Speaking East

The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou

Andrew Hussey

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781789144932
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies

A vibrant account of both the sensuous cultural scene of postwar Paris and the life of an alluring icon of modern art. Isidore Isou was a young Jew in wartime Bucharest who barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris, where, in 1945, he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, and May '68. In Speaking East, Andrew Hussey presents a colorful picture of the postwar Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avantgarde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafés, and where Isou—as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis—gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank, and had sex with the Parisian intellectual élite. This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of modern art.

PART I

A Romanian Youth (1925–45)

O, țară tristă, plină de umor
Oh, sad land, full of humour

GEORGE BACOVIA, Cu Voi (With You; 1956)

one

Yiddishland

Botoşani was once a handsome town. The town that Isou knew was sometimes called ‘little Leipzig’ because the houses and shops on the main street, Calea Națională, were built in the same style as those in Leipzig. This style is sometimes called Leipziger or Sächsische Barock (Leipzig or Saxon Baroque): it is characterized by rich, creamy ornamentation grafted onto the solid and squat buildings. Some of these buildings are still standing in Centrul Vechi (the old centre) of Botoşani; but most of the streets there are now half-wrecked and crowded out by communist-era grey or twenty-first-century steel and glass.

The rest of Botoşani is a dismal, half-built suburban sprawl. Botoşani is indeed now fairly typical of the ‘Wild East’ of Europe, closer to the Ukraine or Moldava than any of the great capitals of Western or Central Europe. Unemployment is high here and one of the few thriving commercial activities is smuggling, mainly petrol and cigarettes and also sometimes people, making for the migrant routes westwards.

At the southern edge of the town is the old Jewish cemetery halfway down Șoseaua Iașului, a nondescript road leading out of Botoşani to the town of Târgu Frumos and then the regional capital Iași. The Jewish cemetery in Botoşani is vast and the new part is still used by the tiny band of Jews who continue to live here. The rest of the cemetery is impenetrable, overgrown and abandoned. Still the graves here are regularly desecrated.

The New York-based academic Mitchell Cohen came here in 1990, writing a book in pursuit of the town’s lost Jewish past. He described it to me as ‘a truly awful place’. He also told me that while speaking in bad Yiddish to one of the local Jewish leaders, he switched to Hebrew, which Cohen knew that they both spoke fluently. The man refused then to speak at all, avoiding any public usage of what was his own first language. ‘This was not out of shame but fear,’ said Cohen.¹

When Isidore Isou spent his earliest years here, there were around 30,000 Jews living in Botoşani and its surrounding districts. Yiddish and Hebrew were as widely and openly spoken as Romanian, Russian or Ruthenian (a local variety of German). Botoşani was part of what was called ‘Jiddischland’, or ‘Yiddishland’, a term used by historians to describe the floating zone between Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Hungary and Romania that, before the Holocaust, was home to 11 million Jews. In this part of Eastern Europe, several varieties of Yiddish were the first language of everyday life.

The typical Jewish market town in this region was called a shtetl, a Yiddish term derived from the south German word Städtel/Städtle, meaning ‘little town’. The street life of a shtetl was mainly dominated by Jews and had a distinctly Oriental atmosphere – there were Jewish coachmen in high boots, with long, curly locks and rustic clothing, open markets with butchers and livestock, Russian or Romanian peasants, and a few Christian townspeople. The shop signs were in Latin, Cyrillic and Hebrew letters. An early photograph of Botoşani shows such scenes and a town built of two-storey houses with a shop on the ground floor and family apartment above. Nearly all of the houses were made of wood, apart from a handful of stone mansions belonging to the wealthy classes. The streets were, depending on the season, mainly mud.

The artist Arthur Segal – whose real name was Aron Sigalu – grew up in Botoşani and hated it. Segal came from a banking family and he led a relatively privileged life. But he despised the dull and brutish natives of Botoşani, as well as the Orthodox Jews, the Yiddish and Hebrew languages and the prayers at the synagogue. Eventually the way out for Segal was through Dada, as one of the founders of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 – the cabaret where Dada was invented and first presented to the public. But when he started painting as a young man in Botoşani Segal was not yet a radical avant-gardist; his early paintings of the town and region are figurative and romantic. The tones are also dark, the mood is melancholy and you can sense that he was dissatisfied and angry that he had to live here.²

For a large part of his life, Isou would claim that he felt the same way about the place. But Botoşani was not quite as provincial as Segal, or indeed Isou, made out. For one thing it was famous as the birthplace of Mohai Eminescu, the national poet of Romania. Eminescu’s ambition was to make the Romanian language a great language rather than a provincial dialect of Eastern Europe. Like all Romanian nationalists of the nineteenth century, Eminescu was also a passionate antisemite.

Postcard of Carol Square, Botoșani, early 20th century.

