Noted for his defense of Western culture in front of the isolationism advocated under the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the researcher also acquired a familiarity with the various aspects socialist history which led him to abandon Marxist ideology.
According to her account, Ornea spent the years before World War II in his native village, until all Jews in the nation's rural areas were expelled with the acquiescence of the antisemitic regime of Conducător Ion Antonescu, and thereafter forced to wear the yellow badge (see Holocaust in Romania).
[4] He subsequently settled in the ghetto of Botoșani city, where he lived in poverty and isolation, spending some of the money he had left on adventure novels, and ultimately set up a small clandestine business dealing in humming tops.
[4] Upon the end of the war, Ornea resumed his studies and graduated high school, during which time he became an avid follower of historical debates animating the Romanian cultural scene during the previous century.
[7][8][9] A student at the University of Bucharest's Faculty of Philosophy between 1951 and 1955,[8] Ornea was, according to his colleague and future philosopher Cornel Popa, one of those who would not accept the strict interpretation of human endeavor as fostered by official Marxism-Leninism, seeking to inform himself on classical subjects directly from the sources.
"[6] Speaking later about "latent antisemitism" and forms of "aggressive intolerance" in postwar Romania, the literary historian noted: "being born a Jew was not a detail in my case, but [...] a state and a permanent wound that I have been feeling acutely, ceaselessly".
[22] With the tightening of the Ceaușescu regime's control on media and the literary environment, coupled with the ideological recuperation of national communism and isolationism (the July Theses), Ornea joined the intellectual faction attempting to circumvent censorship and promote a more nuanced take on cultural history.
[26] In a 2000 interview, Ornea recalled that the Ceaușescu years had brought renewed pressures for him to leave the country for Israel: "I constantly enjoyed the friendship of Romanian and Jewish democratic writers, which provided me with resilience and courage.
[6][8][11][30][31] His other anthumous works include a 1995 revised edition of Junimea și junimismul[20] and a series of new volumes of essays: Fizionomii ("Physiognomies", Editura Nemira, 1997), Medalioane ("Medallions", Institutul European, 1998), Portrete ("Portraits", Minerva, 1999) and Polifonii ("Poliphonies", Polirom, 2001).
[6][7][28] In addition to his unpublished Însemnări ("Records"), comprising his notes on everyday events, Ornea is said to have been planning a history of Romanian politics after World War II and a monograph dedicated to the "Jewish question" as understood locally.
Writer Augustin Buzura called him "a great historian" and "an encyclopédiste",[6] while Jewish community leader Nicolae Cajal defined him as "a Wise Man" whose interest touched "everything that brought intelligence in a person or in a book.
"[34] Political scientist Daniel Barbu speaks of Ornea's works as having supplemented the lack of sociological research under communism, and thus one of the "outstanding authors" to have dedicated themselves to such overviews during that period (alongside Vladimir Tismăneanu, Pavel Câmpeanu, Henri H. Stahl and Vlad Georgescu).
[7] The literary style characterizing Ornea's volumes is described by his Dilema Veche colleague Radu Cosașu as follows: "He sounds like a stern classic, incorruptible when it comes to the naïveté of hope, tenacious in the convictions he expresses on two-three voices, like Bach's Fugues, the only ones reliable, the only ones harmonious".
[6] Șușară compares the result of Ornea's research with novels by Honoré de Balzac, describing the Romanian author's "irrepressible thirst for inventory, for observation, for analysis and, obviously, the calling of a novelist who has not yet managed to set fire to his data sheets.
"[6] In relation to Ornea's "mastery" in stylistic matters, critic Mircea Anghelescu made reference to the author's own image of his reader as "cultivated, of good faith and open to debate".
[6] As a consequence, he grew interested in Reformism, Austromarxism and the non-Leninist Orthodox Marxism of Karl Kautsky,[6][8] and, according to his colleague Ion Ianoși, had sympathy for the Right Opposition of Nikolai Bukharin (whom he reportedly viewed as a precursor of reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev).
