The Snows of Yesteryear (40 page)

I used to hesitate when asked about my place of origin, and the reasons for this demurral were twofold: first, because the admission that I came from Czernowitz invariably drew the irrepressible comment, “Ah, I see ...” This is not limited to former Austro-Hungarians, for whom the very name Czernowitz stands for a standard set of concepts: Czernowitz seems to be well-known everywhere as the setting of most Galician-Jewish jokes and as the breeding ground of an unmistakable type of individual. My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs, fused and refined there into a quintessential species of “Slaviennese” rapscallions. To what extent it is an advantage to be counted among them is a moot point. All my life I did what I could to make the best of it. The poet Paul Celan, who said of Czernowitz that it was a place where people and books had lived, has done better than I in this respect.

The second reason for my hesitation is again twofold: of the three score and fifteen years of my earthly existence I spent only the first ten in Czernowitz. After that I visited the place only sporadically — alas! for there was much to be learned there. The last time I had been there was in 1936, when I was twenty-two, fifty-three years ago. Over such a time span the original markings fade. But what contributed even more signally to my alienation was the increasing “erstwhileness” and irreality of my origins. It began to sound to me as if I had invented Czernowitz — and with it, myself.

The fact is that I actually
did
invent my own Czernowitz. Leaving aside my book
Maghrebinian Stories,
which I could not have written had I not been born and raised there, the city itself plays a fatidic role in three other of my books: significantly in
An Ermine in Czernopol
(published in English under the title
The Hussar)
; marginally in the novel
Memoirs of an Anti-Semite;
and of course decisively in this one. I did not intend in any of these to write a travel guide to the actual Czernowitz-Cernăuţi-Chernovtsy, but rather to describe a mythical
topos
. Especially in
An Ermine in Czernopol,
the very title indicates that we are dealing with a literary transposition, the remembrance of the town of my childhood serving merely as a scaffolding on which to model a mythic site in which mythical events take place.

But we know that memory is anything but reliable. It selects at random what it wishes to store, discards what is not to its liking, underscores the emotional, sublimates and distorts. Thus I contributed both intentionally and unintentionally to the growing loss of reality for my place of origin, adding the odium of implausibility to its — and thereby also my own — already legendary reputation for shifty unreliability.

This hardly disturbs me insofar as the ethical question of truthfulness is concerned. I am a writer and as such I have not only the right but also the duty to raise the level of reality, as I see it, to the very point where it threatens to tip over into the unbelievable. But if one seeks to achieve this by drawing — as I do — on the autobiographical, paraphrasing and transforming it and inserting it into fictional and hypothetical happenings, then one runs the danger of falling into one's own trap, with the result that one no longer knows what is real and what is not. This exceeds the moral sphere and comes dangerously close to schizophrenia.

But since I am a conscientious person, I recently chanced the adventure of confronting my invented Czernopol with the factually existing Czernowitz still surviving in the present-day Chernovtsy. This was all the more daring an undertaking since I had given not only myself but my hometown as well half a century in which to develop into something entirely unforeseeable. Naturally I had to assume that the Ukrainian Chernovtsy of 1989, cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians, could no longer be the Czernowitz or CernăuÅ£i that I had last visited in 1936. Likewise I had to assume as out of the question that Chernovtsy should have escaped the hybrid growth which, in the past few decades, has transformed all human settlements throughout the world into teeming excrescences — especially not this chameleon among cities, which the popular Austrian writer Karl Emil Franzos called around 1890 “a village of Huzules with pseudo-Byzantine, pseudo-Gothic and pseudo-Moorish buildings,” and somewhat later “a Black Forest idyll” and ultimately “Little Vienna.” I was sure that much of what I recalled would have to have been destroyed according to pseudo-American and pseudo-Russian notions about redesigning the future; it was likely that I would have to dig up large portions of my remembered past or else leave them permanently under tons of reinforced concrete. Equally, the erstwhile capital of the erstwhile Bukovina had meanwhile become a Soviet backwater, in which most probably dilapidation and squalor would be visible everywhere.

