Ronetti Roman
His chief literary contribution was the 1900 play Manasse, which explores the intergenerational conflict between older, devout, tradition-bound Jews and their more secular, modern, assimilated descendants.
The scion of a Hasidic Jewish family,[1] he was born in 1847 in Jezierzany, in the Austrian Empire's Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria; today, the place is called Ozeryany and is located in Ukraine's Ternopil Oblast.
[1] Following his 1883 marriage to the Eleonora Herșcovici, the daughter of a leaseholder, he was a farmer and land manager at Roznov and Davideni in Neamț County, living on an estate in the latter village.
Determined to become a Romanian writer, he submitted satiric pamphlets and articles on social issues[1] to Revista literară și științifică (1876), Adevărul, Almanahul Dacia, Calendarul Răsăritul, Convorbiri Literare, Curentul nou, Egalitatea, Mântuirea, Opinia, Reforma, România Liberă, Timpul, Anuar pentru israeliți and Flacăra.
[2] He was friends with Mihail Kogălniceanu;[2] while writing for the Conservative Party's Timpul, he also became close with Mihai Eminescu and Ion Luca Caragiale, and the three together attended meetings of Titu Maiorescu's Junimea for a time.
[2] His 1898 essay Două măsuri,[1] which appeared as a series of articles in Adevărul,[3] lamented the erosion of traditional Jewish society and its values, a process he ascribed to modernization; dismissed Zionism as a utopian notion that could not halt Judaism's disappearance; and criticized Romanian government policy toward the Jews.
[4] Its title character is the elderly Manasse Cohen, a conservative defender of Jewish tradition who resides in the Moldavian shtetl of Fălticeni.
Nissim has two children, Lazăr and Lelia, who respect Manasse's faith but are also modern people who harbor socialist ideas and are integrated into the Romanian intellectual milieu.
[8] His interventions resulted in a temporary suspension from contributing to Convorbiri Literare, and were eventually cited as a reason for not returning him to the magazine's leadership committee.
Politicians who considered Jews unassimilable opposed the idea, and Interior Minister Take Ionescu remarked that "it would be pure madness on our part to stage Manasse right when the Jewish question is being forced upon us".
The latter generally resorted to platitudes: Vasile Pârvan "praised the students' enthusiasm, but suggested the matter does not deserve such importance"; Simion Mehedinți recognized he "did not know the play Manasse and was in no capacity to discuss it, but believed the role of the National Theatre is to safeguard the ancestral religion and creed"; Dragomirescu asserted that "there are spectators who have the right to demand this play, just as students have the right to protest against it".
Acting upon instructions received from the government, police prefect Dimitrie Moruzzi banned the performance on grounds of "maintaining order".
[5] Mihail Sadoveanu's 1908 novella Haia Sanis deals with a similar situation from another perspective, but has the same psychological motivation of the younger generation rebelling against older mores.