"[8] Despite such ideological choices, Ianoși contends that Ornea was being secretly used by Romanian Communist Party leaders with literary or scientific ambitions, who would employ him as a ghostwriter, signing with their name works on which he had largely contributed his skills and his specialized knowledge.
[37] Reviewing this debate, literary critic Pia Brînzeu argued that Ornea, with Manolescu, Andrei Pleșu and Adrian Marino (who "appreciated Western values and favored the acceptance of some advanced social and cultural issues"), represented "the opposition" to communist or nationalist magazines such as Flacăra, Luceafărul and Săptămîna ("which insisted on maintaining Romania's isolation from Europe").
Such distinctions, Ornea noted, "defy the spirit of democratic tolerance", and were used by Ionescu himself as an ideological weapon not just against Jews such as Mihail Sebastian, but also against the Romanian Greek-Catholic man of letters Samuil Micu-Klein and the liberal current's founding figure Ion Brătianu.
[8] According to Katherine Verdery, Tradiționalism și modernitate în deceniul al treilea makes Ornea "the most energetic Romanian student" to have investigated the cultural debates of the early interwar.
[43] Historian Nicolae Păun sees the work itself as also relevant for the cultural debates of Ornea's day, or "an analysis of the interwar period's message and its perception within a Romanian society fed by the passionate conflict between modernity and tradition.
[6] Its final section, largely dealing with the uncomfortable subject of Stere's Germanophilia, could only see print after the end of communism, and, according to Rizescu, influenced an entire generation's view of Poporanist foreign policy.
"[31] To support this assessment, Ciotloș identifies an allusion to the radically nationalist magazine România Mare, founded by politician Corneliu Vadim Tudor in the 1990s, as well as direct parallels drawn by the author between the Iron Guard's guidelines and the various tenets of Romanian communism.
"[51] Rizescu also finds flaw in the book's perceived search for centrist references, which, he claims, led Ornea to neglect the contribution of Marxists and peasantists active in the 1930s, and as such to avoid inaugurating an "extensive interpretative revisions" of interwar leftist ideas for a post-communist world.
[...] The general impression one gets, after this comparison, is that Ornea [...] avoided to make the effort to re-comprehend, in post-communist terms, the problems connected with the sociological and economic component of pre-communist doctrines and ideological currents, as well as to discover a new, post-totalitarian 'language', fit for preserving the vagaries of the Romanian left.
The final such book, Medalioane de istorie literară, includes chronicles of new historiographic works, as well as overviews of established contributions to literature and political theory or inquiries into themes of historical debate.
[9] Among the other chapters of the work are debates about the legacy of various 20th century intellectuals—Cioran and Noica,[9][28] as well as Iorga, Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu,[28] Anton Golopenția, Henri H. Stahl and Constantin Rădulescu-Motru[9]—, commentary on the work of other celebrated authors from various periods—Tudor Arghezi,[9][28] Ion Luca Caragiale, Eugène Ionesco, Panait Istrati, Ioan Slavici,[9] Vasile Alecsandri, Nicolae Filimon[28]—, case studies of Romanian culture in Romania or in outside regions (Bessarabia),[28] and the cultural ambitions of authoritarian King of Romania Carol II.
Several of these traced the history of antisemitic legislation in Romania starting with the 1866 Constitution, which had effectively delayed Jewish Emancipation by treating most Jews as aliens (a measure Ornea defined as an ab ovo form of discrimination, his syntagma being later borrowed by researcher Michael Shafir).
"[7] Literary historian Ileana Ghemeș notes that the "generic assessment and labels" Ornea's Sămănătorismul generated in relation to the "clichés" of traditionalist literature were still shaping the analytical work of other Romanian researchers in later decades.
[7] A controversy surrounding Ornea's legacy was sparked in 2007, when Ziua journal published two articles signed by journalist Ion Spânu, who depicted the historian as an informant for the communist secret police, the Securitate.