American scholar Anne Quinney argues that the play, which obviously was based on real events, was autobiographical, and reflected Ionesco's own youth in Romania. Ionesco was born in Romania to a Romanian father and French mother. Ionesco's father was a Romanian ultra-nationalist of the Orthodox faith with few political scruples, who was willing to support whatever party was in power - while his mother was a French Protestant who came from a family of Sephardic Jews who had converted to Calvinism to better fit into French society. In the increasing antisemitic atmosphere of Romania in the interwar period, being even partly ethnically Jewish was enough to put Ionesco in danger. The Israeli historian Jean Ancel states that the Romanian intelligentsia had a "schizophrenic attitude towards the West and its values," yet considered the West, especially France, to be their role model. At the same time antisemitism was rampant in Romania. Most Romanian Jews were descendants of Ashkenazi Jews who had moved to Romania in the 18th and 19th centuries from Poland. A recurring claim of the Romanian radical right was that most Romanian Jews were illegal immigrants or had obtained Romanian citizenship fraudulently. In the 19th century, the newly independent Romanian state proved very reluctant to grant citizenship to Romania's Jews, and a volatile atmosphere of antisemitism flourished with many intellectuals like A. C. Cuza claiming the Jews were a foreign and alien body in Romania that needed to be removed.