Hoenig Triumph Street, Bucharest

1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-912545-88-9
Verlag: Istros Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 280 Seiten

Bucharest, before and during World War II, where Bernard Davidescou lives with his parents and his older brother on Triumph Street, in the middle of a courtyard block inhabited by a dozen Jewish families and two Christian ones. When Romania, under General Ion Antonescu's dictatorship, allies itself with Hitler and invades the USSR, the Jews in Bucharest face the threat of being sent to the Nazi extermination camps, after having survived the terror of the fascist Iron Guard. However, each Sunday morning, young Bernard, age twelve, passionate about politics and history, amazes the adults in the courtyard, Jews and Christians alike, with his analysis of the political situation in Romania and the development of the war on all fronts. 'Rue du Triomphe' is the story of this young boy and his dreams and torments during this dark period of human history, while also chronicling a family in crisis, the discovery of sexuality and first loves, and the distraction offered by the cinema, religious searching and idealistic aspirations for a better world.

Dov Hoenig had a long career in film in Israel, Europe and ultimately in Hollywood. He edited over fifty films including 'Thief', 'The Keep', 'Manhunter', 'Last of the Mohicans' and 'Heat' directed by Michael Mann and Andrew Davis' 'The Fugitive' for which, along with co-editors, he received an Oscar nomination for best picture editing. Hoenig was born in Romania in 1932 and after WWII, one of the darkest periods in the history of the world and of the large Jewish community of Romania, he left his family to emigrate alone to Palestine. Rue du Triomphe was first published in French and was chosen as one of the 10 best first novels by the jury of the Prix Stanislas.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hoenig, Dov