None of this was the case — at least it didn't seem so at first. I found myself back in my Czernowitz, the Romanian CernăuÅ£i from between the two murderous wars, as if I had never left, a Rip Van Winkle rubbing the sleep from my eyes without first realizing that it had been a sleep of a half-century. Everything stood in place around me exactly as it had been fifty-three years earlier. Nothing was missing — at least at first glance. A second glance revealed tiny changes. Everywhere trees had been planted on both sides of the streets, and their resplendent young greenery brought the city closer together and made the avenues, streets and alleys seem narrower and also more cheerful, almost spalike. It was altogether a Czernowitz to which I had to apologize for my skeptical anticipations. Nothing was dirty or messy. The houses were freshly painted in an imperial Austrian egg-yolk yellow that alternated with an imperial Russian pea green. The pavements were swept clean — the very same cobblestone pavements that once had been polished smooth by the hackneys' rubber wheels and the same stone slabs of the sidewalk over which I had toddled in my child's shoes and slid in my first dancing-lesson pumps, with their slippery soles, after some pretty girls along the promenade of Squires Street. The streets, to my boundless relief, were free of the tinny metastases of parked cars. Small amounts of traffic trickled by without bottlenecks, without stench and almost noiselessly. The silence made me aware of the lack of some dearly familiar sounds from the past: what was missing were the rough shouts of “Hoh!” with which the Jewish hackney drivers had shooed inattentive pedestrians out of the way of their horses, and the whirring twitter of swarms of sparrows that everywhere had greedily awaited the plentiful fall of damply steaming horse apples. The hackneys had disappeared, as had the streetcars (whose brakes had had a way of their own and often had caused confused tie-ups in the traffic). Now nimble trolley buses snaked along the old routes, the rails long since paved over, where in the past the faded red-white-and-red cars with narrow windows swayed on little metal wheels like toy boxes, to emerge in front of the town hall on the Ringplatz after having courageously mounted the steep gradient from the Prut River valley, then continuing across town, ringing their bells and shrieking at every curve, all the way out to the People's Park. Missing too was the bickering of jackdaws in the acacias across from the provincial administration building and around the onion towers of the Orthodox church, missing the rattle of rack carts on which the peasants from surrounding villages drove to market, missing their smell of cheap rotgut and the ‘tinkling clopping' of their poorly shod scruffy Polack horses. The acacias were now trimmed in the Italian manner and the peasant carts were replaced by the kolkhozes' trucks. This made the city neater-looking but also more sterile.

I couldn't get over it. There could be no doubt that this was indeed the Cernăuţi of my childhood, tangibly concrete and real — and yet it wasn't the Czernowitz whose vision I had carried in me for half a century: Czernopol, the city of the steppes, mythic site of mythic happenings. It was the quintessence of a provincially stolid, bright and well-kept township, undeniably revealing its imperial past, phenotypically a former provincial capital from the eastern reaches of the former Dual Monarchy, still faintly glinting with its erstwhile glory. Sensibly planned streets still presented the architectonically well-meaning and unpretentious façades of bourgeois residences from the middle and end of the last century (in which even the rare extravagances in style were tempered by the period's mediocrity). The neo-Gothic towers of the Catholic churches, the pseudo-Byzantine cupolas of the Orthodox ones and the pseudo-Moorish crenellations of the Armenian rose in urbane moderation above the level rooftops of the other buildings (I was to learn that only the flamboyant neo-Assyrian temple of the Jews had been razed during the German occupation), and in an equally mild manner the neo-Renaissance public buildings and pseudo-classic garrison barracks still helped the eye to enjoy an easy transition from
Gründerzeit
architecture to a temperate Art Nouveau. All of this embedded in the fresh greenery of newly planted trees.

