Alexandru Vona

Alexandru Vona (actually Alberto Henrique Samuel Bejar y Mayor ; born March 3, 1922 in Bucharest ; † November 12, 2004 in Neuilly near Paris ) was a Romanian writer and architect who moved to French exile in France from 1948.

Life

Père Lachaise

The son of a Sephardic Jewish family related by marriage to the Elias Canetti family began a secondary career as a writer after studying architecture. In 1947, before the abdication of the Romanian king, he received the “Literature Prize of the Royal Cultural Foundation”, the highest in the country at the time, for a volume of poetry. When he was 25, he wrote the novel “The Walled Windows”, which made him famous in the 1990s, in just 19 days and then did not want to publish it for many years. Instead, Vona embarked on a career in his bourgeois job as an engineer and architect that almost completely turned his back on the literature business. It was only after an old friend published a manuscript copy in a Romanian publisher in 1993 without the author's consent that the novel, highly valued by Mircea Eliade , Paul Celan and Emil Cioran , became a topic again as a publication and translation task. Inspired by an encounter on the stairs of a brothel, the novel, which does not retell external events and is rich in text, is about the atmosphere and traumatization in the course of the National Socialist campaign of extermination.

Works (selection)

Ferestrele zidite . Bucharest: Editura Cartea Românească, 1993
- Les fenêtres murées: roman . Traduit du roumain by Alain Paruit. Arles: Actes sud, 1995
- The walled-up windows. From the French using the Romanian original version by Georg Aescht . Berlin: Rowohlt, 1997
Vitralii. Early poems and prose. Edited and translated from Romanian by Alexandru Bulucz . With an afterword by Peter Henning . Edition Faust: Frankfurt am Main 2014, ISBN 978-3-945400-00-5

Web links

Literature by and about Alexandru Vona in the catalog of the German National Library
Richard Wagner writes on the death of the Romanian writer Alexandru Vona ( memento from December 4, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , December 4, 2004
Obituary in the Times
Conversation with Alexandru Vona (German)
Alexandru Vona in photographs on the Süddeutsche Zeitung website

Individual evidence

↑ Heftarchiv - Authors :: Alexandru Vona :: SINN UND FORM. Retrieved April 30, 2019 .
↑ Review: Fiction: Foam of Dreams . ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed April 30, 2019]).
↑ Iris Radisch: The Bachelor Machine . In: The time . July 11, 1997, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed April 30, 2019]).
↑ Weltwoche: Doomed to Survive . Retrieved April 30, 2019 .
↑ By Anke Pfeifer: “I need a great certainty” - Alexandru Vona's novel “The Walled Up Windows” is now followed by a narrow edition: literaturkritik.de. Accessed April 30, 2019 (German).

personal data
SURNAME	Vona, Alexandru
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Bejary Mayor, Alberto Henrique Samuel (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Romanian writer and architect
DATE OF BIRTH	March 3, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH	Bucharest
DATE OF DEATH	November 12, 2004
Place of death	Neuilly near Paris

[1] Heftarchiv - Authors :: Alexandru Vona :: SINN UND FORM. Retrieved April 30, 2019 .

[2] Review: Fiction: Foam of Dreams . ISSN 0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed April 30, 2019]).

[3] Iris Radisch: The Bachelor Machine . In: The time . July 11, 1997, ISSN 0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed April 30, 2019]).

[4] Weltwoche: Doomed to Survive . Retrieved April 30, 2019 .

[5] By Anke Pfeifer: “I need a great certainty” - Alexandru Vona's novel “The Walled Up Windows” is now followed by a narrow edition: literaturkritik.de. Accessed April 30, 2019 (German).