BENADOR, URY

BENADOR, URY, originally Simon Schmidt (1895–1971), Romanian novelist. One of his best known novels, Ghetto veac XX ("20th-Century Ghetto," 1934), presents a picture of Romanian-Jewish life. A short story, Appassionato (1935), describes expressionistically the ecstatic and mystic fascination that Beethoven's music exercises on a young ḥasid from an East European shtetl. During the Communist period, the writer became a conformist supporter of the regime, publishing anti-Zionist and anti-religious pamphlets. A novel, Gablonz "Magazin Universal" (1961), is a violent attack on the Jewish bourgeoisie. He also wrote a biography of Beethoven (1964). (Leon Volovici (2nd ed.)