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sorana gurian
Sorana Gurian was born on October 18, 1913, as Sara Gurfinchel into a Jewish family in Comrat, Bessarabia, then part of the Russian Empire.
She became associated with Eugen Lovinescu’s circle of modernist writers, Sburătorul, in 1937 once she returned to Romania following treatment for
extrapulmonary tuberculosis in Berck, France, staying in the same room earlier occupied by Max Blecher, who
makes a ghostly appearance in the story “Villa Mysosotis.” While in France she participated in Parisian literary life, publishing her
writing in magazines and befriending André Gide, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, and Anaïs Nin. Among her fellow literati
in Romania, Gurian cut an extravagant figure, and the articles she began to publish were stridently anti-nationalist and antifascist. Even though
Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany and introduced antisemitic laws, she stayed in the country during WWII and took part in the underground opposition,
achieving notoriety as a sort of Mata Hari, while hiding from the Gestapo for two years in a basement. She was aided at this time by a priest of the
French legation, and this experience was partly responsible for her eventual conversion to Catholicism. When Romania broke with the Axis in late 1944,
she was named director of the mass-circulation newspaper Universul, and collaborated with many leftist publications in the immediate
postwar period. Her fluency in Russian also helped her to find work as an interpreter for the Allied Commission. After 1948, she fell out of favor
with the new communist regime, who accused her of being a French spy. She escaped Romania in 1949, first going to Israel before making it to
France in 1950. She died in Paris in 1956. Her final book, Récit d'un combat, recounted her desperate search for cancer treatment,
her thirst for life never waning.
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published by TSP
Episodes between
Twilight and Darkness
[forthcoming 2027]
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