Ex-Romanian commentator and writer Andrei Codrescu should be feeling good - but he sees anti-Semitism everywhere.
VAMPIRE MAVENS RECOGnize the Sign of the Cross as the traditional, if increasingly ineffective or even laughable, first line of defense against the undead. For New Orleans-based poet, essayist, teacher, radio commentator and now novelist Andrei Codrescu, though, it is a toss-up which generates greater dread: the mythical "nosferatu" of his native Transylvania or the almost universal gesture used to ward vampires off.
Known for his deadpan, absurdist pontifications on National Public Radio, Codrescu, 49, recently published "The Blood Countess" (Simon & Schuster, 347 pp., $ 23), his first novel, and one based on the exploits of real-life blood fetishist Elizabeth Bathory. This 17th-century Hungarian noblewoman gained notoriety during her day by bathing in the blood of dozens of young virgins in a deranged attempt to sustain her own life and beauty. British writer Bram Stoker considered basing a vampire novel on Bathory's life, but eventually deemed her crimes too repugnant for delicate Victorian sensibilities.
Leaving Bathory for Codrescu to rediscover a full century later, Stoker drew his inspiration instead from a 15th-century ruler of the Wallachian principality, Vlad IV, also known as Vlad the Impaler because during his reign he impaled over 30,000 of his enemies. Ironically, Elizabeth Bathory could claim real blood ties to Prince Stephen Bathory, who helped "Draculya" (son of Vlad Dracul - which means "dragon" or "devil"), or Count Dracula, as he would become known in Stoker's fiction, regain his throne.
Bathory was also an atheist who apparently spent the latter part of her life arguing the absurdity of Christian theology with clergymen who placed her under house arrest after her crimes became known. Like such modern-day literary vampires as L'Estat in Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire," or Barlow in Stephen King's "Salem's Lot," she would not have been deterred by the Sign of the Cross.
The same, alas, may not be said of Codrescu.
"My Jewishness," he recounted in a recent series of E-mail encounters with The Jerusalem Report, "began with the remark by two boys pissing crosswise on a street corner in Sibiu, Transylvania.
" Every time you piss like this, a Jew dies,' one of them said, in my direction." Codrescu was 6 at the time.
Codrescu's Jewishness, which is rarely absent from his writing, finds pointed expression in "The Blood Countess." One of his protagonists is Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a descendant of Elizabeth Bathory's, who fled Hungary for the U.S. in 1956, and who returns after the collapse of communism, becoming enmeshed in the dreams of certain Hungarian intellectuals
of restoring the monarchy. After a short time in his native land, Bathory-Keresh tur begins to realize that real vampires continue to feed on Eastern Europe. Communism is a vampire only partly vanquished by the collapse of the Soviet empire. And although a stake was driven through its heart only half a century ago, fascism, too, has begun once again to stir in the crypt. But no set of fangs has endured longer, or sunk deeper into the cultural jugular, than those of anti-Semitism. Says Codrescu about it: "It's so deep it will take an operation the patient might die from."
Like Bathory-Kereshtur, who though not Jewish becomes convinced in his anguish that he must be, Codrescu still bears their mark. They are embedded in his name, which evolved from Perlmutter to Steiu - courtesy of the Red Star Writers' Wednesday Workshop, to which he belonged in his teens.
"Alas, Steiu when written in cursive," he explained, "looks just like Stein (stone). Not far enough. After years, I settled on Codrescu, which resembled Codreanu, the founder of the Iron Guard, a great anti-Semite. The choice was unconscious. But when I realized it, I kept the name, so as to make Codreanu a footnote in my history.
"In America, I could have ditched the name. I didn't, and am the first of my line." In Romania, Codrescu's parents were both photographers. "He had the fancier studio downtown," he recalls, "she had the run-down one by the train station." Codrescu's father hailed from a family of observant Jews who owned a stall in the town market. But neither parent, he once quipped, could be construed as "good Jews," both having chosen a profession that ran counter to the prohibition against making graven images.
His father, moreover, compounded his sins by sporting leather jackets and tooling around in a black Packard. In rural Sibiu, an old walled medieval fortress town in the Carpathians, this kind of attire and transportation usually marked one as a member of the secret police. Whenever the elder Perlmutter passed by, doors would click shut and people would cross themselves. But Codrescu's father was neither a vampire nor, his son says, an agent.
"My father was a Communist, at least theoretically, but in essence he had the bohemian vocation. He had a black car, a motorcycle, 100 girlfriends,
played poker all night with Communist Party brass, and, generally, according to my mother, wasted his life," Codrescu recounts.
Codrescu left Romania for Detroit, assuming his rightful place in an American Bohemia thanks to a cash advance from the State of Israel, which under Ceausescu in 1966 began ransoming its Jews to Jerusalem. Codrescu, who with his mother made a beeline to the States instead, once boasted having cost the Jewish state $ 10,000. When asked when it might expect restitutio n, however, he reassessed the price of his freedom to about $ 3,000.
