Immanuel Weissglas (1920–1979)

Immanuel Weissglas was born to a Jewish family in Cernăuți (present-day Chernivtsi, Ukraine), Bukovina, a region then part of Romania. His father Isak Weissglas was a lawyer As a young man, he was distinguished equally by his musical talent, playing the piano, and as a lyric poet. While still a student, he came to the attention of the renowned poet Tudor Arghezi, who encouraged the publication of his early poems. Weissglas worked as a librarian in his hometown and began studying philosophy at university until the outbreak of World War II. Under the fascist government, he was deported in 1942 with his family to various concentration camps for Jews in Transnistria, but survived. After the war ended, he moved to Bucharest. There he worked as an editor and proofreader at the Europolis Publishing House. In 1948, he joined the editorial staff of the newspaper Romania liberă, where he worked for about 15 years. He also translated literary works from German, English, and French into Romanian and vice versa (sometimes using the pseudonym Ion Iordan). Among these were Goethe's Faust and Eminescu's "Hyperion." He was part of the group of German-language poets and writers that included his famous classmate and friend, Paul Celan. Celan fled to the West in 1947. Under political pressure, Weissglas gave up publishing his own works, after two volumes of his poems appeared in 1947: Gottes Mühlen in Berlin (God's Mills in Berlin) and Kariera am Bug. Only in 1972 did he publish a new volume, Der Nobiskrug, which won the Romanian Writers' Union Award.