Dear Colleague, 

Thank you for your brilliant speech delivered here in the Great Hall of the Romanian Academy to which you now belong. It was a pleasure listening to you after reading your books and following the rough path of your biography. The rule of the Romanian Academy requires that I answer this Reception Speech. I will do it briefly, starting from your subjective literature, i.e. from the two considerably large volumes of Memoirs: “All Rivers flow into the Sea” and “The Sea Won’t Fill”… While reading I tried to discover the man (the inside man), the phantasms of your literature and what the old French moralists called la qualité maîtresse, the essential trait of your spirit… Let me begin with the last one. My impression is that in everything you write one feels that in your spirit there is a permanent, benefic struggle between the man of action and the man of reflection, the redeeming fighter (not in the military but in the moral sense) and the man intent on his studies. I do not know in modern literature such a religious spirit (I could even call it a mystical spirit), such a restless and passionate one. At the same time: let me repeat the word of a great French humanist, a spirit which should transform l’existance en conscience and make conscience (his and his contemporaries’)  work, not let it sleep. I would like to quote Sartre here, the Sartre cursed today and so much adored in the past: the true intellectual assumes the burden of the world or the true responsibility of the committed intellectual is the world as a whole. But unlike him, I think you do not believe  that an individual should be sacrificed for the benefit of humanity… If so, then you are right: there is no reason in the world that should account for sacrificing  an individual… We, in Eastern Europe have lived half a century in a world that taught us that the reasons of history were superior and that in their names a simple man could be sacrificed. It was an ideology or moral that caused many misfortunes…Let me resume my idea: I think that your essential trait is that of a modern moralist who wants to make moral work… and manages to do it brightly.

Regarding the phantasms in your literature – I have noticed that there are two that repeat themseles: Sighet and your father… Wherever you are, you remember Sighet, your space of origin, the matrix… In Oslo, in the hall where you receiverd the Nobel  Prize, in Washington - in the President’s Office at the White House, in Jerusalem, where you often go, you always talk about the small town of Maramureş, where you spent your childhood with your parents and sisters, Hilda, Bea and Tibuca…Here are your roots, here is your start, here the child and the teenager you were discovered the beauty of the world, but unfortunately, also the attrocities of an irrational history. Sighet is also connected to the image of your father, that keeps coming forth. While delivering the reception speech in Oslo you saw, behind your son, your own father, and the long tried mature man underwent a moment of extreme emotion. I must confess that I liked the fact that in a century in which the father was excluded from the equation of the spirit, you continued to defend the institution of paternity. Here  again you are different from Sartre (who maintained that as a rule all fathers were bad and that the institution of paternity was rotten) and from Eugene Ionesco who saw in his father the emasculating father, l’ogre… You are different from so many 20^th century writers, called by some the parricide century. I like the fact that you did not abandon, not even in your literature, your wise and loyal father.

There are two other characters in your Memoirs I would like to mention here: Moses the Mad you met at Sighet when you returned 20 years after your deportation. Moses had predicted the Apocalypse but nobody had listened. After passing through it, he returned to his native town. The only survivor… You were happy to see him so you asked him whether he wanted something. After some time Moses the Mad answered: “Let Messiah  come, let him show himself, let him hurry. This is my dearest wish”… Had I seen it in a fiction work, I would have considered it an extraordinary epic invention. But as I see it in a book of memoirs I say it is an absolutely touching statement, made by someone who seems to have descended on earth from Dostoievski’s work. Then there is a peasant, Maria, a Christian, your family’s servant who crossed the ghetto to bring you food and to beg you to hide in her house in the mountains in order to save you. It is a beautiful image of what we call Romanian kindness, sympathy, tolerance, pity.

I would like to end by saying that as long as there is a Maria to defy the wilderness of history, there is still hope for man. Sometimes a simple naive being may save the honour of an irrational history…                                                                             

                                                                                                Eugen Simion