Weitere Mitwirkende

Bowd, Gavin

Leseproben

1 The Courtyard, the House, the Hall   Today, my childhood home no longer exists. In the 1980s, mass demolition work took place in Bucharest and my courtyard, my street and my whole neighbourhood were reduced to dust. In the name of Marxism-Leninism and the holy class struggle, the tyrant Nicolae Ceau?escu had decided to give the capital wider avenues with monumental prospects and immense con­structions. Thus, the magnificence of marble and the fury of reinforced concrete were to intimidate a people starved and con­demned to despair. On the dictator’s orders, thousands of inhabitants were expelled from their homes and dispersed to the city’s periphery. They had to pack their things and agree, at barely a day’s notice, to relocate to housing blocks still under construction, without water or electricity, often without even doors and windows. The bulldozer’s blades and caterpillar tracks razed their homes, turning them into a pile of bricks, stones and scrap metal. More than forty thousand houses, along with many priceless churches, monasteries, synagogues, hos­pitals, theatres and monuments, were demo­lished or moved. Among the many neighbourhoods annihilated was the old Jewish quarter stretching across the suburbs of Vacaresti, Dudesti and Vitan, where thousands of poor emigrants, mostly from Russia and Ukraine, had settled since the nineteenth century. This is how several streets of my childhood, with their houses, whose bright, joyful colours guided me in winter like morning stars on my way to school, were wiped out with the occasional exception of a few mutilated, pitiful segments. At the very heart of Ceau?escu’s urban ambitions was his mega­lomaniacal plan to build in the city centre a gigantic House of the People, conceived, in his imagination, as the Eighth Wonder of the World. He wanted this project to mark the apotheosis of his reign, ensuring him an eternal place in history. The construction works for the House of the People were launched in 1984 and a fifth of the old city of Bucharest (a surface equivalent to three Parisian arrondissements) was converted into a vast cemetery of rubble. Ceau?escu and Elena, his wife, did not have the chance to attend the completion of this project in all its grotesque majesty. On 21 December 1989, a series of riots in Bucharest and other cities in the country led the population and the army to rebel and provoked the fall of the communist regime. The brutal and degrading execution of the Ceau?escu couple, on 25 December 1989, was worthy of their ignominy and the suffering they had inflicted on their people. I had left Romania well before Ceau?escu came to power. For me, on a personal level, he was just the thief of a few precious traces of my childhood. I cast him into oblivion now in order to devote myself to the period preceding the Second World War, when my neighbourhood of Vacaresti-Dudesti enjoyed a quiet life, just like Triumph Street and the big combined courtyards of numbers 47 and 49, at the centre of which nestled the little house where we lived, behind the branches of an old plum tree. Most importantly, there was our courtyard. It was entered through one of the two gates that opened onto two parallel alley­ways where the two properties joined one another. On the left was number 47 with the house inhabited by the landlord, Nae Theodorescu. Although he was short of stature, and a little overweight, his elegance, intimidating look and powerful voice commanded respect and submission: ‘A man of great class’, said those in the know. I have kept quite a clear image of Theodorescu: greying hair under a wide-brimmed felt hat; bulging eyes; bushy black eyebrows; a long nose poised above a perfectly trimmed pencil-thin moustache. He liked striped suits of fine wool and double-soled English shoes that made him a little taller. A white silk handkerchief often spilled out of his breast pocket, like cream overflowing from a cup of coffee. Proud of his social position and his success in life (he was the son of a rich landowner), Theodorescu had never been too familiar with his tenants. But, since his marriage to Lu­te­tia Filot­ti, his distant and unapproachable man­ner had only become worse. In the courtyard, this attitude had, to quote Bal­zac, ‘aroused un­­favourable suspicions about his character’, and malicious tongues began to wag: ‘If he wasn’t chasing after money, even though he already had plenty, why would he, at the age of fifty, have married a woman like Lu­te­tia Filotti?’ Apart from the fact that she was skin and bone, morose and haughty, Lutetia brought, by way of dowry, her old mother, Valeria, while poor Nae already had a mother of his own to look after. His mother’s mind had gone since the death of her husband, Tudor Theodorescu, and she lived in her son’s house in a small isolated room, just behind the kitchen, under the care of a nurse. We often heard the old woman’s wails, like heartrending appeals for help, but with time the neighbours learned to ignore them. She was eighty-two years old, to believe Theodorescu’s young servant, Maria – a petite brunette, young and full of life, who liked gossip as much as Sunday dances in the Municipal gardens. In contrast, Valeria Filotti, Theodorescu’s mother-in-law, maintained, despite her seventy-six years, robust health and a sound mind. Small and thin and always dressed in black, she would spend hours behind the curtain of her window, spying on the goings-on in the alley. She desperately sought someone to speak to and, as soon as the opportunity arose, she flung open the curtains, darting her head out like a snake flicking its forked tongue to taste the scents. ‘Ah, what a beautiful day!’ or ‘Oh, what awful weather!’ she would exclaim, her face cleft from ear to ear in a syrupy, toothless smile revealing three or four yellowing and decaying stumps clin­ging to her rotten gums. She knew how she looked and to hide her embarrassment, her smile vanished just as fast as it had come, her face returning to its severe and assertive expression. She would then launch into endless litanies that went from the national crisis to the rampant corruption in King Carol’s palace, not for­getting the punishment of sinners and rewards for the righteous. That would set off a series of imperious sighs, sometimes followed by a few tears, and ending with the interjection vai de loume! (‘world of misfortune!’). Motan, her big black cat, with long whiskers like those of an old Hungarian hussar, did not seem to worry about the misfortune of this world as much as she did. Seated like a sphinx on the windowsill, he ran his bushy tail across his mistress’s face with the regularity of a windscreen wiper. Motan had little time for the old woman’s conversations with passers-by, but his misanthropy did not bother Valeria. No cat was going to dictate to her how much of her time to spend on humans, for this depended solely on the interest she had in the passer-by. Those considered ‘poor of mind’ were summarily dismissed, whereas she latched on to the ‘elevated souls’ and I, vai de loume, was at the top of her list of elevated souls. ‘Bébé is one of us, he’s one of us’, she would tell Motan in the unlikely hope of persuading him to endure my presence, but despite her coaxing, Motan continued to observe me with the disdainful green-grey eyes of a spoilt and spiteful creature. I have never liked cats, black ones in particular, and Bébé is not my real name: my name is Bernard, but family and the neighbours had saddled me with the nickname ‘Bébé’, or even worse, to cajole me, ‘Bébéloush’. Naturally, I hated the one as much as the other. In the same alley, facing the Theodorescus’, was the house of the Cassimatis couple, Radu and Cornelia. They too were of Greek origin like Theodorescu. Radu, dark-skinned and well-built, who smelled of perfume a mile off, was the director of a small import-export company trading with Greece. Cornelia, his beautiful wife, was a teacher at the primary school on Laby­rinth Street, not very far from us, and she was the one who aroused in me the precocious desires of a barely pubescent boy. The two conjoining alleyways of 47 and 49 Triumph Street, led from the entrance gates to a communal roundabout bordered with flowers that served as the meeting place of our little community. From this roundabout, three more alleyways ran in parallel to the back of the courtyard, where sturdy walnut trees and a fence separated us from a large empty lot. On either side of the alleyways, little houses succeeded one another like train carriages pulled up at a railway siding. About twenty families lived in our courtyard and with the exception of the Theodorescus, their servant Maria and the Cassimatis couple, all were of the Mosaic religion, in other words: Jews. The entrance hall and the living room at the front of our house were situated opposite the Cassimatis’ kitchen, near the roundabout. But, other than on days when we received guests, we came in and out of our home, that is, of the Davidescus’ home which we rented, through the kitchen. The tall narrow door, with a rectangular transom, faced west, which was a pity, as the sun did not light up the room when my mother Jenny, started her day’s work, long before my father George, my bro­ther Leo, and I, Bernard (and not Bébé!) began to stir. On entering the kitchen, a table with four chairs was placed near a large cupboard in which the crockery and glassware were kept, along with a number of cooking utensils. An imposing old blackened cooker with a large oven held court from the opposite wall, beyond which a door...