Professor discusses author's life in concentration camp

Matei Calinescu, professor emeritus of comparative literature and West European studies at IU, discussed author Norman Manea's memoir "The Hooligan's Return" in his lecture Thursday morning in the Indiana Memorial Union Oak Room. \nThe lecture, titled "On Norman Manea's 'The Hooligan's Return'," was one of nine sessions in "The Writer Uprooted: A Conference on Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature," an event several IU departments sponsored that started Wednesday and ends today.\nChristina Illias, an IU professor of Romanian and Latin, introduced Calinescu's lecture. Illias, a former student and close friend of Calinescu's for more than 40 years, said he had been a longtime intellectual inspiration for her.\nCalinescu's lecture focused on his paper regarding Norman Manea's book, "The Hooligan's Return." Norman Manea, a survivor of both the Holocaust and totalitarian rule under Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania, has written several critically acclaimed books of these experiences. "The Hooligan's Return" is a memoir concerning three stages of his life: growing up in a concentration camp, living under a totalitarian system and exile in the United States. Calinescu described it as a detailed and revealing account of communist censorship that captured a generalized atmosphere of mistrust in Romania.\nManea felt an ethical obligation to tell the unsimplified truth of his experiences, no matter how painful they were, Calinescu said. Manea's recollections of communist censorship included examples of the secret police blackmailing his friends to give up information on him. Romanian authorities kept a secret file on him, a relic currently on display at the Lilly Library. \nCalinescu said Manea's translated works are intended for American readers, despite his continuance to write in Romanian. He addressed the discontinuity in the book's message for Americans and Romanians: Americans unfamiliar with the political climate had to be instructed by the text while Romanians were challenged to face a familiar and painful truth. \nBeing from Eastern Europe, visiting research scholar Peter Nemes said he could relate to the theme of the lecture.\n"It's something that I probably have a different perspective on than Americans," he said.\nAlvin Rosenfeld, director of the Jewish studies program, organized the event and attracted speakers from six countries.\n"The basic theme of the conference is the connection between exile and creativity," he said. \nGraduate student Larisa Privalskaya said she thought the conference was a creative and well-organized event.\n"It's nice to see all these people together, and I'm looking forward to seeing their presentations," she said.\nThe lectures will continue until noon today and will be part of a book on the conference.\n"Though the audience here is relatively small, the eventual audience will be very large," Rosenfeld said.