In reality, contrary to the grumblings of Segal, and later Isou, Botoşani was quite civilized by the standards of the era and region. The Marxist philosopher Lucien Goldmann, who made his name in post-Second World War Paris, was brought up in the Jewish life of Botoşani in the early twentieth century. In his unpublished autobiography, Goldmann describes ‘[a] town [which] probably differs little from many other Moldavian towns. Within it there were two communities which were numerically almost equal: Jews and Christians. Some [Jews] were quite rich but the majority was extremely poor.’³ The Jews mainly worked in craft or commerce, while all the public positions in the civil and military bureaucracy were held by Christians, who were also manual workers and labourers.

As Mitchell Cohen describes it, Botoşani was a crossroads for trade passing back forth between Russia and Austria. As such it was prosperous enough to support a lively civic and cultural life; it had a good theatre and several high-quality publishing houses. It also had numerous Jewish houses of worship. The town’s chief rabbi, Ezra Zuckerman, had an excellent library of Jewish ceremonial art.⁴

Botoşani was not, however, quite the model shtetl. As Lucien Goldmann also pointed out, its population was too mixed between Christians and Jews to properly qualify for this status. The Jew-hatred of the Christians – the ‘true Romanians’ – occasionally came to the surface. There were anti-Jewish riots in Botoşani in 1870; Jews were attacked in the street and businesses looted. More serious still was the so-called ‘Peasants’ Revolt’ of 1907, which quickly spread across the region but began in Botoşani.

According to one account, peasants ‘went on a rampage through the old town centre’. Old Believers (Russian Orthodox fundamentalists) emptied out Jewish stores and encouraged ‘true’ Christians to drive the Jews away from their territory. The populist newspaper Moldava de Sus (Northern Moldavia) called upon ‘all true Romanians to save our ancestral land and our race from the infernal plans of the Yids’.⁵

Jews had no rights in this part of Romania until after the First World War. But they were allowed to be arendaşi – effectively managers on the estates of large landowners. Unlike the non-Jewish arendaşi, the Jews were not allowed to eventually buy the land they managed. This status made Jews doubly hated by the peasants: they were the instruments of the landlord’s will but with no connection to the countryside. This was a dangerous position to be in; as Leon Trotsky explained it after a visit to Romania, this was how, ‘while serving as a tool of feudal exploitation, the right-less Jew has at the same time to serve as the lightning conductor for the wrath of the exploited.’⁶ When land reforms were introduced after the First World War, the arendaşi disappeared. But the resentment towards the Jidan (Dirty Jew) still lingered. Orthodox peasants cheered the Romanian troops, retreating from Russia, who took out their anger and humiliation on the Jews of the region.⁷

By the time of Isou’s birth his family, the Goldsteins, had been established in Botoşani for three generations. They were Ashkenazi Jews and spoke Yiddish and Romanian with equal fluency. Yiddish (and some Hebrew) was associated with home and religion, and German, French and Russian with the outside world. When they spoke Romanian, like all the Jews from the region, they spoke with what Mihail Sebastian called ‘a questioning lilt that comes from Yiddish’.⁸

Isou’s paternal grandfather was a barrel-maker and the family was not rich. However, by the time that Isou was born the Goldstein family was wealthy enough to have two homes, one in the poorer and older quarter of Botoşani, where the family had its roots, and which was nicknamed Calicime (the Romanian for ‘paupers’ or ‘beggars’), and the other in the new, commercial part of town. The family spent the dog-days of summer in the shade of the old town. The ‘paupers’ who lived here were mainly country people, still new to town life and who brought with them the habits and superstitions of the countryside. When business began once more with the bustle of the autumn harvest, the Goldsteins moved back again to the centre of the new town, to a parade of handsome two-storey buildings in the Leipziger style.

This is where Isou’s father, Jindrich Goldstein, controlled his mini empire of shops across the Botoşani region. Isou described his father as the ‘Romanian Félix Potin’ – Félix Potin being a famous chain of Paris grocery shops. Isou despised his father for his money-grubbing. He was not above corruption – a house was burnt down by Jindrich to collect the insurance. Even though this was the kind of scam that ensured that the Goldsteins lived the good life, Isou thought it was mean and stupid.

He also saw his father as a show-off and a bore. Jindrich was a well-respected businessman with a taste for high culture. He was not Romanian but Hungarian (a nationality that made him doubly unpopular, as a Jew and a Hungarian, with the local ‘true Romanians’). He was also extremely good-looking; when he made a first visit to the local kindergarten to check on the little Isou’s progress, women clustered around him.

