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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, once she returned to Romania in 1937 following treatment for
extrapulmonary tuberculosis in Berck, France, where she stayed in the same room earlier occupied by Max Blecher, who
makes a ghostly appearance in the story “Villa Myosotis.” 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 resistance,
achieving notoriety as a sort of Mata Hari, while hiding from the Gestapo for two years in a basement. She was aided 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. In 1946 she debuted as an author with an autobiographical novel about a family in Bessarabia and her only collection of stories
Episodes between Twilight and Darkness. Her fluency in Russian also helped her to find work as an interpreter for the Allied Commission.
After 1948, Gurian fell out of favor with the new communist regime, who accused her of being a French spy, so she fled the country in 1949. She
stayed in Israel until 1951 before permanently relocating to France, where she became a noted journalist and political commentator. Her subsequent
work was now in French: a diary of the years 1947-49 Les mailles du filet (1950); a translation of her earlier novel, Les jours ne reviennent
jamais (1952), and its sequel about the political environment in pre-WWII Romania, Les amours impitoyables (1953); and her final book,
recounting her desperate search for cancer treatment, Récit d'un combat (1956). She died in Paris in 1956.
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published by TSP
Episodes between
Twilight and Darkness
[forthcoming 2027]
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