When I turned 45, my daughter, Daria, gave me the book “The Hooligan’s Return” as a birthday present in Brussels, just a few days after the French translation was published. That’s how I discovered Norman Manea and became his friend without him knowing. Norman Manea lived through the horrors of Nazism and Communism, survived the Holocaust and the concentration camp to which he was deported as a child, and knew the dramatic experience of exile. In fact, the theme of exile is a