The only limit to the triumph of capitalism is transportation. Happily, public transportation still prevails over automobiles. In Prague, buses, subways, and electric trams do a superb job of carrying weary shoppers home. This civilized service is a legacy of deceased socialism and, while people take it for granted, they would be miserable without it. The beauty of public transport is that you cannot haul more goods home than you can carry. Therefore, you cannot shop until you drop. People with cars have more room to carry things and, while some people have small cars, few of them have station wagons or trucks. Americans could take home the material contents of entire Czech villages if ever they happened upon them. Luckily, they haven’t yet, but you can be sure that a river of station wagons and trucks is massing quietly outside the borders of Eastern Europe, waiting for just the right moment to invade. Small European countries are hypersensitive about their history, which consists mostly of invasions and takeovers. In the past, these invasions were easy to spot because the enemy wore uniforms and their cars had machine guns mounted on them. The new occupation forces are friendly though, and give you (seemingly) pleasure instead of pain. So far, the population is welcoming the invaders with flowers and excitement. What they will do when they wake up poor, in debt, and laden with defunct electronics cannot yet be guessed. There is no known antidote to consumerism yet. This invasion may be permanent.
Prague (cont.)
Prague is a before it left behind some mighty structures. Knowing their kingdoms before it left behind some mighty structures. Knowing their history puts a certain edge on their ornaments since it consists mainly of bloody episodes. For a thousand years, people were regularly thrown out of windows for political reasons in Prague, a process known as “defenestration,” and if the cobblestones were not spattered by falling bodies, there were plenty of hangings, burnings, and barricade-making to mark them. Today’s tourists think that they are in Disneyland because the restoration of Prague has gone to fairy-tale colors, and fairy tales, as everyone knows, have happy endings. In fairy tales, the bad dragons get their heads chopped off and the hero gets to live with the heroine in a castle. The tourists may not know it, but there are still some bad dragons in the Czech Republic today and some of them reside right in the castle, which is ruled by Kafka’s ghost and President Havel’s reputation.
The situation of the Gypsies or Romanys is one of the quiet demons stalking the Czech fairy tale. During the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, thousands of them were deported to a concentration camp at Leti where brutal guards murdered most of them. They drowned babies in the lake and shot pregnant women and children. The Czechs have long maintained that German nazis had run the Leti camp. But it turns out that the butchers of Leti were Czech, not German, and nobody in the Republic, including the president, wants to wake up that ghost.
Paul Polanski, a Czech-American who lives in Prague, has made it his life mission to draw attention to that horror and to interview the Leti survivors. Unfortunately, the Leti massacres are not just relevant history, but a direct link to the situation of Czech gypsies today. Over thirty Gypsies have been murdered by skinheads since 1989, with only one conviction to date. There have been hundreds of attacks with injuries by racists and neo-Nazis. Graffiti with messages like “Send Gypsies to the camps,” appear regularly.
Paul Polanski has lived with Czech Gypsy families and knows their misery firsthand. Unemployed, shunned, and poor, these proud people have a complex and rich culture, marked by living generously, delighting in storytelling, music, and fine craftsmanship. Their chief crime is their skin color. Polanski boiled down their long and intricate stories to a series of brisk, factual poems that speak tersely of an entire culture. The publication of his book was greeted with criticism and disbelief in the Czech Republic. The message from the castle was: shut up! The Leti camp received an official monument thanks to Polanski’s efforts, but he was not invited to the opening ceremonies.
Prague is indeed a mighty city, but the shadows of her aesthetic delights are long and deep.
I was eating my first salad in Eastern Europe at Kampa Park under the Charles Bridge in Prague, when a gaggle of Secret Service agents burst into the restaurant escorting Madeleine Albright. “Thank you,” I heard her say, “for finding a place so late.” Next day, I read in the Herald-Tribune that she’d been in St. Petersburg earlier and was in the Czech Republic to receive a medal from President Havel in gratitude for her role in bringing NATO to the Czechs. Meanwhile, the waiter was grinning from ear to ear: “She’s Czech, you know.” “I know. She’s also Jewish,” I said. “Yes, yes,” said the waiter, “but she didn’t know it.”
