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Benador, Ury

(1895–1971), writer, playwright, and journalist. Ury Benador (Simon Schmidt) was born in southern Bucovina in the village of Milişăuți; his father was an impoverished tailor and the family had many children. As a teenager, Benador was forced to leave school to work at various trades. He began to write in Yiddish, his mother tongue, and contributed his first works in 1916 to Der hamer. He continued to publish sporadically in Yiddish until the 1940s, but eventually made Romanian his language of preference.

By 1918, Benador was publishing articles in the Scena (Stage) review, issued in Bucharest, and contributed both stories and criticism to a considerable number of Romanian periodicals. His first book, 5 acte (5 Acts; 1925), issued in Brăila, was a collection of plays that had not yet been staged. He saw his first real success with his novel Ghetto veac XX (Ghetto 20th Century), published in 1934.

Benador, a supporter of the left and a participant in the Intellectuals Congress for Peace in Paris in 1939, became a leader of the procommunist Jewish Democratic Committee shortly after the end of World War II. He was also involved in founding the Writers Union in 1948, and from 1948 until 1955 was literary secretary of the Jewish State Theater of Bucharest.

Under the influence of German expressionism, Benador was originally drawn to depicting abrupt individual crises, marked by inadaptability and alienation; later on, his writing described vast social frescoes, especially the impoverished environment found in Jewish districts within large cities or smaller towns, resulting from what he considered the rapid advance of capitalism. The whole set of human relations developing in this special universe that forced people into isolation with its religious and cultural values, hierarchies, and contradictions generating distinct aspirations and frustrations on a psychological level, is the very essence of the novel Ghetto veac XX, as well as of its sequel, Gablonz, Magazin universal (Gablonz, General Store), published in 1961. In this latter novel, however, under the constraint of ideological stereotypes, Benador’s attempt to describe in fiction the adaptation mechanisms of the Jewish bourgeoisie slipped into didacticism. Still, the specific Jewish issues in a society undergoing modernization, the equally enriching and constraining effects of tradition, and the need to adapt to, or to be assimilated in, a rather hostile environment became opportunities for debate and reflection.

The environment in which rabbis were charmed by Beethoven’s music, and, at the same time, businessmen were eager to make a quick fortune, became the background of several pieces of writing such as Benador’s Appasionata (1935) and Final grotesc (Grotesque Ending; 1940). They ensured the evolution to Subiect banal (Banal Subject; 1935) and Hilda (1936), analytical novels and short stories with a strong erotic ingredient that focused on the intense emotions of both the male and female main characters. The short story “Preludiu la Beethoven” (Prelude to Beethoven), published in 1940, announced a project that Benador only completed in 1964, the novel Beethoven—Omul (Beethoven—The Man).

Suggested Reading

Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu, “Ury Benador,” in Literatura română între cele două războaie mondiale, vol. 1, pp. 345–346 (Bucharest, 1972); Alexandru Mirodan, “Ury Benador,” in Dicționar neconvențional al scriitorilor evrei de limbă română, vol. 1, pp. 139–147 (Tel Aviv, 1986); A. B. Yoffe, Be-Sadot zarim: Sofrim yehudim be-Romanyah (Tel Aviv, 1996), pp. 298–303, abstract and table of contents also in English.



Translated from Romanian by Anca Mircea