The only pain which I understand directly and instinctively, without needing it explained, is the pain of discouragement.

I too had breathed the diffuse poison of hostility, I too knew what it was like to have someone swear at you over their shoulder, or to land a punch without a word, or to slam a door in your face.

I’d known all these things, day after day, breathing the same adversity, bearing down on you from all around, anonymously, stubbornly, without beginning or end. Today, recalling it, this drama looks puerile and overdone to me. But back then, along with the experience of my first lamentable years of university, it was a burden I suffered. Anybody I met could have been an enemy, every hand held out could have been about to strike you.

Even Blidaru I approached with apprehension. The uproar at the university, the street fights and the tension of that year of confrontation maintained my consciousness of the sin of being a Jew like an ever-raw wound. I turned this feeling into an obsession, a mania, and now I understand that my perturbation was excessive, and it must have been deadly tedious to anybody not involved. The naivety of those with something to hide – a crime, a disgrace, a drama – is that they imagine they are under suspicion. In reality, there’s a strong dose of indifference in the world, enough that you can go off and die and nobody will notice. In the case of Jews, their mistake is that they observe too much and thereby believe themselves to be under scrutiny. Back then, I felt interrogated by every glance cast my way. I felt hounded. I felt the urgent, comic need to denounce myself: I’m a Jew. I was sure that if I didn’t I’d sink into compromise, that I’d slide into a series of lies, that I’d sully the part of me that longed for truth. More than once I envied the simple life of the ghetto Jew, wearing his yellow patch. A humiliating idea perhaps, but comfortable and clear-cut, because they had finally put an end to the horrible comedy of uttering their own name like a denunciation.

I’ve never had a conversation with someone without wondering apprehensively whether they know I’m a Jew and, if so, whether they’ll forgive me or not. This was a real problem to me, and caused me an absurd degree of suffering and awkwardness. So, I had resolved long ago to renounce all equivocation and to clarify the matter from the outset, confessing everything brusquely and readily, which must often have seemed the mark of aggressive pride, when in fact it was only wounded pride.

I tried behaving this way with Vieru, right from the first day, to explain myself concerning this issue, but he quickly cut me short.

‘My dear fellow, it doesn’t concern me. It’s a personal matter and I beg you to keep it to yourself. Do you want me to tell you if I’m an anti-Semite? I don’t know. I’m not familiar with the matter, it doesn’t interest me, never could. But I’ll say one thing: any general judgement about a category of people gives me the shudders. I’m not a mystic. I have a horror of generalizations. I can only judge specific cases, individual people, detail by detail.’

I thought he was trying to be nice. Later though, getting to know him, I realized how sincere his opening declaration was. It wasn’t directed at me personally, but reflected his convictions. I subsequently found this to be true not only in Vieru’s attitude to anti-Semitism – in the end a minor matter for him – but in his attitude as an artist, a critic and an architect.

I think it was in the first year of the Uioara project that someone turned up one fine day to ask his opinion for a feature in The Universe about ‘the national character’. I cut out his reply and still have it today.

There is doubtless such a thing as a ‘national character’. In art, it is the lowest common denominator. The more specific the character, the more commonplace it is. That is why creation always requires overcoming such a character.

An artist, if he is anything, is an individual.