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Literature in Romania is probably the artistic field in which Jewish presence was the most prominent. The first Jewish authors writing in Romanian published their work in the second half of the nineteenth century, a time when the first works of artistic value were published in Romanian. Until then, French was the language of the intellectuals in Romania.
The first known Jewish writer in Romanian is Cilibi Moise, a peddler who published maxims full of popular wisdom and humor, and attracted a wide audience beyond the Jewish community.
In the late nineteenth century, a large group of Jewish writers in Romanian emerged. The first of these to become an important figure in Romanian literature was Roneti Roman, who was the first to deal with the dilemmas of Jewish identity and assimilation as a literary theme.
The second generation of Jewish writers, asserted at the beginning of the 20th century, includes a significant number of poets, such as Abraham Steuerman Rodion, Avram Axelrad, and Enric Furtună, who became emblematic figures in Jewish cultural life. Some symbolist poets, such as D. Iacobescu and Barbu Nemțeanu died young, or like Leon Feraru, emigrated before they were fully recognized.
Jewish writers represented a significant part of the Romanian literary avant-garde. Many of them emigrated, mainly to France, including Tristan Tzara, Benjamin Fondane, IlarieVoronca, Gherasim Luca, and Claude Sernet. Both Tzara and Marcel Iancu were among the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916.
After World War I, the number of Jews writing in Romanian grew dramatically. Some writings focused on Jewish subjects, and others addressed broader cultural trends. Among those for whom Jewish themes were the main themes is Abraham Leib Zissu, considered a founding figure of this genre of literature. Two of the most important Jewish writers, Felix Aderca and Benjamin Fondane, were very close to the circle dominated by Zissu at the beginning of their careers. Fondane’s ties to Zissu and with topics concerning Judaism remained strong and significant even when he became a part of literary avant-garde and after his emigration to France in 1923. Aderca too was consistent in his involvement in Jewish issues, even when he enjoyed notable prestige in Romanian literary life.
Jewish writers that were active in the 1930s made a remarkable contribution to Romanian modernism, were Paul Păun, Jacques Costin Sesto Pals, Liviu Deleanu, Mihail Dan and Aurel Baranga. Outstanding representatives of Romanian modernist prose were Max Blecher, Ion Călugăru, Ury Benador and Isac Peltz .
During World War II, Jewish writers shared the wave of discriminatory laws and the threats of deportation and death. As they were prevented from publishing, some continued their work focusing on Jewish themes, or kept journals. Mihail Sebastian, Emil Dorian, Maria Banuş, kept journals, creating outstanding testimonies on the Jewish intellectuals’ life under the Antonescu regime, and on the Jewish community’s coping with everyday threats of deportation, deprivations, and anti-Semitic laws.
The dilemmas Jewish Romanian writers faced were extended, during the decade following the establishment of the Communist regime. Some, such as Isaac Ludo, Uri Benador, Maria Banuş, Veronica Porumbacu, and Aurel Baranga, did not resist the new realist-socialist temptation, and some of them paid for this commitment with artistic failure. The most gifted of them succeeded in freeing themselves from servitude to socialist realism.
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 theTransnistrian camps, or of Nazi camps for the natives of northern Transylvania was reflected in many works in the first years after the war, with great achievements in the poetry of Maier Rudich, Maria Banuş, Ştefan Iureş, and Veronica Porumbacu and Paul Celan. The Holocaust was also present in the works of writers like Ieronim Şerbu, Matei Gall, 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.
The rediscovery of Jewish traditions is evident in the works of writers from the generation after the war, among them Alexandru Mirodan , Vera Călin, Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, Zigu Ornea , Henri Wald and Henri Zalis. Some of those authors wrote exceptional memoirs from the period of war and antisemitic persecutions. Among them, Maria Banuş', 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 toatezilele (Our Everyday Century, 1980.)
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.
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 collection of short stories Supraviețuirile (The Survivals,2002–2006).
During the Communist years, 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, EranSela and Shaul Carmel, the writers Iosif Petran, I. Schechter, Virgil Duda, Alexandru Sever, Andrei Fischof, Bianca Marcovici,Tania Lovinescu the playwright Alexandru Mirodan and others. Alexandru Mirodan wrote Dicționarul neconvențional al scriitorilor evrei de limbă română (Unconventional Dictionary of Jewish Writers in Romanian, the two volumes were published in 1986 and 1997), a captivating combination of literary erudition and personal reflection.
A. B. Yoffe, Be-Sadotzarim: Sofrim yehudim be-Romanyah, 1880–1940,Tel Aviv, 1996, abstract and table of contents also in English
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
Henri Zalis, ed., Contribuția scriitorilor evrei la literatura română, București, 2001
