Manea norman biography of alberta

Norman Manea (born July 19, ) is a Jewish Romanian writer and author of short fiction, novels, and essays about the Holocaust, daily life in a communist.

Norman Manea was born in in the Romanian province of Bukovina. As a child, he was deported with his parents to a concentration camp in Transnistria, the area of Ukraine that Hitler handed over to Romanian governance during WWII. His novels, short stories, and essays typically draw from his experiences with totalitarianism and his later life as a writer in exile living in the United States.

His works have been translated into more than twenty languages and in recent years, international critics have considered him a highly plausible candidate for the Nobel Prize. I sat down with Norman in the living room of the apartment he shares with his wife Cella on the Upper West side of Manhattan during one of their brief visits to the city—they spend most of their time in upstate New York.

He was gracious and thoughtful throughout our exchange, speaking English with a rather strong Romanian accent and undercutting any self-seriousness with a healthy dose of ironic, sometimes self-deprecating, humor. At the end of our interview, I asked how he thought one might escape the constraints of social identity. Norman Manea: I was nine years old.

It was April of My parents and I had come back to Romania after being deported to the concentration camp in Transnistria. It was a time of extraordinary and sudden joy, rediscovering what I call the banality of life, the very basic things: food, clothes, school, especially. They spoiled us because we had come back from hell and nobody could believe that we had survived.

This period between and was still quite a confusing time in Romania—the Communist Party was not yet in power—but everyone, as is often the case after a disaster, was full of hope, regenerated vitality. There were love affairs, music, dancing, food. For me, as a child, it was magic. It was a time of intense joy. And it was during that time that I was given my first book of fairytales.