I threw some bread to the oversized swans in the Vltava River and looked at the lights of Prague, this amazing jumble of Gothic, baroque, Cubist and commie buildings, which is now the new Paris of Europe and, thanks to NATO, the new border of Western Europe. When the Iron Curtain lifted, Prague was the gleaming jewel that sat in the debris pile of Eastern European cities. The commies didn’t have the money, or perhaps the heart, to wreck it.
Next day I went to the old Jewish Quarter, five hundred years of ghetto history crowded in the stones of a small cemetery. The remains of the Golem, a human being created and then destroyed by Rabbi Leow in the sixteenth century, lay under lock and key in the attic of the Old Synagogue. Legend has it that the rabbi made the Golem to defend the Jews from their persecutors. The Nazis so enjoyed this tale, they planned to transform the Jewish Quarter into what they called “The Museum of an Extinct Race.” They didn’t finish the job, so the Jew Franz Kafka is now the city’s most visible citizen. And the Jews who comprised the famed Prague Circle in the 1920s are among the world’s best-known philosophers. I sat in the Franz Kafka café, across from the house where he was born, and watched some of the twenty thousand expatriate writers who, I was told, live in Prague now, strut by with alchemical incunabula under their arms. Some of them were doubtlessly Jews, giving Central Europe back its missing spirit, though they probably didn’t know it. It is said that the number of expats is equal to the number of sexy, recently degrimed gargoyles that stare down from Prague’s gleaming new façades. The ancient alchemists of Rudolf the Second were just as numerous before Rudolf threw them into the castle moat, where they were eaten by bears. The expats are safer, though, with a playwright in the castle, the Republic in NATO, and the dollar worth about thirty five crowns, which will buy your starving artist two glasses of flaming absinthe and a plate of boar stew in a pivnice. I mean, it’s a fine day when bohemians can actually live in Bohemia.
Still, there was something all too perfect about the fairy-tale city around me. Two saints with freshly painted halos that looked like helicopter blades stared at me from atop the Charles Bridge. They were, I supposed, the first NATO-ready Czechs. Below them, English-speaking buskers strummed Dylan tunes on battered guitars. Michael Kaufman, who edits a local journal, may have put his finger on it when he said, “Prague is a Potemkin Village built by tourist money. The Czech economy is in shambles. They have no money for F-16s.”
Be that as it may, you can’t get absinthe legally anywhere else, and the je ne sais quoi—how do you say that in Czech?—necessary to inspire an artist, still gushes bountifully from the nymph by the New Town Hall.
A Simple Heart
In these days of confessional frenzy, voluntary and coerced, every story is under suspicion. From writers wallowing in the details of affairs with famous people to witnesses spilling their guts under oath, the land is awash in hypocrisy. It is therefore, oh, so refreshing, to receive a nine-page handwritten letter from a housewife named Char Smith in a small town in West Virginia.
In 1989 Mrs. Smith, touched by the plight of Eastern Europeans emerging from decades of authoritarian rule, was moved to help a Romanian family. By no means rich, Mrs. Smith was able to contact and visit a family in the town of Piatra Neamt, and strike a friendship that has endured for ten years. During these ten years, she has seen a tremendous struggle to survive as livin
g conditions for these people worsened. “It’s almost ten years since the revolution,” she writes, “and look where they are now. I’ve tried to give this family hope … but though they appreciate my support, my words aren’t meaning as much anymore.”
