35 Facts About Zigu Ornea

Zigu Ornea, who spent much of his career under the communist regime, began by following a dissenting form of Marxism, objecting to the official censorship of writers viewed as "reactionary" and later to the emerging forms of national communism.

In parallel to his work in the study of Romanian cultural history, Zigu Ornea was a noted publisher, who held positions of leadership at Editura Meridiane and Editura Minerva, before becoming founder and director of Editura Hasefer.

Zigu Ornea had a vast activity as a literary chronicler and essayist, holding permanent columns in Romania Literara and Dilema Veche magazines during the final decades of his life.

Zigu Ornea was the father of mathematician and essayist Liviu Ornea.

Zigu Ornea's father was a cattle trader, and Ornea often helped in the family business by tending to the animals.

Zigu Ornea was a cousin of Romanian-born Israeli writer Mariana Juster, who later left details on their early life.

Zigu Ornea subsequently settled in the ghetto of Botosani city, where he lived in poverty and isolation, spending some of the money he had left on adventure novels, and ultimately set up a small clandestine business dealing in humming tops.

The Police representative shut down the enterprise, on the basis of legislation which prevented Jews from owning firms, and Zigu Ornea is said to have narrowly escaped further repercussion by bribing him with tobacco.

Zigu Ornea was expelled from ESLPA at the same time as art historian and critic Dan Grigorescu, both of them for having "bourgeois" origins.

Zigu Ornea followed up with the 1968 volume Trei esteticieni and a 1969 overview of interwar ideology, dedicated to the tenets of the National Peasants' Party.

Zigu Ornea edited a 1968 anthology from the works of Henric Sanielevici, a maverick exponent of Marxist criticism who was noted for his attempt to classify literature around racialist criteria.

Also in 1972, Zigu Ornea inaugurated his collaboration with Editura Eminescu, publishing Studii si cercetari, followed in 1975 by the first edition of his Junimea si junimismul, and in 1976 by Confluente.

In parallel, Zigu Ornea was publishing the selected works of Poporanist theorist Constantin Stere, and reediting the complete literary tracts of conservative historian Nicolae Iorga.

Zigu Ornea bowed down to the requirements in at least one instance: his Lovinescu edition was published without some portions of text that the regime found unpalatable, and the introductory note purported that Lovinescu had points in common with historical materialism.

Zigu Ornea's views were criticized by the nationalist magazine Saptamina, whose contributor Constantin Sorescu depicted him as a "dogmatist" of Marxism.

The next focus of Zigu Ornea's research was the life and career of maverick Marxist thinker and Poporanist founding figure Dobrogeanu-Gherea.

At this stage in his career, Zigu Ornea coordinated Minerva's collection of integral editions from Romanian literature, Scriitori romani.

Zigu Ornea was by then a regular contributor to the Writers' Union main organ, the magazine Romania Literara, where he was assigned a weekly column.

Zigu Ornea was a member of the executive council for the Federation of Jewish Communities of Romania, one of the ethnic minority representative bodies.

Progressively immobilized by osteoarthritis, Zigu Ornea is said to have exhausted himself with his continuous literary work.

Zigu Ornea died in 2001, after failed surgery on his kidneys, and was buried in the Botosani Jewish Cemetery.

Zigu Ornea had authored his literary columns months in advance, and the magazine was able to publish contributions of his for the several weeks after his death.

In 2006, the 5th commemoration of Zigu Ornea's death was marked by an official ceremony, hosted by the Bucharest Museum of Literature.

Zigu Ornea was incapable of fanaticism, irrational stubbornness and deliriums, and his enormous, but never ostentatious, knowledge of written culture had not rendered him haughty.

The literary style characterizing Zigu Ornea's volumes is described by his Dilema Veche colleague Radu Cosasu as follows: "He sounds like a stern classic, incorruptible when it comes to the naivete of hope, tenacious in the convictions he expresses on two-three voices, like Bach's Fugues, the only ones reliable, the only ones harmonious".

Zigu Ornea was among those few to be passionate by the history of ideas, during a period when it was easier to approach literature from an aesthetic rather than ideological angle.

Rizescu and literary critic Daniel Cristea-Enache both noted that, progressively, Zigu Ornea replaced the Marxist system of reference with the classical liberalism of Eugen Lovinescu and Stefan Zeletin.

Around 1970, as nationalism, national communism and protochronism were being imposed on an increasing number of publications, Zigu Ornea joined the faction of professionals who attempted to promote a different line from within the cultural system.

In 2001, while assessing the conclusions drawn by Samanatorismul and being inquired by Daniel Cristea-Enache about the book's implications, Zigu Ornea discussed the paradox of his stated admiration for Iorga, the Samanatorist theorist and historian.

Zigu Ornea discussed such aspects in contrast to the legacy of interwar Trairist philosopher and Iron Guard sympathizer Nae Ionescu, who introduced a theoretical separation between, on one hand, Romanians of the Orthodox faith, and, on the other, Romanians of other creeds and the ethnic minorities.

Such distinctions, Zigu Ornea noted, "defy the spirit of democratic tolerance", and were used by Ionescu himself as an ideological weapon not just against Jews such as Mihail Sebastian, but against the Romanian Greek-Catholic man of letters Samuil Micu-Klein and the liberal current's founding figure Ion Bratianu.

Zigu Ornea cites Traditionalism si modernitate for tracing the links between, on one hand, the Romanian traditionalist environment in the wake of World War I and, on the other, France's integralist faction, for discussing the role of Romanian traditionalists as cultural critics in their conflict with the interwar establishment, as well as for researching the links between the neo-traditionalists at Gandirea magazine and the original editorial line of Cuvantul daily.

Boia described the monograph as "fundamental", but found that Zigu Ornea was lenient and partisan on the issue of Stere's links with the Central Powers in the World War I occupation of Romania.

The spectrum of illiberalism was broader and less clearly identified with a marginal radical rightist position than Zigu Ornea suggests in his study.

The critique is shared by Manolescu, who argues that Zigu Ornea had failed to acknowledge that the supremacy of modernism in the 1920s had been replaced with a new wave of traditionalism in the final part of the interwar, and that racial antisemitism had only become a phenomenon after 1930.