In Norman Manea’s Bucovina

The Romanian-jew writer Norman Manea was born in Bucovina in 1936. During the Second World War, as a child, he ended up in a concentration camp in Transnistria. He left Romania in 1986. Since 1989 he has been a literature professor and resident writer at the New York Bard College. The most translated Romanian writer returned to Bucovina in 2008. This trip to his native Bucovina followed a week in which his being festively received by the press and by his readers turned him into a late star.

The author of the “The Hooligan`s return” came to see again the places of his childhood, went to the Jewish cemetery in Suceava at his mother`s grave, spent the Orthodox Easter at Dragomirna, sat down again in his bench at the highschool he graduated from, he saw again the places where his family got deported.

The exiled in the USA Romanian Jew wanted to share the experience of this trip with his friend Antonio Tabucchi – the writer with two countries: Italy and Portugal. A declared literary friendship, whose testimony will become a book.