Mrs. Smith writes movingly of the details of this family’s life, their fight to insure an operation for their adopted daughter, their loss of faith in the future. She rails against the indifference of the Western world after the Cold War and berates our media for telling us next to nothing about the suffering of real people. But her own despair lives most tellingly in that simple assertion of fact: “my words aren’t meaning as much anymore.” Here is the entire relationship of our overaffluent West to the quickly dimming world behind the former Iron Curtain. Our words, whether the words of free-market ideologues, democracy preachers, consumer visionaries, or simple, good-hearted people, do not mean much anymore. Romanians have heard them all, and things are getting bleaker. They have McDonald’s and Coca Cola and the rare sympathy of a few pure souls like Mrs. Smith, but their survival is precarious. The magical West brought many things but not a quick way out of the past.
As the IMF licks its wounds over the loss of billions to ex-KGB thieves, and NATO re-creates the Hapsburg Empire, you have to wonder what’s in store for Mrs. Smith’s friends. Left outside the nouveau NATO-Hapsburg Catholic world, they seem relegated to a life understood only instinctively and compassionately by a good soul like the very rare Mrs. Smith. Is that how all stories end?
I kept cringing, as I read the handwritten, crowded, nine-page letter, that something truly awful might come from this story of unselfish friendship. I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, for something terrible and scandalous to be revealed. But there wasn’t. There was only love for a family far away and the despair of living in a world that doesn’t care. And that was the most awful thing of all—without a punch line, without a dramatic denouement.
How We Got to Kosovo
In communist Romania in the 1950s, my classmates were multi-ethnic and spoke a variety of languages. In my class we had Romanians, Germans, Hungarians, Serbs, Jews, Gypsys, Szekelys, Bulgarians, and Greeks. We spoke a hodgepodge of languages and got along fine because it was forbidden by the government to speak ill of people’s nationalities or origins. Our parents were too afraid, at least during Stalinism, to tell us the horrible history that had brought all these different people together. They didn’t tell us about all the fighting, over hundreds of years, over the same piece of real estate, or about the slights and insults, real or imagined, recorded in the collective memory and kept alive by hundreds of small sayings, sentimental songs, drunken ditties, morbid fairy tales, and musty chronicles.
Without knowing it at the time, I had the misfortune of belonging to one of the top-hated categories. I was Jewish, from a Hungarian and Polish background, and my mother, who was Jewish, had remarried a Romanian from a part of the country hated by everyone, including the local Romanians. I didn’t know that my hometown had been the subject of territorial disputes between the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman empires, then between the nations of Romania and Hungary. These facts were relayed to us in a highly comforting version in history class, a version that blamed all misfortune on class relations and tensions within economic systems. And was this version wrong? Not necessarily. The problem with it is that it left out the one unpredictable element that usually renders nonsensical the best theories, namely, people’s deep-seated and emotionally unassailable stupidity.
This stupidity, which is one of the great unanalyzed factors in all history, not just that of the Balkans, is composed of the belief that the stink of one’s family and tribe is vastly superior to the familial stink of the neighboring tribe; that your language is wittier or deeper; that the sounds you make when you wail away about your love for the muddy ravine in which you were conceived is much, much more melodic than the wailing of your neighbors; that the smoke-darkened icons cut out of old magazines that hang on your wall are true representations of the only gods worth praying to, and that the gods and prayer habits of the people over the hill are unspeakable offenses that will cease only when you have killed them. This kind of stupidity is like a sturdy weed: you can weed several times a day and, in the morning, there it is again.
In 1989 the official narcotic ideology that went by the name “socialism” was officially kaput, but the people who had been in charge were not kaput at all. Their way to hold on to power was to remind people of the undying hatred they once felt for their neighbors. Suddenly, all those sentimental songs and nasty ditties recording all the slights suffered throughout history at the hands of people with whom they had gotten along just fine for about forty years, bubbled up and started intoxicating everybody with the bittersweet juice of eternal victimization.
Among the mobsters who percolated out of the communist apparatchik muck after 1989, Milosevic of Yugoslavia is the worst. He stripped his country and his people of all the three conditions necessary for the eradication of historic stupidity: peace, a good economy, and good leadership.