For me it was a fall into the unreal. I could no longer trust my senses. The city before me had been built stone by stone in duplication of my legendary Czernopol. But its overwhelming here-and-nowness was devoid of any soul; in some strange way, it was removed from its global time. Not that it had been arrested in its evolution, but rather that it had been backdated, as it were, beyond it. This present-day Chernovtsy was a repudiation both of the interwar Cernăuţi and of the imperial Austrian Czernowitz. In its unaltered surface permanence it had reverted to an abstract, provincially idyllic Belle Époque, a founders'-era dream of itself, but without spirit and life. It was the stage setting of a play that had never been produced, a contradiction in itself: a cleanup, spit-and-polish, lacquered and antiseptic city. Nothing could be felt of its once demonic nature. What could endow this cunning model of a provincial town, as the Chernovtsy of 1989 presented itself, with the wide-awake perceptiveness, the bright resourcefulness, the sharp powers of observation, the delight in ridiculing others and the biting wit of — well, precisely of Czernowitz? Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically skeptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers. And yet the city before me was an undeniable reality, and it was more persuasive than the myth, which was merely my own assertion.

It has been claimed that the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina's multiplicity of populations and to their furiously fermenting compression in its capital, their reciprocal insemination and abrasion, the challenging, constant need to react quickly and adapt shrewdly, a need that had been vital especially for the Czernowitz Jews. All of this seemed invalidated in the here and now of Chernovtsy. The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people. Of those wretched avatars, issued from folksy patriotism and fatal nationalism, which had produced Walpurgis Night-like excesses here too, hardly more than allegorical traces remained visible. On the façades of the former Deutsches Haus, Dom Polski, Romanian Casa Poporului and Ukrainian Narodni Dim could still be discerned, though faded by the strongly contrasting local weather, the frescoes of imposing female figures with bared bosoms and all kinds of symbolic appurtenances — sword, book, lyre, wheat sheaves, eagles, throttled snakes — meant to epitomize in Art Nouveau style the spirit of every nationality, each but a single component among the many of the
spiritus loci
of Czernowitz.

But the primary base element of Czernowitz had always been a cynically healthy derision for all types of lofty conviction. Any true Czernowitzer watched an exhibition of overflowing nationalistic sentiment with no greater personal involvement than that which he reserved for the Purim masquerades put on by street urchins.

Still, it was anything but shoulder-shrugging imperturbability that was responsible for letting these strongholds of conceited, chauvinistically overheated pettiness remain standing just as they had been built and decorated a century ago in the heyday of patriotic romanticism. Among all the spooky, soullessly preserved testimonies to a turbulent past, these were the only ones that appeared dilapidated. I had the impression that behind their now shabby façades these buildings were nothing but empty shells, like houses after a ruthlessly extinguished conflagration, when the firemen have done more damage than the flames — as if, at one time, the aggression they harbored had flared too violently and the people who then exterminated the spreading infection had proceeded so drastically that they also annihilated all the productive antagonisms, all the color and vivid tension that had characterized the city's contiguous admixture of a dozen nationalities.

In this connection I tried to reconstruct a scene from the past in my legendary Czernopol: a youth from the Junimea, the Romanian Youth Movement, steps from the Casa Poporului wearing the well-known costume of short, sleeveless and colorfully embroidered sheepskin jacket, and coarse linen shirt over linen trousers tightly belted in blue-yellow-and-red; there's a suggestion of a whiff of pine needles from the Carpathian forests in his hair and his eyes shine with the pride of the Dacians (whom Trajan's cohorts could never subdue, though they managed to overcome them in battle). As chance will have it, a German student passes by, a member of the folk-German fraternity Arminia, in its usual uniform: stiff collar, kepi worn at a snappy angle, fraternity colors displayed across the chest on a broad ribbon. At the sight of the Romanian he snorts contemptuously through the adhesive plaster covering a recent saber cut — an unambiguous signal that he considers the Romanian a lumpish yokel and potential adversary, even though both sit in the same lecture halls at the university. Such an encounter might all too easily lead to blows. But this time both are distracted by the appearance of a Hasidic rabbi in black caftan, with the pale skin of a bookworm and long corkscrew side-locks under a fox-pelt hat, an apparition that forthwith unites the former opponents in the happy recognition that the newcomer is the natural target of their aggression. For the time being, they content themselves with jeers and taunts, obscene gestures and curses. For the time being — I was writing of the year 1930. The great signal had not yet been given that would produce all its evil consequences.