Looking for absence in Cluj-Napoca

I am writing from Cluj-Napoca, Transylvania, in present-day Romania. I came here for a week-long initial visit, beginning a long research project on the afterlife of Hasidic communities in this region. The territory now incorporated into the state of Romania is a fascinating region, a meeting point of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires.

I was first inspired to embark on my research journey after reading Elie Wiesel’s novel, Gates of the Forest. One of my teachers recommended this book to me based on my interest in mysticism and catastrophe (one of the theoretical focuses of my PhD research.) Indeed, the novel offered more to my imagination than anything I had read before in this regard. Wiesel tells the story of an orphaned teenage boy during the Holocaust, who hides in the forest from soldiers and their dogs. After his father leaves and doesn’t return, the character Gregor is totally alone, until he is joined by an angelic version of himself who has Gregor’s own Hebrew name, Gavriel.

The novel would suggest that it’s impossible to be alone in Romania. Gregor, or Gavriel as he is later called in the story, lives in an enchanted forest. First he finds safe haven in a Hungarian village, then he joins a group of teenagers forming a Partisan militancy. All along, his angelic alter ego guides the way, in clear or obscure ways.

So far my trip has not gone exactly as I expected. Searching for Jewish history, I’ve encountered closed doors. I have traveled to many distant places before in my life, but always been lucky enough to travel with others who were familiar with the environment, and made quick new connections that facilitated my integration. I came to Romania alone, driven by an unexplainable spiritual desire, my only justification for which was found in Wiesel’s mystic novel. I came to try to find something—anything–that demonstrates a connection between present-day life in Cluj and the history of Jewish ancestors. I was warned by many people that there are really, truly, no longer any Jewish people here. Nonetheless, I believe in haunting, the expression of pain that puts time out of joint.

So far there is very little haunting even to be found here, at least to my perception. The sensation of absence and a lost, sorrowful time is supplanted by anhedonia, a failure to feel the presence of anything Jewish absent or present. I visited the Muzeon Jewish History Museum in Cluj, which is no more than a few small rooms underground containing pictures and artifacts of Jewish life in Cluj between 1900 and 1944. There is no writing on the walls; instead, visitors are prompted to scan a QR code which directs to an audio guide. You choose one of three narrators, who tell a fictionalized (but based on something true) personal story of the Holocaust. I was anxious walking through the museum because my phone’s battery was dying. I paused the audio play and read the accompanying text on my phone. 

I was most moved by a room in the small museum that imitates the train cars that transported Jews from the ghetto of Cluj to concentration camps. I am thoroughly haunted by Elie Wiesel’s description of these train cars in his Yiddish Holocaust testimony, Un Di Velt Hot Geshvign (a condensed, and mostly rewritten version of which later became the French and English book Night/Nuit.) Nonetheless, the stories the museum told were already thoroughly familiar to me. As the granddaughter of a Holocaust refugee, I can’t really remember a time when I didn’t already know stories like this.

I also tried to visit two synagogues, one of which was rebuilt after WWII and is now the Reform synagogue in the region. The other building, no longer a synagogue, is now run by an outstanding cultural institution called Tranzit House. Both doors were locked, unsurprisingly. I am optimistic about revisiting, and next time gaining entry.

Standing outside these locked doors, I could not even feel the presence of something mystical. I have trained myself through meditative practice to become more perceptive of ethereal remnants. Frequently, while in meditation, I see the image of an open door with someone entering. Here, awake and in the world, I sat in the grassy yard of the Reform synagogue and felt confused and out of place, evidently unguided by anyone living or dead, in a foreign city in Eastern Europe where people were reasonably friendly and spoke English, but none would be able to help me find what I’m looking for.

This morning I visited the Jewish cemetery (pictured below). I am happy to report I did feel something. I approached the gated lot and saw that I’d arrived outside visiting hours. Nonetheless, I tried to turn the gate handle, and this door just happened to be unlocked.

I saw gravestones first in Romanian for the recently deceased, with some Hebrew letters, then as I regressed further, the languages changed to Hungarian, German, and Hebrew. The oldest graves, of course, were illegible. I regretted not coming with paper and crayon to scratch against the surface and reveal the letters I couldn’t see. Everything was overgrown by grass, mushrooms, and fruit trees, but nothing seemed purposely defaced (unlike the Jewish cemetery in Vienna, where my own ancestors are laid.)

What broke me was the Auschwitz graves. These stones said things, below the names of the deceased, like “In Memoriam! Auschwitz. 5704.” I saw several of these stones before it occurred to me that, of course, the deceased bodies were not actually present underground; the people themselves would have been burned in the infamous crematoria. Nonetheless, someone, their descendants perhaps, decided to plant a stone marking the absence of the absence. Not even the mes, the dead body, to signal the departure of the soul. Simply writing on a smooth rock in the place where a person used to live, in the tract of land dedicated to the Jewish dead.

Bizarre as it may sound, I felt deeply encouraged by this visit to the cemetery. I played Lecha Dodi on my phone as I walked out past the graves. I finally experienced the absence of the absence, the haunting of what cannot be recovered, even in disjointed time. Perhaps Jews are more remembered elsewhere in this region, and I intend to spend much more time looking harder, in more places, in the future. I leave for Paris on Sunday. This has been a fascinating trip.