Vera Calin

CALIN, VERA (Clejan; 1921–), Romanian literary historian. Born in Bucharest into a bourgeois family, she was the daughter of the architect Herman Clejan. As a consequence of the antisemitic measures of the Holocaust period, she could study only in a Jewish school and college. After World War II, she graduated from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, Bucharest University (1946), and received a Ph.D. Calin became professor of comparative literature at Bucharest University (1970). Regarded as one of the most original Romanian essayists of the postwar generation, she published various literary studies, including Pornind dela clasici ("Starting from the Classics," 1957), a biography of Lord Byron (1964), and Alegoria si esentele ("Allegory and Essence," 1969). Metamorfozele mastilor comice ("The Metamorphosis of Comic Masques," 1966) includes a section on Shylock and the psychology of his revenge. Calin emigrated from Romania and settled in Los Angeles in 1976, serving as visiting professor at American and Canadian universities (1973, 1977, 1980) as well as the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1978). She published Tarziu: insemnari californiene 1986–1996 ("Late California Notes," 1997), personal reflections describing the immigrant condition and the condition of the non-religious Jewish intellectual assimilated to European culture in the United States.

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