He kept a low profile during World War II, when he was employed by the daily Timpul, discreetly expressing his criticism of Nazi Germany, later contributing to the clandestine România Liberă.
[3] Dinu spent his youth in a multicultural environment, spending time in the Romanian Jewish neighborhoods, and acting as the shabbos goy,[2] preserving links with the Zionist A. L.
His links with radical left-wing circles were documented from late 1921, when Siguranța, the Romanian Kingdom's secret police, was informed of his possible connections with the terrorist Max Goldstein.
[4] During the 1920s, Enache's shop became a meeting place for avant-garde poets and artists such as Victor Brauner (who painted its exterior),[5] Ilarie Voronca, and Sașa Pană.
[8] He signed his articles with his birth name, and his poetry as Stephan Roll,[5] a pen name he allegedly picked up at random from a Swiss magazine, after noting that he was the only non-pseudonymous writer of his intimate circle.
[9] While visiting Câmpina in 1927, Roll met the aspiring poet Geo Bogza, who had read his Contimporanul pieces, and helped him to launch another avant-garde periodical, Urmuz[10] (to which he also contributed).
He "very seriously" recounted stories of pseudo-zoology to an audience of fellow tram riders, insisting that giraffes owed their elongated necks to a diet of drain spouts.
[19] Soon, the unu group severed its links with Vinea and Contimporanul: the latter was becoming more mainstream, more eclectic, and more tolerant of "reactionary" figures such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Sandu Tudor, and Mihail Sebastian.
[22] The group won a victory over Vinea by obtaining foreign support: Roll published in Der Sturm an introduction to Romanian Surrealism, followed by samples from Bogza, Fondane, Pană, and other poets.
[26] Soon after, Roll made a decisive contribution to excluding Voronca from the unu group for publishing a collection with an "official" press and applying for membership in the Romanian Writers' Society.
[15] In an early 1933 article for Cuvântul Liber, Roll expressed his support for Louis Aragon, calling Surrealism a "false avant-garde" as long as it did not tap into "the anarchic economic structure of society".
[35] He also made occasional returns to cultural polemics, issuing a political critique of the Contimporanul artist Marcel Janco,[36] and, befriending folklorist Harry Brauner, was among the first to hear and encourage Maria Tănase, who became Romania's leading recording star.
[39] In 1936, he and Paraschivescu were guest editors at Korunk, the Hungaro–Romanian Marxist review, publishing therein his essay on "The Formation of Romanian Intellectuals", and contributions by Tudor Arghezi, Belu Zilber, Ghiță Ionescu, Stoian Gh.
[40] In 1937, he participated in the campaign for free speech mounted by Zaharia Stancu's Azi newspaper, defending the avant-garde's Bogza and H. Bonciu against accusations from the nationalist far-right.
[4] From 1938 to 1940, Roll edited Stancu's Lumea Românească newspaper,[1] where he continued to press for antifascism, alongside Bogza, George Macovescu, Petru Manoliu, and various others.
[35] In his forties, Stephan Roll emerged as an important figure among communist writers, and, as noted by critic Ion Pop, "enrolled himself heart and soul in support of propaganda".
[33] Shortly after the pro-Allied coup of August 1944, he rallied with the Romanian Society for Friendship with the Soviet Union, and became co-editor, with Athanase Joja, Simion Oeriu and Petre Pandrea, of its Veac Nou magazine.
[5][25] Following the writer's death in 1974, his widow Medi recovered and copied the original drafts of his poems, which were published by Macovescu and Eugen Jebeleanu in Gazeta Literară.
His early "integralist" Constructivism, with its hints of Futurism and Dada, produced manifesto-like poems, odes to modern life, and samples of jazz poetry,[5] as well as an homage to the avant-garde cult figure, Urmuz.
[56] Their "dynamic" and "synthetic" style drew attention from the modernist critic Eugen Lovinescu, who noted that Roll managed to outdo his Futurist masters in "virtuosity".
Eu sunt mai înalt decât tine cu o vrabie[5] Look up: the light is white like the breast of a seabird a corpus of quails put strain on their tongues their echo filling up sky-mouths and air-chimes
I am taller than you by one sparrow In its various editions, Ospățul de aur collects both poems and essays about his generational colleagues, written in the same poetic style and brimming with imagery.
[1] According to critic Răzvan Voncu, he endures in cultural memory as "a second-shelf author, albeit one whose biography and work contain, in effigy, all defining traits of the interwar avant-garde.
[3] Contrarily, Marin Mincu pays homage to Roll as Romania's "most authentic avant-garde writer", finding him superior to poets Mircea Dinescu and Ana Blandiana.