I’ll always resist invitations to fervour, and will resist the more tempting ones all the more resolutely. Letting yourself be swept along on the current is too attractive to be trusted.
It has been my fortune to have grown up by the Danube, where the humblest boatman working the oar must continually read the waters. I don’t know any inspired boatmen, only those who take care. All your nebulous intuitions are worthless on the Danube. What you need is good judgement.
Were I less wary of over-analysing myself, I’d try to establish to what degree I’m above all a native of the banks of the Danube. That is my country. It has always been hard for me to simply say those two words — ‘my country’. Since childhood I’ve become accustomed to having my good faith doubted. Sensitive to ridicule, I haven’t insisted on making affirmations that nobody would accept.
We, Romanians … It was almost inevitable at school, in history lessons, recounting a war, to employ this first person pluraclass="underline" we, Romanians (‘which Romanians?’ someone on my bench shouted at me once, forbidding me for a good while from sympathizing with the story of Ştefan the Great). I was careful to avoid terms that might be judged affected, though I was at an age when solemn words provide a certain pleasure. Country, fatherland, nation, hero — a whole forbidden vocabulary. As an intellectual exercise, it wasn’t bad, as I was forced from early on to monitor my words and to make them mean exactly what was required. But, no matter how much consolation you get from the feeling of being wronged, the game isn’t all fun. A shadow of terror hangs over all my memories of school and childhood.
Today I regard with asperity any tendency I have towards feeling persecuted and I’m rather unforgiving of my emotional outbursts. But I will not soon forget my first night on guard duty years ago, in the regiment, when they told me that position number 3, in the adjutancy, could not be assigned to me. (‘There’s a special regime for Jews,’ explained the lieutenant, a little embarrassed.) In this way, as far as they were concerned, even if I wasn’t a proven traitor, I was in any case a potential one. A ‘special’ regime annulled in that moment the life I had lived on this soil, the lives of my parents, the lives of my grandparents and great-grandparents, a ‘special’ regime with a serial number erased nearly two centuries of history in a country which, of course, was not ‘my fatherland’, since I might betray it in the course of a night on guard duty.
Writing, I have the feeling that I’m getting pathetic about ‘my sad fate’, and this is not my intention at all. It’s good to remind myself anew that I decided once and for all not to be a martyr, which is too serious a role for me to play. All I am doing here is explaining to myself my plain inaptitude for certain grand words, certain solemn ideas. Probably it will always be difficult for me to speak of ‘my Romanian fatherland’ without a feeling of sudden awkwardness, being unable to conquer through willpower a right which the slow passage of time has not let me conquer, in the face of good faith ignored and sincerity scorned. But I will speak of a land that is mine, and for her I will risk appearing ridiculous, and I will love that which I am not allowed to love. I will speak of the Bărăgan and the Danube as belonging to me not in a legal or abstract sense, under constitutions, treaties and laws, but bodily, through memory, through joys and sorrows. I will speak of the spirit of this place, of its particular genius, of the lucidity I have distinguished here under the white light of the sun on the plain and the melancholy I perceive in the landscape of the Danube, drowsing to the right of the town, in the watery marshes.
It’s time for me to stop. I’ve let myself be carried away and have started making speeches. I’ll start again tomorrow, with less sentimentality.
*
There is in the landscape of the Romanian character a particular region, a particular sensibility, where I feel at home: Muntenia. It’s the point from which the culture of the country can be observed, analysed and judged. Moldova is more fertile, but also more confused: her creative resources are infinitely more complex, but imbalanced, mixed chaotically. There is a coolness to the Muntenian spirit that I gladly recognize to be the rather sterile yet commanding play of intelligence. There’s much more metal in the soil on this side of the Milcov river.
I think there’s more to Pârlea’s hostility than Romanian — Jewish discord. There is also the Moldovan — Muntenian split. I said this to him, and it made him laugh. ‘So, now you’re a Vlach, too.’ I took the joke without offence and decided to think about it properly. If Wallachia is as much a psychological category as a geographical one, and there’s a Wallachian people as well as a Wallachian climate, then I am, in Romanian terms, a Wallachian, a Muntenian. The chaos of Pârlea’s thinking, its obscurity, its leaps, its generous naivety, all derive from an unbridled, lyrical, rhetorical sensibility with which S.T.H., being from Fălticeni, can sympathize directly but which, in the light of day on the Danube plain, looks like the chasing of a mirage.
*
I will never cease to be a Jew, of course. This is not a position I can resign from. You are or you’re not. It’s not a matter either of pride or shame.
It’s a fact. It’s not necessary to forget it. It would be just as unnecessary for someone to contest it. But nor will I, in the same way, ever cease to be from the lands of the Danube. This too is a fact. Whether someone recognizes me as such or not is their business. Their business entirely.
The difficulty does not reside and never has resided in legal recognition of my situation, which is a detail that has nothing to do with me, since I’m not trying to lay claim to anything or have my rights recognized. (I imagine a gathering of willows from the Brăila marshes, asserting their right to be willows.) I know what I am, and the difficulties, if they exist, can only concern what I am, not what is written in the state’s registry books. The state may declare me what it will, but I won’t stop being a Jew, a Romanian and a Danubian. ‘You might be overdoing it,’ whispers my anti-Semitic voice (as I have an anti-Semitic voice, with which I converse in moments of reflection). Certainly, I might be. I’m not saying that the blend is free of any dissonance, I don’t claim that peace between these tendencies is immediate. On the contrary, I know that this agreement is hard-earned, that this cohabitation has personal, internal difficulties. For me, a political discussion of the Jewish problem is completely sterile. I’m only interested in one solution, and it is psychological and spiritual. I believe the only way in which I can clarify any of this ancient pain is for me to try, alone, for my own sake, to comprehend the knot of adversity and conflict with which I am bound up in Romanian life. And I don’t believe this solitariness is an escape, a lack of solidarity with my people. On the contrary, as it’s not possible for the experience of one person who sincerely accepts and lives a drama not to be of some use in lighting the way for all the others. It seems more urgent and effective to me to achieve a harmony in my own life between the Romanian and Jewish parts of my character than to obtain or lose certain civil rights. I would like to know, for instance, what anti-Semitic law could erase from my being the irrevocable fact of having been born by the Danube and loving that place.
Has anybody had greater need of a fatherland, a soil, a horizon with plants and animals? Everything abstract in me has been corrected and, for the most part, cured by a simple view of the Danube. Everything fevered has been soothed and ordered. I don’t know what it would have been like to have been born somewhere else. But I am convinced I would have been different. The example of the regal indifference of the river has risen against my Judaic taste for personal catastrophes. The simplicity of the landscape has countered my inner complications. And insecurity and worry have been shown the ephemeral yet eternal play of the waves.