Leon Feraru

Leon Feraru (born Leon Enselberg, also credited as L. Schmidt; 1887 – 1961) was a Romanian and American poet, literary historian and translator.

Born in Brăila into a modest Jewish family, his father was an ironworker (fierar), the origin of his pseudonym. He attended primary and high school in his native city, followed by a literature and law degree from the University of Montpellier, making his published debut in Saniel Gossman's Jewish review, Lumea Israelită; other reviews that ran his work included Viața Românească, Viața Literară și Artistică, Ecoul. Conservatorul Brăilei, Curierul, Flacăra, Noua Revistă Română, Țara Nouă, Convorbiri Critice, Vieața Nouă, Pessach, Pagini Libere, Adevărul Literar și Artistic, Tânărul Evreu and Eugen Relgis' Cugetul Liber. Pen names he used in these publications were Ola Canta (shared with Dimitrie Anghel), H. Libanon and L. Feru.

Enselberg-Feraru was friends with Jean Bart, Camil Baltazar and especially Anghel, with whom he collaborated on several poems (Halucinații, Orologiul and Vezuviul). Following the anti-Semitic outcry that came about as a result of the staging of Ronetti Roman's play Manasse and similar episodes, he emigrated to the United States in early 1913. In his adopted country, he became a constant promoter of Romanian culture, as confirmed by his correspondence and noted in the accounts of his contemporaries. Initially working as an unskilled laborer, he became a teaching assistant at the University of Toronto. He then was a professor of Romance languages and literature at Columbia University (1917–1927) and at Long Island University (1927–1947), where he chaired the foreign languages department for a time. He contributed to The Romanic Review and Rumanian Literary News (which he edited).

Briefly returning to Romania only in 1925, his first book of poetry was Maghernița veche și alte versuri din anii tineri ("The Old Shanty and Other Verse of Youth"), put out by Cartea Românească of Bucharest in 1926, followed in 1937 by Arabescuri ("Arabesques"), issued as a supplement by the social democratic review Șantier. According to literary historian and critic George Călinescu, the works fall into two separate categories: "moving" regrets for his native Romania, and samples of proletarian literature, including an ode to the sound of hammers in industrial Brăila ("his most valid" poetry).

Feraru also wrote two English-language critical studies of Romanian literature: The Development of the Rumanian Novel (1926) and The Development of the Rumanian Poetry (1929); he submitted articles and reviews for The International Encyclopedia (1930) about Gala Galaction, Mateiu Caragiale, Ioan Alexandru Brătescu-Voinești, Lucian Blaga and Camil Baltazar. He translated selections from Mihai Eminescu, Tudor Arghezi, Panait Cerna, Anton Pann, Vasile Cârlova and Dimitrie Bolintineanu into English. Through his will, he left Columbia University, which paid his pension, his library of some ten thousand Romanian-language books. He died in New York City.

References

• George Călinescu, Istoria literaturii române de la origini pînă în prezent. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1986.