Quand une femme écrit en homme

• Main Author: Hélène Lenz
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre d'Études Balkaniques 2013-06-01
• Series: Cahiers Balkaniques
• Subjects: Banus Maria (1914-1990); romanian Jews; Transnistria; Roumania; second World War; History
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ceb/3988

This analysis presents Sub camuflaj: 1943-44 / under disguise: 1943-44 published in Bucharest in 1977. It is the diary of the war’s end by Maria Banus (1914 – 1999), who is also the author of Tara fetelor / the maiden country. For the Israeli literary critic A. Mirodan this diary was scandalous due to its sexual immorality (relations with men in the matrimonial home) and due to sarcastic references to compatriots then threatened by deportation (Transnistria camps). The author of Sub camuflaj was widely published and translated during the communist period. Working Illegality in 1943-44 she describes the cleavage between jews excited by the hope for a renewal linked to the soviet arrival and young Romanians belonging to a nationalist, christian orthodox right, while the “legionaries” daily imposed their symbols if not the law in the capital. Several details show this group to be more legitimate and desirable than the first one. Heaped with praise after the war, M. Banus is forgotten in the eighties. As a refugee in France she opposes the Ceaucescu dictatorship. In 2008 her works remained unknown, a fact that the young literary critic O. Moraru attributes as well to antisemitism as to misogyny. Actually Sub camuflaj unites the qualities attributed to M. Banus durig the era of her glory: it is a diary of creation, a chronicle, a conjuration of daily fear, but also a saganovel. Its diarist intention avoids as well nationalist or religious as dogmatic feminist speech. One can compare Sub camuflaj to Journal 1935 - 1944 by Mihail Sebastian -1998 - (bestseller of Romanian translations after 1989). M. Sebastian (1907 - 1944) has also been marginalized as a jew during the war but his literary work is now often reedited in Rumania and abroad.