Jindrich was also well travelled, a fact that he often boasted loudly about in front of his friends and family. Among his businesses he ran a popular ‘estaminet’, or café, and he loved to hold forth to its clientele. He had been to France, Italy, Germany, Greece and Turkey, as well as to all the other Balkan countries. Isou was embarrassed about Jindrich’s tendency to show off but most of all it made him wonder, from the earliest age, why did they still live in dreary Botoşani?⁹

Isou’s first and greatest ally in the long war against his father was his younger sister Fanny. When arguments between the teenage Isou and his father turned violent – which was often the case – Fanny always defended her brother, calmly and without hesitation. Isou called her his Antigone – the grieving sister in the tragedy by Sophocles who, risking her life, goes against the king by ensuring that the body of her rebellious brother has a proper funeral. There was another younger sister called Ora (meaning ‘my light’ in Hebrew), born in 1936, who was also sometimes called Clarisse. But it was Fanny whom Isou loved best. She in turn stayed faithful to him to the end of both their lives, writing to him affectionately, now with her married name of Steiner, from her home to the north of Tel Aviv.

To reward her courage, Isou declared that he would give the entire proceeds of his first Nobel Prize to Fanny – this could not be far off, he assured her. He also promised to make sure that she married well, wedding a ‘Young Lord’ as ‘young and beautiful as myself’. Fanny was an icon of feminine purity. Isou recalled an incident on a train in Sambothely (now Szombathely in Hungary) when he met a young girl who looked just like Fanny. He gave her sweets and bought her sandwiches. The following day, on seeing Isou kiss another girl, the younger girl burst into tears. Isou was deeply moved by this, and especially so because the younger girl ‘had the same look as my sister when I used to slap her’.¹⁰

These statements are typical of the young Isou – provocative, amoral and grandiose. The model was not Romanian but the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, precociously gifted and defiant. Isou thought himself a revolutionary rebel in the same mould. Slapping his younger sister was no more important than making love to a girl whom he had just met and did not care about. But there was also obviously an emotional affinity. He adored Fanny for her gentleness. In this she incarnated a kind of feminine ideal, and most importantly this ideal was directly opposed to the boorish, masculine world of his father.

Isou attended a kindergarten and was mentored there by a certain Loewenstein, who was the director of the school and who encouraged Isou to read beyond his years in Romanian. Isou claimed that at the age of four he had a reading age of seven and that by the age of five he was easily accomplishing everything that children were just learning at the age of nine. This was only the beginning, said Isou, of his ascent.¹¹

Most of his early schooling was, claimed Isou, a bore. He listened to stories of gods, angels and Romanian history with indifference. Isou’s early years, like all Jewish children of his class and era, were entirely shaped by the regular, unchanging pattern of school, Sabbath, family obligations and religious festivals – all more or less common to the Central European Jewish bourgeoisie. He began his studies in the Botoşani Yeshiva – a Jewish educational institution devoted mainly to religious study. It was around this time (1932) that Jews were forbidden to speak Yiddish in the streets of Botoşani.

Around this time, Jews in Botoşani could expect to be insulted and sometimes physically attacked on a daily basis. The town was also home, however, to the Botoşani chapter of HaShomer Ha Tsair (the Young Guard), a Zionist and socialist youth movement that offered political, and sometimes physical, resistance to the antisemites. Inspired by the unlikely combination of Freud, Marx and Baden-Powell, this group was founded in Galicia, Austria-Hungary, and tried to imbue young Jews with a sense of moral perfection – a religious spirit without being religious. The reading was eclectic: the Prophets, the Essenes, the Hasidism and the New Testament as well as the ‘Romantic anti-capitalism’ of Gustav Wyneken or indeed Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea – be friended by Trotsky when he visited Romania and described by the Marxist philosopher as ‘Romania’s Marx’.¹²

Other cultural influences in Botoşani included Zayde [Grandpa] Schwarz’s bookshop, which stocked books in French, German and Yiddish and a few books in English.¹³ This was a regular meeting place for young communists, who organized the ‘Botoşani Reading Circle’. The shop was shut down in 1938 on the orders of no less than King Carol II, who was then starting to imitate the anti-communist and anti-Jewish positions of Adolf Hitler. Like most of the Romanian elite until this point, Carol had been staunchly Francophile. Now, he had decided to turn his back on his traditional allies and throw his hand in with Hitler. He was suspicious of ‘communism’ in both France and Russia and convinced too that the Germans would win any coming war.

King Carol II also loudly declared his belief that Jews in northeast Romania were really infiltrators from Russia and either communists or communist sympathizers. More to the point, he thought that they were all too ready to hand over Romanian territory to their Soviet masters at the first opportunity. Throughout the end of the 1930s, the propaganda from Bucharest intensified into a crescen...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Introduction: ‘All Poets Are Yids!’
• PART I. A ROMANIAN YOUTH (1925–45)
• PART II. PARIS SEEN BY A STRANGER (1945–68)
• PART III. THE DIVINITY OF ISOU (1968–2007)
• REFERENCES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PHOTO ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX