Norman Manea’s Exiled Shadow

On Sept. 11, 2001, Norman Manea was teaching a class at Bard College on Nabokov’s Pnin. Manea cut his class short, noting the mismatch between the unfolding terrorist atrocity and Nabokov’s delightful novel about a hapless émigré professor. History had arrived with a vengeance, but hardly for the first time in Manea’s life. Born in Bukovina (like Paul Celan, another Romanian Jew), Manea was sent at the age of 5 to a concentration camp in Transnistria, where he remained until the end of the war. As a teenager he was briefly a passionate communist, but he soon turned away from Romania’s Draconian regime, which at one point tossed his father in prison for loaning someone a bicycle. During Ceausescu’s long tyranny Manea became a distinguished Romanian author, continually harassed by the state and refusing to court the dictator’s favor. Manea turned down several chances to emigrate to Israel, but finally left Romania in 1986, going first to Berlin and then to America.