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During the decade following the establishment of the Communist regime, the dilemmas Jewish Romanian writers faced, included new elements. The reintegration of many Jewish writers into cultural life, and their promotion to positions of cultural prestige, were obtained in exchange for an ideological conformism. Some, such as Isaac Ludo,Uri Benador, Maria Banuş, Veronica Porumbacu , Marcel Breslaşu, and Aurel Baranga, did not resist the socialist realism temptation that seemed to provide a perfect solution to the dilemmas of identity. Some of them paid for this commitment with artistic failure, while the most gifted of them, succeed later in freeing themselves from ideological restrictions and regaining their art.
The evocation of the Holocaust was remarkable even during this period when literature was dominated by the official ideology. The trauma of pogroms and of the Transnistrian camps, or of Nazi camps, was reflected in many literary works in the first years after the war, with outstanding achievements in the poetry of Maier Rudich, Maria Banuş, Ştefan Iureş and Veronica Porumbacu and Paul Celan, whose famous Todesfuge was released in Romanian in May 1947, when he was still in Bucharest. The Holocaust was also present in the works of writers like Ieronim Şerbu, Matei Gall, and Norman Manea ,Alexandru Sever and Virgil Duda.
Starting in the late 1960s, as Jewish writers freed themselves from ideological restrictions, they embraced their Jewish identity, and stood in the foreground of Romanian literary life. Attempting to revive a tradition, they wanted to connect with the past and to the Jewish writers between the two world wars: Fondane, Sebastian, Aderca, Blecher, Peltz, Bonciu and Voronca. This action was supported by a similar trend in general Romanian literature, when literary critics published new editions of these Jewish writers’ works, emphasizing Jewish characteristics, perceived as a means of enriching the Romanian literary heritage.
The rediscovery of Jewish traditions is evident in the works of writers from the generation after the war, among them, Alexandru Mirodan, Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu , Lucian Raicu, Vera Călin, Zigu Ornea, Henri Wald and Henri Zalis. Some of them also began to write for Revista cultului mozaic(Periodical of the Mosaic Religion.) They did it as an act of protest against the antisemitic attacks launched in the 1980s in the periodical Săptămîna (The Week), by the writer Eugen Barbu and the poet Corneliu Vadim Tudor.
Some of those authors wrote exceptional memoirs from the period of war and antisemitic persecutions. Among them, Maria Banuş' journl Sub camuflaj. Jurnal 1943–1944 (Under Camouflage: Journal 1943–1944), published in 1978, and the memoir written by the theorist Ion Ianoşi, Secolul nostru cel de toate zilele (Our Everyday Century, 1980), with its direct approach to Judaism and praise for the spiritual and moral advantage of being part of a “minority.”
In this atmosphere, some Jewish writers of the younger generation initiated a process of rediscovering Jewish tradition. Among them, Norman Manea, whose fiction includes reflections on the process of assuming an identity.His most revealing works in this respect areOctombrie, ora opt (October,8O’Clock, 1981) and A Hooligan’s Return (2003), a brilliant memoir written in exile.
Some of the writers who made their mark in the Communist era, wrote their best books after the fall of the dictatorship. Among those who remained in Romania, Radu Cosaşu became one of the most prominent with his Supraviețuirile (The Survivals; 2002–2006). The same generation included writers B. Elvin and Gheorghe Schwartz, and Adriana Bittel.
During the Communist years, and mainly during NicolaeCeauşescu’s dictatorship, a large number of Jewish writers left Romania and settled in Israel, where they continued to write in Romanian. Among those were the poets M. Rudich, Sebastian Costin and EranSela, Shaul Carmel, Solo Har-Herescu , the writers Iosif Petran, I. Schechter, Duda, Sever , Andrei Fischof, Gina Sebastian-Alcalay, Bianca Marcovici, Tania Lovinescu, the playwright Mirodan, and others.While editing the monthlyMinimum(since 1987),Alexandru Mirodan wrote Dicționarul neconvențional al scriitorilor evrei de limbă română ( Unconventional Dictionary of Jewish Writers in Romanian, the two first volumes were published in 1986 and 1997), a captivating combination of literary scholarship and personal reflection.
Alexandru Mirodan, Dicționar neconvențional al scriitorilor evrei de limbă română, 2 vols. Tel Aviv, 1986–1997
Leon Volovici, Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s, trans. Charles Kormos , Oxford, 1991
A. B. Yoffe, Be-Sadotzarim: Sofrimyehudim be-Romanyah, 1880–1940 ,Tel Aviv, 1996, abstract and table of contents also in English
Henri Zalis, ed., Contribuția scriitorilor evrei la literatura română , Bucharest, 2001
