A dialogue stretching over more than two and a half decades, starting from an exchange of letters in 1982-83 – during the overwhelming degradation of life in Ceauşescu’s Romania and the anti-Semitism of nationalist communism. This epochal document acquires new meaning in the light of subsequent events, such as the public polemic of 1992 regarding Mircea Eliade and his relationship with the Iron Guard, the controversies about Roger Garaudy and the negation of the Holocaust, the new nationalism and corruption of the Romanian political and cultural post-communist elite – as they appear in the ample conversations in Jerusalem (1999) and at Bard College, New York (2007).
Together all these dialogues reconstruct a restless and exemplary life and reveal its obsessions, from identity and exile to literature and religion, from ethics and aesthetics to the most urgent global issues and dangers of today.

“At different ages and in different places, confronted with different problems and dramatic events, Norman Manea and Leon Volovici have maintained in their conversations the ‘normality of dialogue,’ regardless of the tumult around them, the acuity and persistence of ‘self-questioning,’ and have succeeded, in the end, in presenting Norman Manea, (to use his own expression) ‘converted to himself’.” (Sanda Cordoş)