[12] Taking his first steps in literary life, Eisig Sigler adopted his new name through forms of wordplay which enjoyed some popularity among pseudonymous Jewish writers (the case of Paul Celan, born Ancel).

Writing in 2007, literary historian Paul Cernat suggested that Relgis, like fellow humanitarian and Jewish intellectual Isac Ludo, had a "not at all negligible" part to play in the early diffusion of Romanian modernism.

[15] Like Ludo's review Absolutio (which saw print two years later), Fronda stood for the radical branch of the Romanian Symbolist movement in Iași, in contrast to both the left-leaning but traditionalist magazine Viața Românească and the more conventional Symbolism of Versuri și Proză journal.

[17] Fronda put out three issues in all, after which time Relgis became an occasional contributor to more circulated periodicals, among them Rampa (founded by Arghezi and the socialist agitator N. D. Cocea) and Vieața Nouă (led by Symbolist critic Ovid Densusianu).

[1] Back in Iași after the Central Powers stormed into southern Romania, he was reportedly drafted into the Romanian Land Forces, but refused to take up arms as a conscientious objector; briefly imprisoned as a result, he was in the end discharged for his deafness.

Historian Lucian Boia, who notes that Umanitatea was published when Romania's temporary defeat seemed to announce sweeping political reforms, believes that the magazine mainly reflected the "nebulous" agenda of a senior editor, the Bessarabian journalist Alexis Nour.

[1][23] Joined in such efforts by the veteran anarchists Han Ryner and Panait Mușoiu,[1] Relgis also circulated an Apel către toți intelectualii liberi și muncitorii luminați ("Appeal to All the Free Intellectuals and the Enlightened Workers").

[31] Relgis' contribution to Romanian literature was renewed in 1926, when he published Melodiile tăcerii ("Melodies of Silence") and the collection Poezii ("Poems"), followed in 1927 by Glasuri în surdină ("Muted Voices").

[34] At that stage in his career, Eugen Relgis was also a contributor to the Bucharest left-wing dailies Adevărul and Dimineața, part of a new generation of radical or pacifist authors cultivated by the newspaper (alongside Zamfirescu, Ion Marin Sadoveanu and various others).

[6][23] His various inquiries also enlisted positive replies from other international supporters of pacifism: physicist Albert Einstein, biologist Auguste Forel, writer Heinrich Mann and anarchist militant Paul Reclus.

[46] In its new translated editions, Apel către... was signed by a number of leading pacifist intellectuals of various persuasions, among them Zweig, Sinclair, Barbusse, Campio Carpio, Manuel Devaldès, Philéas Lebesgue, Rabindranath Tagore.

[69] In 1958, the University of the Republic published Eugen Relgis' acclaimed political essay Perspectivas culturales en Sudamérica ("Cultural Perspectives in South America"), for which he received a prize from the Uruguayan Ministry of Public Instruction and Social Prevision.

The Romanian writer spoke about the negativity of "state fetishism", seeking to overturn it and create "universal fraternity",[75] and, in Diario de otoño, postulated a necessary distinction between Law ("which may be interpreted for or against") and Justice ("elementary" and unavoidable).

"[76] Speaking from the cultural mainstream, Romanian literary historian George Călinescu observed Relgis' anti-establishment and anti-artistic rhetoric, but described it as mere "idealist reverie", "without any daring proposals that would threaten our self-preservation instincts".

[32] Relgis himself spoke of his movement as a form of "active thought", and "a critical method applied to natural, human and social realities",[10] while expressing admiration for the nonviolent resistance tactics advocated in British India by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore.

"[10] However, he explained to Iosif Gutman that joining a Zionist organization was not worth the effort, since membership was a form of captivity, and elsewhere suggested that Zionism was justified only as long as it did not follow "the restrictive methods of vulgar nationalism.

[2][10] The Romanian writer was interested in those aspects of Jewish ethics which anticipated humanitarianism or pacifism, citing the Bible as "that most humane book", and identifying himself with the lament of Malachi 2:10 ("Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother, profaning the covenant of our fathers?").

[79] Historian of ideas Andrei Oișteanu analyzes Relgis' text as more of a reaction to Nazism's own obsessive take on cleanliness, and writes that, at that time, Jews and Christians in Romania had been collecting certain brands of German soap and burying them as human remains.

[81] Earlier, in Europa cea tânără, Relgis had claimed that the European continent needed to revisit its "pathetic history" of violence and imperialism, and reconvert by combining the lessons of Eastern philosophy and United States models of industrialization.

[82] Relgis identified this as a merit, describing South America in general and Uruguay in particular as exceptionally fertile and a "healthier" example for the whole world, offering safe haven to independent thinkers and defying the ideological divisions of the Cold War era.

[83] Also important in Relgis' assessment was Latin America's capacity to resist modern dehumanization by granting a social role to its intellectuals, an idea impressed upon him by the writings of Uruguayan humanist José Enrique Rodó.

[8] Reviewing such appraisals, Uruguayan philosopher Agustín Courtoisie calls Relgis "eccentric and genial", and sees in him a real-life version of characters in Jorge Luis Borges' fantasy literature.

Relgis' essay described industrial society in harsh terms, as directed by "the bloody gods" of "Capitalism and War", and cautioned that the advocacy of anonymity in modern art could lead to kitsch ("serialized production, without the significance it used to carry in bygone days").

[11] Leon Baconsky, a historian of Romanian Symbolism, notes that all Frondistes were at the time enthusiastic followers of French literary theorist Remy de Gourmont, to whom Cernat adds philosopher Henri Bergson and Epicurean thinker Jean-Marie Guyau (both of them dedicated "prolix-metaphoric commentary" in the review's pages).

[89] According to Călinescu, Relgis' literary ideal became "the living book", the immediate and raw rendition of an individual's experience, with such "idols" as Rolland, Zweig, Henri Barbusse, Heinrich Mann and Ludwig Rubiner.

Glasuri în surdină is noted for depicting the disorientation of a young man who becomes deaf: Relgis' alter ego, Miron, finds that such a disability has turned his old friends into opportunistic exploiters, but his imaginative spirit and his (minutely chronicled) self-determination allow him to rebel and start over in life.

[96] During his time at Fronda, Eugen Relgis and his fellow writers published collective, experimental and unsigned poems, largely echoing the influence of Arghezi and Minulescu, but, according to Cernat, "aesthetically monstrous".

According to Călinescu's classification, Relgis the poet is similar in this respect to fellow Symbolists Alexandru Tudor-Miu and Barbu Solacolu, but also to Simona Basarab, Leon Feraru, Cristian Sârbu and Stelian Constantin-Stelian.

[98] Up there, on flimsy scaffolds, I stare all across this city, Massive and daring: —enormous rock That was hidden into deepest night And reemerged under the sun, Millennial efforts behind it— Climbing slowly, ceaselessly, Fed by the force of tiny titans.

The political ideas of Eugen Relgis were largely incompatible with the totalitarianism prevalent in Romania between World War II and the Romanian Revolution of 1989: as Rose notes, the scholar was persecuted by "four dictatorial regimes in his native country".