The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

Nomadic Language

Nomadic Language ! Norman Manea Kafka did not often write about the country in which he was born, but he did write about the language—that is, the homeland —which he came to inhabit. In this connection, he spoke about “impossibilities” and of the use of the German language as the “self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property.” In a letter to Max Brod, he lists three impossibilities for a Jew writing in German or, in fact, in any other language. He considers these impossibilities as a matter of “the Jewish question or of despair in relation to that question.” Kafka saw himself as a product of the impossible, which he recreated continuously as poetry, that is, as life, with a magical and austere fixation. His three impossibilities are as follows: the impossibility of not writing, of writing in German , and of writing differently, which means, probably, of writing in a language other than German. To these he adds a fourth, comprehensive impossibility: namely, “the impossibility of writing per se.” Actually, this last point entails the impossibility of living per se, the impossibility “to endure life”—as a diary entry tells us. “My whole being is directed toward literature . . . the moment I abandon it, I cease to live. Everything I am, and am not, is a result of this,” he confesses. Few people have had their home- 2 | Norman Manea land as dramatically located in writing as the Jewish Franz Kafka writing in Prague in German—his paradoxical way of “crossing over to the side of the world” in the struggle with himself. “I am nothing but literature and can and want to be nothing else,” he often repeated. It may seem surprising that Kafka did not mention a fifth impossibility , one which is the most kafkaesque of all: E. M. Cioran, who held that you would do better to write operettas than to write in a foreign language. And yet it would be more suggestive to call it “the snail’s impossibility”: that is, the impossibility of continuing to write in exile, even if the writer takes along his language as the snail does his house. Such an extreme situation seems borrowed from the very premise of Kafka; and our clownish forerunner K. could not but be attracted by such a farcical hypothesis of self-destruction. ! For the mature adult, exile reformulates tardily the premise of initiation and becoming, reopens the gate of life’s extreme risks and potential, putting into question all the steps of past experience . Moreover, for those prematurely traumatized, never truly free from the psychosis of the provisory, from the threat of being thrown once again into the chaos of the unknown, exile suddenly releases all the old fears. One does not so much lose a precarious and dubious stability as discovers oneself deeper in the abyss of never-ending instability. The writer, always a “suspect,” as Thomas Mann said, an exile par excellence, conquers his homeland, through language. To be exiled also from this last refuge represents a multiple dispossession, the most brutal and irredeemable decentering of his being. ! In the beginning was the Word, the ancients told us. In the beginning for me, the word was Romanian. The doctor and all Nomadic Language | 3 those who assisted my difficult birth spoke Romanian. Romanian was spoken in my home, where I spent most of my time with Maria, the lovely peasant young woman who took care of me and spoiled me, in Romanian. Of course these were not the only sounds around me. German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, and Polish were spoken in Bukovina, as was a peculiar dialect, a Slavic mixture typical of the Ruthenians. It is notable that the family quarrel between Yiddish, the earthly-plebeian language of exile, and Hebrew , the holy-chosen language, peaked at the 1908 Czernowitz conference when the celebrated triumph of Yiddish (“The Jews are one people, their language is Yiddish”) gave no sign of the spectacular and definitive domination that Hebrew would attain with the founding, four decades later, of the state of Israel. When my grandfather asked at my birth if the newborn had nails, trying to gauge my chances of survival, he presumably asked in Yiddish, although he knew Hebrew and spoke fluent Romanian. The books sold in his bookshop were, in fact, Romanian. At five, when I was deported to the Transnistria concentration camp, along with the rest of Bukovina’s Jewish population, I...