Formele conflictului în Ghetto veac XX [Ghetto 20th Century] de Ury Benador

Forms of the conflict in Ury Benador's Ghetto 20th Century

Abstract

This article proposes a re-examination of interwar Romanian ghetto literature. This urban, marginal, and political space is documented in Romanian literary history almost exclusively through the autobiographical novels of the Jewish writers published between 1930 and 1940. Interethnic tensions intensified during this period and formed socially segregated spaces, such as ghetto areas. These territories were mostly generated by social conflict, which constitutes the main focus of this study. The analysis is based on Ury Benador’s Ghetto veac XX [Ghetto 20^th Century], which is representative for this type of literature. The motivation behind selecting this novel lies in its complex narrative network, driven by interethnic conflict developed through causal relations. This novel presents a taxonomy of conflicts, indicating – as I will argue – that the civic, political, and domestic realms become mutually entangled. The novel sheds light on a particular perspective on antisemitism: it reveals how social conflict is not limited to public space, but, in fact, penetrates and disrupts the private life of the Jews. In the introduction of this paper, I examine the two main critical approaches developed upon the novel’s publication. On the one hand, the conservative strand of criticism insisted on the idea of the author’s “dangerous race”, thereby rejecting him through the eugenic and racist theories that were gaining ground in early twentieth-century Romania. On the other hand, modernist critics reduced the reading of the novel to the aesthetic and thematic frameworks promoted by this movement. Both perspectives prove to be limited. Therefore, I consider that a (re)reading of these texts can be productive for various reasons: primarily because it illustrates the perspective of the Jewish minority, excluded by the hegemonic discourse of the “pure” Romanian race; foremost, because an aesthetic analysis of these novels cannot overlook the social dimension of these texts. For a literary subgenre that emerges directly from a specific historical context, the aesthetic and social dimensions must be considered together, so as to undertake an analysis informed by the conditions of writing and publication of these texts. The initial section of the paper centers on social conflict and its permeable character, whereby civic tensions penetrate domestic life and manifest across multiple dimensions (economic, erotic, identity, spiritual). Considering the characters’ Jewish identity, I examine some text extracts through the lens of religious symbolism, highlighting the concepts of sacrifice and chastity inherent to their culture. Continuing in this vein, I further interpret the conclusion of the text as an attempt to transcend historical political constraints through the sacred. In the final section of the article, I examine the novel’s fragmented structure, which makes the reconstruction of a coherent narrative thread nearly impossible. My study points to an interpretation of this novelistic form as a literary social form, an argument justified by the political realities of the time, namely the intensification of antisemitism in Romania. If the form of the novel is perceived as the author’s ideological instrument, I consider that some of his formal options can be viewed either as acts of emancipation or outright subversion. From a methodological perspective, the study lies at the intersection of several academic fields, making use of variety of sources that include literary studies (Caroline Levine), historical research (Leon Volovici, Marius Turda), sociological analyses (Georg Simmel, Thorstein Veblen, Ernst Bloch, Michel Foucault), and works on the history of religions (Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Eusebiu Borca). Through this approach, my aim is to recover marginalized literature and to demonstrate how aesthetics and politics become inseparable in case of an autobiographical novel documenting Romanian interwar antisemitism.