Abstract This article focuses on the work of Emil Dorian, a Jewish-Romanian writer and physician, examining three forms of witnessing exile as a universal Jewish experience. The first part deals with the way in which Dorian’s novels, the 1930 Profeți și paiațe (Prophets and clowns), and the 1937 Otrava (The poison) recount obliquely the turmoil in which Jewish Romanians found themselves in the 1930 s, bearing witness to the condition of Jewish people in inter-war Romania where anti-Jewish policies were being progressively introduced. The second part uses Dori Laub’s distinction between “levels of witnessing in relation to the Holocaust experience” and three types of witnessing as well as Hayden White’s discussion on the representation of historical events and Dominick LaCapra’s critique of White’s ‘middle-voice’ approach to discuss the “quality” of Dorian’s testimony in the first volume of his diary, translated into English as The Quality of Witness: A Diary 1937–1944 . The last section connects this volume to a different medium, the film-essay Țara moartă (The dead nation, 2017), directed by Radu Jude, which deals with Romanian amnesia about the Holocaust.
Arleen Ionescu (Mon,) studied this question.