Avram Steuerman-Rodion, born Adolf Steuerman or Steuermann and often referred to as just Rodion (November 30, 1872 – September 19, 1918), was a Romanian poet, anthologist, physician and socialist journalist.
During the early stages World War I, Rodion was a columnist at Seara daily, with articles which criticized Romania's prospects of joining the Entente Powers.
[11] The same collaboration brought the posthumous edition of poems by the socialist Traian Demetrescu, published by Șaraga and prefaced by Steuerman,[12] and tales by Carmen Sylva, the Queen-consort of Romania.
[22] Its regular contributors were young supporters of left-wing ideologies: alongside Steuerman and Giordano, they include poet Mihail Codreanu and future jurist Eugen Heroveanu.
That collaboration ended abruptly, when Gheorghe Ghibănescu, the editor in chief, discovered that Trestianu was a Jew, and ordered his staff to destroy the physical evidence of Rodion's correspondence.
[19] His work established Rodion's reputation outside Moldavia: in Transylvania, critic Ilarie Chendi noted that, with Dumitru Karnabatt and some others, the "fecund" Steuerman was still maintaining alive the tradition of cultural journalism.
[39] His comments enlisted negative reactions in Chendi's Cumpăna magazine, where it was implied that Rodion risked awakening latent antisemitism, but were defended by his more liberal colleagues at Noua Revistă Română.
[40] At around the same time, Rodion had become a sympathizer of Josef B. Brociner and his "Society of Romanian Israelites"—a local branch of Hovevei Zion and one of Romania's first Jewish political associations.
[44] During the first stage of World War I, when the Kingdom of Romania maintained its neutrality, Rodion grew close to the political circles comprising Germanophiles, neutralist socialists or pacifists.
Like his colleagues there, Rodion was not a keen supporter of making Romania part of the Entente camp; he looked with more sympathy toward the German Empire and the Central Powers.
[45] In June 1915, Avram Steuerman was assigned a regular column in Seara, a Bucharest newspaper founded by Germanophile agitator Alexandru Bogdan-Pitești and purchased from him by a German cartel.
Back into civilian life, Rodion was, like George Topîrceanu, one of the combatants whom the war years had rendered even more critical of the Ententist option; from Moldavia, he sent his texts to be published in Stere's explicitly Germanophile review, Lumina, and, at the same time, began contributing to Scena, the daily owned by conscientious objector A. de Herz.
[18] During the same month, Rodion was also a correspondent of the short-lived leftist tribune Umanitatea, launched in Iași by the Bessarabian Germanophile Alexis Nour, and noted for its advocacy of total Jewish emancipation.
[52] Avram Steuerman-Rodion was haunted by memories of the war, and, according to historian Lucian Boia, suffered episodes of clinical depression which he both concealed and left untreated.
[55] According to literary historian Zigu Ornea, Rodion, a "minor poet",[55] was one of the young writers and activists instrumental in supporting the Romanian socialist patriarch Constantin Dobrogeanu-Gherea, who was at the time caught in an ideological dispute with the dominant conservative group Junimea.
The other figures listed by Ornea in this context are Stere, Ibrăileanu, Dimitrie Anghel, Anton Bacalbașa, Traian Demetrescu, Emil Fagure, Raicu Ionescu-Rion, Sofia Nădejde and Henric Sanielevici.
[56] In his earlier Istoria literaturii române synthesis, the influential literary critic George Călinescu chose to discuss Rodion and Berman Goldner-Giordano together, as two minor representatives of Dobrogeanu-Gherea's "tendentious art".
The son of a people with sideburns and robes, that survives by assimilation with earthworms, with stones, with mankind, with plots of land, his force has bumped [...], like a fly, upon the wall of the world..."[55] Fondane noted that Rodion, with his "painfully Romanian style of writing" at a time when Zionism was still "vague", could only opt in favor of erasing his own Jewish identity.
Rodion's verses were described as particularly eloquent in depicting the misfortune of Jewish intellectuals who sought integration into Romanian society but were still rejected—the piece is called "agonizing" by Zigu Ornea,[55] and "immortal" by poet-essayist Radu Cosașu.
[60] However, Romanian and Israeli academic Michael Shafir noted that, with similar texts by Ronetti Roman, Steuerman-Rodion's poem mostly reflected the disbelief with which Jewish intellectuals were reacting to the late-19th-century antisemitic barrage.
[18] Boia found the overall Germanophile bias of Scrisori to be palatable: "the impression they leave is that Iași was sharing in only too little measure the 'Ententist' pathos of Bucharest; an exaggeration of sorts, but also a fair amount of truth.
[55] Fondane is also believed to have chosen the title of his column in the Zionist journal Lumea Evree, Idei și oameni ("Ideas and People"), as a quote from and homage to Steuerman.
[63] In 1919, the same magazine hosted a philosemitic essay by Romanian cultural promoter Gala Galaction, which deplored the marginalization or persecution of Jewish writers, from Barbu Nemțeanu to Rodion.
Poet and Premier Octavian Goga outlined his self-declared hatred for the Jews and call for discriminatory policies in his political tracts, but, unusually in this context, stated that he held no such grudge against either Rodion or Ronetti Roman.
[64] According to Radu Cosașu, Rodion's failure to integrate announced the similar drama of 1930s Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, who wanted to be perceived as Romanian but was in return vilified by the far right.
[60] In 1941, the authoritarian regime of Ion Antonescu published a directory of Jewish Romanian authors, living or deceased, whose work was officially banned: Steuerman was included, under the erroneous spelling Steverman.
[66] Although negative in substance, the brief profile published in George Călinescu's Istoria... (first edition 1941), alongside other portraits of Jewish literary men and women, is sometimes referred to as an act of defiance to Antonescu's cultural pronouncements.