This is all the more tragic since Yugoslavia, even while still part of the great socialist camp, had already made more economic progress than all its other Balkan neighbors. We, in Romania, looked with envy at the standard of living of Yugoslav workers and to their freedom to travel and to bring money back home to build private homes and start small businesses. And, indeed, you have to go no further than the Olympic Games in Sarajevo to see a prosperous, Western-style city, in which young people in blue jeans listened to rock ‘n’ roll on their Sony Walkmans and filled up the coffeehouses and bars, flirting and talking across ethnic lines, without any self-consciousness. Today, the beautiful city of Sarajevo is in ruins, more than half its people dead or in exile, its fine historical buildings piles of rubble—all of it courtesy of Milosevic, the man who today cries foul because his murdering thugs are being checked by NATO bombs.
Exiles, All
For my literary generation, exile had only one direction: France. When my mother and I made the momentous decision to leave our homeland forever, my interests and hers differed. I looked forward to being in the company of Tristan Tzara, E. M. Cioran, Paul Celan, and Eugen Ionesco, the great French-bound exiles of previous generations. My mother, on the other hand, looked to the bourgeois comfort of America. I despised her for this utilitarianism and vowed to conquer France as soon as I could get away from my mother’s America, which she imposed on me by the sheer force of her seniority and economic clout.
The romantic myth of exile was possible in its full, unexamined glory only in the mind of an adolescent in the mid-sixties of our century. At that time, alienation was philosophically fashionable, even necessary, and exile had become the crème of alienation, the acme of youthful despair. We maintained the generation gap with all the assiduity of housemaids. Every removal from home, from my very real exile to a precollege Grand Tour of Europe on a shoestring, was gravely experienced by my contemporaries as existential estrangement (in different concentrations, of course; the metaphorical containing, usually, only 10 percent of the potency of the real thing).
The reality of exile, visible in a realistic light several decades later, had in fact been very different for my predecessors. Far from a celebration of estrangement, it had been heartbreaking. For Cioran, the author of Un précis de decomposition, his condition was a prompt to suicide. Paul Celan, whose parents were murdered by the Nazis, saw his continued existence as a mistake and committed suicide, finally, in Paris. Ionesco, who had taken Europe by storm by pointing a mirror at its absurd manners, was situated at the intersections of two totalitarianisms, a position that was hardly playful. Tristan Tzara, who had founded the Dada provocation, became a communist, which was a form of artistic suicide very much like a real one. The list of literal and metaphorical suicides of Romanian exiles is long, and the same is true for exiles from every other country who had the misfortune of being born in one of the century’s dark decades.
&nb
sp; Part Four
The Devil’s Art: Autobiography
Adding Life, Erasing the Record
1.
I am going to address two forms of life-telling: the automatic and the palliative. The first was once, but is no longer, vulnerable to social revolution, the second is a perennial placebo, and the subject of this essay.
Let’s start with the first: Is it possible to have a life without having a biography?
On the face of it, the answer would be yes, but on further thought I’d say that, yes, before the advent of the modern, bureaucratic state it was possible. The bureaucratic state, however, inscribed every individual with the infrastructure of biography. You can even say that the state invented the individual by means of biography. The individual is someone with a recorded birth, marriage, school attendance, property deeds, employment record, and death certificate. The individual is the writing that defines him. It is not possible to be an individual without a biography. It is illegal to be an individual without a biography. The state sees to it—through the recorded infrastructure—that each individual has a unique biography. The official infrastructure is filled out over a lifetime by the modern individual with a network of paper trails: correspondence, inter-office memos, faxes, e-mail, tape and video recordings. There is little difficulty in biographing anyone alive after the mid-eighteenth century in Europe or North America, and what little difficulty there is has to do with the overabundance of data and the need to select. The biographical act of the state is automatic and increasingly weighty while the biographical subject is increasingly baroque and circumscribed.
The Devil Never Sleeps Page 13