"I think I was exaggerating because I felt that I was worth, well, more, you know," he told The Jerusalem Report. "I will begin to pay it back once I get an advance for my next novel, (tentatively entitled) Messiah Throng.'" The book, which Codrescu researched during a trip to Israel last year, is about an adolescent female wannabe messiah who sojourns briefly in Jerusalem before heading "where any hip messiah would - to CNN headquarters in Atlanta." That's all he will say about the book.
CODRESCU, WHO PLANS TO return to Israel for further research, has never lived near Ted Turner. But for a guy who only recently began to drive, he does manage to get around. In America, Codrescu quickly fell under the tutelage of poets Ted Berrigan and Allen Ginsberg, and was befriended by Beat poet Tuli Kupferberg. A stint as a visiting writer at Johns Hopkins University begat an op-ed piece for the Baltimore Sun, which, in turn, brought him to the attention of National Public Radio.
Listeners to "All Things Considered," NPR's evening news and features magazine, still recall the time he characterized "Wheel of Fortune" hostess Vanna White as his "favorite Dadaist artist." Codrescu eventually wrote a play, "The Marriage of Joseph Stalin and Vanna White," in which he considered Stalin's writings against excerpts from White's memoir, "Vanna Speaks." Asked to explain the rationale behind the incongruous pairing of the two, Codrescu explains that "Vanna White is the apex of commercialism, an ideology resembling Stalinism in ways it would take too long to enumerate. Suffice it to mention the apathy of the consumer classes, and the pervading fears associated with one's credit (party) card."
Fans also recall the time Codrescu matter-of-factly explained the line "What's the frequency, Kenneth?" which had been repeatedly intoned by the two men who otherwise inexplicably beat up CBS-News anchorman Dan Rather outside a New York hotel in 1986, and has since become a national catchphrase.
"The suspicion gnaws at me," announced Codrescu in a masterful stroke of demystification, "that Kenneth' just may be the name of that demon that hides inside all of us media people. All the news you hear comes from Kenneth. Kenneth is plugged into the central frequency of the world brain."
Codrescu achieved cult status, however, in 1993, when he became convinced he should stop mooching lifts from his friends and learn how to drive. He rented a red 68 Cadillac convertible and allowed himself to be filmed driving across an American landscape and visiting individuals and sites only a Transylvanian Jew teaching English in Louisiana could imagine, never mind actually locate. The 82-minute documentary, "Road Scholar," generated major buzz at Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival, and was shown in art film houses and on public television. It also cemented Codrescu's burgeoning reputation as latter-day Alexis de Tocqueville with a Kafkaesque eye for the absurd, a wry paranoia distilled from a Philip K. Dick novel, and an accent "Rocky and Bullwinkle's" Boris Badunov would have killed for.
Asked about his unique status as America's only "Romanian-born, American-adopted multimedia pundit," as he was once referred to by the Los Angeles Times, Codrescu once said, "I made it all up, it wasn't something that was there before. It's a very American idea - invent a need and then fill it."
But Codrescu, who teaches at Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge, while editing a literary journal called "The Exquisite Corpse," takes great umbrage at suggestions that the uniquely Jewish experience and sensibility so evident in his writing may not come through quite so clearly - and perhaps for good reason - in his radio work.
AS A SHARP-TONGUED ROMANIan intellectual who appears to have inadvertently inherited the "Letter from America" mantle left by the BBC's Alistair Cooke, Codrescu easily invokes the romance, irony and dark sarcasm one expects from someone hailing from Dracula's old haunts.
Indeed, in vampire-savvy 90s America, an exotic accent can actually provide an advantage. But would that advantage suffer, I wonder, if fans were to perceive Codrescu not as a charmingly accented media iconoclast, but as yet another funny-talking Jew putting his classic alienation to good use?
"You insinuate," he responds acidly, "that I'm more Romanian than Jewish on the radio, as if this was a conscious mercantile decision to charm the suckers who listen. I find this both offensive and stupid. I do what I do because only I can do it. You can't, and neither can millions of others, no matter what they decide is commercially appropriate."
Despite his singular talents, Codrescu is not sanguine about the future, whether viewed from the vantage point of a Jew or a poet. As a Jew living in America, Codrescu does not imagine himself to be beyond the clutches of renascent fascism. "The American potential for turning on Jews," he insists, "is great and increasing, in direct ratio to the rise of fascism around the world."
The world's propensity for turning on its poets, meanwhile, may be even greater. Codrescu attributes the testiness of his response to my query, for instance, to a "cranky academic conference" he attended in St. Paul, Minnesota, where he says literature professor and Palestinian ideologue Edward Said proposed assigning a cultural commissar to every poet to ensure political correctness.
"To this time-warp Marxism," says Codrescu, "there is barely any answer save yech!'"