The Walls Behind the Curtain: East European Prison Literature, 1945–1990

Paul Goma (b. 1935)

roMania | 311 Paul goma (b. 1935) The leading literary dissident of Communist Romania, and a prolific writer, Goma was arrested on several occasions. From April 1957 to March 1958 he was incarcerated in Jilava, then transferred to Gherla from which he was freed on 21 November 1958. He was then placed under house arrest for the next thirty-six months in the village of Lăteşti, in the southeastern corner of Romania. Finally, in 1977, he was forced to emigrate. He and his family received political asylum in France where they have lived since and where, Goma claims, he continued to be harassed by agents of the Romanian Securitate before the collapse of the Communist regime. Although he spent far less time in the Romanian gulag than many of his contemporaries, Goma wrote some of the most compelling accounts of prison life in Romania, among them the novels Ostinato (first published in Germany in 1971) and Gherla (first published in France in 1976). The narrative strategy of the latter makes it particularly interesting from the foreign point of view. The novel takes the form primarily of a conversation between a former Gherla inmate and a French friend about the Romanian’s prison years. Although the Frenchman asks questions and makes comments in response to his friend’s recollections, they are so obviously overshadowed by the Romanian’s narrative that they seem to function mostly as a device to break up a book-length extended monologue. Narrative strategy is, in fact, one of the issues discussed by the Frenchman and his Romanian friend who suggests that his purpose in speaking out is not only to alert the West as to the true nature of Communist rule in Romania but to encourage other former inmates to share their experiences as well. The conversational structure of Gherla as a whole is the novel’s strongest feature. Through the voices of the principal narrator, as well as those of fellow prisoners and camp officials, the routine of incarceration comes vividly to life. The first Romanian edition of Gherla appeared only in 1990, after the downfall of Ceauşescu and fourteen years after the French translation. Absent from the French edition are several pages dealing mostly with World War II political issues and Romanian attitudes toward the Jewish population of BukovinaBessarabia on the eve of Romania’s entry into the war on the side of the Germans . Goma has never offered an explanation for these changes as well as for other unpublished versions of Gherla. But a comparison of the 1976 (French) and 1990 (Romanian) editions of the novel suggests that the revisions were motivated by a certain desire on Goma’s part to accommodate an emerging postwar Romanian neo-nationalism. This would seem to underlie not only the later additions to the novel but also the abandonment of the narrative design of the 312 | roMania original edition, to the detriment of the revised versions. In order, therefore, to remain faithful to Goma’s thinking and outlook at the time Gherla was first published, the following excerpts are from the original published edition for which no Romanian text exists (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 7–9, 12–14, 39–40, 70–71, 80–81, 110–11, 112–13, and have been translated from French by Harold B. Segel. from Gherla “But the books we gave you? The reviews, the journals? Why are you smiling?” “It seems. . . . It seems after that you’re going to ask me if we didn’t have TV in the cell, if they didn’t take us to the movies. . . . Possibly to a concert and, why not, to the girlies! To such questions I can only answer with one of the clever replies of the great sage, Ostap Bender:38 ‘Wouldn’t you sometimes like the key to a strongbox too?’ If you gave us some books, there’s a question for you! A piece of paper the size of a hand, several centimeters square of printed paper, cost us several days in solitary. With, in addition, a good thrashing.” “A thrashing just for some paper?” “You’ve got it, for some paper! I’m talking about our prisons, not yours. What the devil, you’ve read nothing about prisons in Russia, Czechoslovakia . . .” roMania | 313 “Yes, but . . .” “Well then? How can you ask such questions? Paper, with us. . . . As regards printed matter: one day, in Jilava, we were taken for...