LUCA, B.

LUCA, B. (originally Luca Bernstein; 1873–1931), Romanian poet and playwright. Luca was born in Ramnicul Sarat. He published verses in Jewish periodicals (Hatikva; Lumea evree; Puntea de fildes) beginning in 1913. Luca's first verse collection Reflex de suflet ("Reflection of a Soul," 1915) is a volume of elegies on the death of the author's child. Another volume, Golgota (1918), includes poems written during World War I describing the sufferings endured, in a realist form. Thanks to this volume, Luca came to be considered the first anti-war poet in Romanian literature between the wars. In 1919 he published a volume of anti-war sketches Pacate ("Sins"), and in 1922 another volume of poems Versuri primitive ("Primitive Verses"). In 1919 in Craiova, he edited and published the literary review Zorile. In 1919–22 he wrote a number of plays presented at the National Theater of Craiova, one of them called Omul de prisos ("The Superfluous Man"), and all published in a single volume (1922). Luca died in Bucharest. -BIBLIOGRAPHY: F. Aderca, in: Th. Loewenstein and N. Kitzler, Israel in lume (1939), 218; I. Bercovici, Pirkei Romanyah (1975), 36; A.B. Yoff, Bi-Sedot Zarim (1996), 188–89. (Lucian-Zeev Herscovici (2nd ed.)