Benjamin Fondane

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Benjamin Fondane : biography

November 14, 1898 – October 2, 1944

Accounts differ on what happened to his sister Lina. Paul Daniel believes that she decided to go looking for her brother, also went missing, and, in all probability, became a victim of another deportation. Other sources state that she was arrested at around the same time as, or even together with, her brother, and that they were both on the same transport to Auschwitz.Călinescu, p. 864; Răileanu & Carassou, p. 133 According to other accounts, Fondane was in custody while his sister was not, and sent her a final letter from Drancy; Fondane, who had theoretical legal grounds for being spared deportation (a Christian wife), aware that Lina could not invoke them, sacrificed himself to be by her side. While in Drancy, he sent another letter, addressed to Geneviève, in which he asked for all his French poetry to be published in the future as Le Mal des fantômes ("The Ache of Phantoms"), Luiza Palanciuc, , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 410, February 2008 , in Dilema Veche, Vol, IV, Nr. 170, May 2007 and optimistically called himself "the traveler who isn’t done traveling".

While Lina is believed to have been marked for death upon arrival (and immediately after sent to the gas chamber), her brother survived the camp conditions for a few more months. He befriended two Jewish doctors, Moscovici and Klein, with whom he spent his free moments engaged in passionate discussions about philosophy and literature. As was later attested by a survivor of the camp, the poet himself was among the 700 inmates selected for extermination on October 2, 1944, when the Birkenau subsection outside Brzezinka was being evicted by SS guards.Daniel, p. 637–638 He was aware of impending death, and reportedly saw it as ironic that it came so near to an expected Allied victory. After a short interval in Block 10, where he is said to have awaited his death with dignity and courage, he was driven to the gas chamber and murdered.Daniel, p. 638 His body was cremated, along with those of the other victims.

Literary work and philosophical contribution

Symbolist and traditionalist beginnings

As a young writer, Benjamin Fondane moved several times between the extremes of Symbolism and Neoromantic traditionalism. Literary historian Mircea Martin analyzed the very first of his as pastiches of several, sometimes contradictory, literary sources. These influences, he notes, come from local traditionalists, Romantics and Neoromantics—Octavian Goga (the inspiration for Fondane’s earliest pieces), Grigore Alexandrescu, Vasile Alecsandri, George Coşbuc, Ştefan Octavian Iosif; from French Symbolists—Paul Verlaine; and from Romanian disciples of Symbolism—Dimitrie Anghel, George Bacovia, Alexandru Macedonski, Ion Minulescu.Martin, p. VII–XIV, XXIV The young author had a special appreciation for the 19th century national poet, Mihai Eminescu. Familiar with Eminescu’s entire poetic work, he was one of the young poets who tried to reconcile Eminescu’s Neoromantic, ruralizing, traditionalism with the urban phenomenon that was Symbolism.Cernat, p. 11, 36; Tomescu (2005), p. 230–231. Of the traditionalist poems he composed under such influences, the few explicitly patriotic ones have been deemed "extreme in their conventionalism" by Cernat: , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 100, January 2002 While Fondane continued to credit Minulescu’s radical and jocular Symbolism as a main influence on his own poems, this encounter was overall less significant than his enthusiasm for Eminescu;Tomescu (2005), p. 231 in contrast, Bacovia’s desolate and macabre poetry left enduring traces in Fondane’s work, shaping his depiction of provincial environments and even transforming his worldview.Cernat, p. 37–38, 398; Martin, p. XIII, XXXIV; Tomescu (2005), p. 228, 231–232 Gheorghe Crăciun, , in Observator Cultural, Nr. 47, January 2001

Fondane’s early affiliation with Ovid Densusianu’s version of Romania’s Symbolist current was, according to literary historian Dumitru Micu, superficial. Micu notes that the young Fondane sent his verse to be published by magazines with incompatible agendas, suggesting that his collaboration with Vieaţa Nouă was therefore incidental, but also that, around 1914, Fondane’s own style was a "conventional Symbolism". Writing in 1915, the poet himself explained that his time with the magazine in question ought not be interpreted as anything other than conjectural. During his polemic with Tudor Teodorescu-Branişte, he defined himself as an advocate of an "insolent" Symbolism, a category defined by and around Remy de Gourmont. This perspective was further clarified in O lămurire…, which explained how Tăgăduinţa lui Petru was to be read: "A clear, although Symbolist, book. For it is, unmistakably, Symbolist. […] Symbolism doesn’t necessarily mean neologism, morbid, bizarre, decadent, confusing and badly written. But rather—if there is talent—original, commonsensical, depth, non-imitation, lack of standard, subconscious, new and sometimes healthy." From a regional point of view, the young Fondane is sometimes included with Bacovia in the Moldavian branch of Romanian Symbolism, or, more particularly, in the Jewish Moldavian subsection.Cernat, p. 16–17, 37