Chapter four: a secure trade

“I accepted a kind of compromise”: Campus, “Elective Affinities,” pp. 367–71.

This was the first-ever rejection: Among the girls was one described only as “Ragazza Mehedinti,” in “ST: Handwritten List of Addresses et al, 1932–41,” YCAL, Box 2, Folder “Santo Domingo 1942.” Jacques Ghelber, a cousin by marriage who was admitted to the Bucharest School of Architecture, wrote to ST from Tel Aviv, Israel, October 19, 1953, YCAL, Box 8, Romanian letters in folder “Correspondence 1953,” joking that he had “more appreciation for Saul’s [word not clear; possible translation is skills ] than those at the School of Architecture in Bucharest. It’s too bad they didn’t also undervalue me. Then perhaps I [too] could have become somebody.” To date, this is the single most direct comment that explains why ST went to Milan. MTL cites this as a possible reason in Mario Tedeschini Lalli, “Descent from Paradise: ST’s Italian Years, 1933–41,” Quest: Issues in Contemporary Jewish Hisotry, no. 2 (October 2011), pp. 316–17 and n. 14; online at http://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/focus.php?id=221. MTL cites as his source for this possibility Theodor Lavi’s entry “Romania” in Numerus Clausus, Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum, Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference, 2007), vol. 15, pp. 341–42.

“for a young Romanian Jew”: ST to Prudence Crowther, included in e‑mail to DB, July 22, 2008.

“an interesting, animated time”: Arthur Segal, “Die neue Malerei und die Kunstler,” Die Action 2 (Berlin, 1912); also in Tom Sundqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, n.d.), pp. 24, 187.

No matter how ugly the building: Luminita Machedon and Ernie Scoffham, Romanian Modernism: The Architecture of Bucharest, 1920–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), unpaginated preface.

“chronicler of Romanian spirituality”: Virgil Ierunca, introduction to G. M. Cantacuzino, Scrieri (Paris: Fundatia Regala Universitara Carol I, 1966), p. 9. Quoted also in unpaginated preface by Serban Cantacuzino, “On Being Romanian,” in Machedon and Scoffham, Romanian Modernism. G. M. Cantacuzino was also the founder and editor of the annual journal Simetria, subtitled “notebooks of art and criticism” and published between 1939 and 1947. It is unlikely that ST read this influential journal at that time, and he did not have copies of it in his adult library.

He also joined them to hike: ST TO AB, April 2, 1985; Campus, “Elective Affinities: Conversations with ST,” Viat¸a Noastră, December 1981, pp. 12, 25.

“rich Jews and Greeks”: ST to AB, July 7, 1998.

He always insisted: On August 7, 1998, ST sent AB a photocopy of a class photo taken during his last year at the Lycée Basarab, of classmates who joined him for a trip to “una rovina bizantina di Bucharest,” on the back of which he wrote capsule biographies of his friends. For Leventi, whose name he sometimes wrote as “Leventer,” ST remembered: “Leventer, ombre perfette, morto 4 anni fa ricco, moglio et figlio fedeli.” In ST to AB, July 7, 1998, he wrote that he had forgotten the first name of Paraschevadis, his Greek classmate. He described Eugen Campus as “the first intellectual of my own age … who was my friend (more in my mind than in reality).” Campus organized the literary circle at his house, but none of the group wrote anything but short critical presentations. ST said “that’s when I first began to understand the importance—which is essential for knowledge—of literature and critical study. The literary critic has the chance to confront concrete values, concretized life concepts.” Campus graduated from Bucharest University and became a high school teacher and critic in Romania and later in Israel, where ST visited him starting in the late 1970s. ST and Leventer were classmates throughout their Bucharest years and their families were neighbors and friends within the local Jewish community. Leventer also graduated from the Regio Politecnico as an architect and had a lucrative and successful career in Bucharest until 1952, when he went first to Vienna and then to Israel before settling in New York on Cambridge Avenue in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and then on Park Avenue.

This was where Steinberg first understood: Information that follows is from writings by Eugen Campus, translated by Emil Niculescu for SSF. As I have not read the original Romanian texts, I give the original sources but use only English titles here: Campus’s review of ST’s show, “ST: Recent Work,” Pace Gallery, New York, October 31–November 28, 1987, Minimum no. 10, January 1988; “ST—The Discovery of America Today,” Minimum no. 77, August 1993, pp. 67–69; “Elective Affinities (Conversations with Saul Steinberg),” pp. 367–71, Tel Aviv, December 9–10, 1981, first published in Viat¸a Noastră, pp. 12, 25.

another Romanian Jew who had been: Constantine I. Emilian, who wrote the first academic study on the Romanian avant-garde in 1931, quoted in Paul Cernat, Avangarda romaneasca si complexul periferiei: primul val (Bucharest: Cartea Romaneasca, 2007).

“young emancipated Jewish writers”: Ibid.

the vast majority of the avant-garde: Tom Sandqvist, Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006).

Balkan absurdist writing: Kirby Olson, Andrei Codrescu and the Myth of America (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), p. 40.

“took pleasure from a city”: ST to AB, May 24, 1996.

“gigantic head”: ST to AB, August 7, 1998. ST was describing himself as he looked in a photograph of his classmates.

“timid and taciturn” personality: Campus, “Elective Affinities,” Minimum no. 10, January 1988.

each one was “bigger than the next”: Sandqvist, Dada East, p. 99.

Steinberg was one of four: In ST’s Romanian letters, Perlmutter is always referred to by his nickname.

Steinberg began to think that going abroad: Campus, “Elective Affinities,” pp. 367–71.

Steinberg’s argument for going to the Regio Politecnico: Information that follows is from interviews with Daniela Roman, Stéphane Roman, and HS; also from the Romanian letters, cited specifically where appropriate.

What would happen to her: As an adult, ST told friends, interviewers, and correspondents that he had never been called by a diminutive or a nickname, but it was not true, and neither was his similar contention in R & S, p. 19. Within his family he was Sauly, Salitza, Saulica, or some other variant of his given name. In many letters, one or another of these is how his sister, Lica, addresses him.

when it came to Milan: It was a given that he would be accepted, for there was no entrance examination in Italian universities and only a high school diploma and transcript were required.

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