SHADOWS AND FOG.(Romanian writer Norman Manea)(Biography)

The Jewish Romanian writer Norman Manea made his first, abortive attempt at emigration at the age of four, when he ran away from home. He was disgusted, he writes, by "the alluvial, alluring, endless boredom, the comedy played out by the grown-ups, their daily grind of worries, their hypocritical chattering, their marionettes' gestures," and so he set out to look for somewhere to live that was more to his liking. He believed then that the problems of boredom and hypocrisy could be solved by movement: somewhere else there was a place where life was different--he had only to find it.

At the time, the early years of the Second World War, Romania was ruled by the ...