
ROMÂNUL
He’s spent his whole life waiting for luck, looking for signs of it with a kind of fatalism, and he supplements this fatalism with the best skills of a shrewd hunter and gatherer, picking up booty like me.
—Bruce Benderson, The Romanian: Story of an ObsessionYOU COULD SAY, couldn’t you, that André Cadere’s métier was incompatibility?
The incompatibility of the exile, of the emigrant?
The incompatibility of border-crossing?
Of trespassing?
Of crashing the party?
Incompatibility, even, with Romania, where he was born the son of a diplomat who was arrested in 1952, then convicted, without a trial, of