessant intellectual scrutiny, often through conversations with dead European authors (Kafka, Ovid, Joyce) and live American ones (Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow), not to mention an array of Romanian literary figures, past and present, with whom he is in constant dispute, most of them, I confess, unknown to me.
Combined with Manea’s reluctance to provide us with even a semblance of chronological order for the life he is reconstructing, these tender and corrosive philosophical debates give the memoir a haphazard, skip-and-jump quality that some readers may find confusing but that made the book all the more fascinating. It is this stubbornness of vision, this determination not to placate any demand for simplicity, this resolve to cling to his own searing imagination, which finally led Norman Manea into banishment and now allows him to offer us unsparingly all the jumble and messiness of his odyssey.
His ultimate home, he seems to be whispering to us and perhaps to himself, is not Romania and not the United States, but the very literature where he struggles for meaning, the luminous book itself that he is writing and we are reading in a world where he has just buried his mother and now faces the final fatherless exile of death.
THE HOOLIGAN’S RETURN
A Memoir.
By Norman Manea.
Translated by Angela Jianu.
385 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. î30
Manea is a Romanian-born novelist ţBlack Envelope (1995)] and essayist (On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist) whose life and work have been marked by themes of departure, exile, and ambivalence about his past. After a harsh childhood in Transnistra, a concentration camp for Romanian Jews, and a frustrated, tedious adulthood as an engineer within the Communist system, Manea finds writing–and controversy–in middle age, and he emigrates to New York.
