In autumn 1940 Ion Antonescu was appointed prime minister by the Romanian king. In the same year, his fascist military dictatorship joined the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo axis. It has up to 300,000 Jews, around 25,000 Roma and thousands of victims of hunger and cold on their conscience. Antonescu was overthrown by the royal coup in 1944 and executed two years later. Under King Michael I, the monarchy seems to be democratizing itself internally, but falls ever deeper into the political sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, until it is finally merged into the People’s Republic of Romania in 1948. Shortly before King Michael I abdicated and had to leave the country at the end of 1947, Northern Transylvania fell back from Hungary to Romania with the Paris peace treaties.
Andrea Tompa draws on these global political events in her nearly thousand-page novel Omertà which is set in communist Cluj-Napoca in the 1950s. At this point, the Romanian city in western Transylvania is still a melting pot of nationalities, ethnic groups and languages. But the measures to standardize cultural, university and denominational life and the collectivization of agriculture according to the Stalinist model are in full swing and are already establishing new living conditions and existential needs in all social classes. As soon as man is in any way relevant to the system, Securists and other comrades enter his life. And as soon as he becomes a thorn in the side of the representatives of state socialism, he has to reckon with harassment, forced labor or imprisonment.
the book of silence how Omertà in the subtitle means lets four characters have their say, Kali, Vilmos, Annuska and Eleonóra. Vilmos, the rose grower, is allowed to speak the longest. But it is with him of all people that the omertà, the code of silence that he imposes on himself, comes out most clearly. All his speech effort and self-censorship are aimed at not jeopardizing his social advancement from self-taught to university professor and celebrated head of a research institute. At first he was the enthusiastic loner who subordinated everything to the roses, the “test material”, but after his discovery by the socialist scientific establishment he was able to devote himself to them less and less. Although he realizes that academic freedom does not really exist, his self-doubt is not as strong as his desire for advancement. He is also silent on the repressions that are affecting his immediate surroundings. After Kali has his child, he sends them both to the country where he buys them a house so he can have more time for his career.
Omertà is Andrea Tompa’s third novel
Kali is in her late thirties, a farmer’s wife who runs away from her abusive husband and works again as a maid at the Cluj market. It just happens to come to Vilmos. He is happy with her, likes her quick-wittedness and above all her fairy tales, which he has missed since he sent her into even greater isolation. Kali is the epitome of regional folklore. Their costumes and effervescent fairy tales represent a world on the verge of disappearing. In the countryside, she finds solace in Catholic sermons, which Vilmos rejects, just as he rejects all religion, which means that he is entirely in line with the unity party, with the difference that the unity party wants the Orthodox Church to have an absolute monopoly.
The sisters Annuska and Eleonóra are the real victims of the communist ideology. Vilmos is having an affair with Annuska. Her young age, her alcoholic father, her poverty, her renunciation of education in order to earn a living – all this makes her even more vulnerable than Kali. And finally Eleonóra, who, as a nun, feels the full harshness of the ideology because of her faith.
Omertà is Andrea Tompa’s third novel and the first to be published in German. One cannot avoid reading parts of her biography in it. Tompa was born in 1971 in Cluj-Napoca, German Klausenburg, Hungarian Kolozsvár, she belonged to the Hungarian minority in Romania and only emigrated to Hungary in 1990, where she then studied. She very consciously experienced the late socialist republic of Romania.
Omertà is a fascinating novel which, in its four-part writing, shows the entire complexity of the endangered human being in his instinct for self-preservation and desire. “I became addicted reading this book,” Péter Nádas is said to have said. Rightly so, one would like to add! Omerta is a monumental historical novel, unparalleled perhaps only in Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvania trilogy, the last part of which appeared in 1940. You don’t even have to speak Hungarian to appreciate Terézia Mora’s translation. The 2018 Büchner prizewinner has artfully given the characters ways of speaking that vividly tell of conflicts of conscience, confession, self-knowledge and great silence. Their decision to give the names of Transylvanian towns, villages and rivers largely in Hungarian is a language-political one and bears witness to the centuries-long tug-of-war between the representatives of the Romanianization and Magyarization of Transylvania, where a large minority of German-speaking Transylvanian Saxons also lived for a long time. In the appendix you will find some of the names resolved in all three languages.
Omertà – Book of Silence Andrea Tompa Terézia Mora (transl.), Suhrkamp 2022, 954 p., 34 €