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ne tee 496 Pádurean number of Jewish chit-chats suggest informal brokerage, financial counseling, or business partnerships. In the first decade of the twentieth century, Báncilá repeated the subject, setting up only new scenographies for his business-oriented Moldavian Jews. Four decades later, another example came from a north Transylvanian artist, when painting a northern Transylvania town. It was the year 1940 when Traian BiltiuDäncus exhibited at the Official Saloon a painting entitled On the Streets of Sighet (ill. 222). Despite the name, the composition was not an urban snapshot, but a social synthesis. The artist crammed in the most visible socioprofessional types from the Transylvanian town. The two Jews-in-conversation that made their way into the composition should have not interfered with the ensemble through their different ethnicity, as they probably fulfilled a social role: stock jobbers.'* The ring gesture indicates once more a good business. However, the evident stereotypical structure presumably consolidated a more benign general understanding. usual,” Susanne Bennewitz analyzes schmoozing in connection with informal brokerage, offering a case study on the Swiss Jews from Basel. The Schmuser, almost every time a Jew, was a third party, sealing businesses between two others and receiving a fee from both sides. His job consisted in walking and talking, negotiations, mediations, bringing the parties together. But, acquainted with everything that went on in the real estate market, cattle market, etc., he was also adviser and personal informer (Bennewitz 2011: 70-93). The situation was similar in Romania, where many local brokers were Jews and brokerage was regarded as a specific Jewish occupation. Unlike the other Jewish professions (rag-and-bone men, tailors, cart drivers, innkeepers, etc.), the brokers’ field of work was invisible: it consisted of talking. They counseled Romanians and Jews and even took the role of personal counselors. Although intimate brokerage was normal and legally endorsed, in the public mind, the Jewish broker became the right hand of the Jewish merchant and landlord, and their prolocutor. In Roman Ronetti’s Manasse, a controversial play from the beginning of the twentieth century, the main character, who gives the title of the play, is followed everywhere by Zelig Sor, his personal adviser, a broker. When Manasse dies in the end, Zelig Sor declaims: “I alone knew him, I alone knew him!” (1900: 180). It is quite likely that, at least for a specific public, the Jew-to-Jew street brokerage seemed conspicuous. A possible evidence supporting this could be the fact that, in the Romanian vocabulary, one of the meanings of the word brokerage was dishonest traffic (Scriban 1939: 1152). Zelig Sor’s philosophy was: “He who doesn’t know to sell a scabby billy goat instead of a milk cow, that is not a true broker!” (Ronetti 1900: 39). 5 In the 1901 painting Two Jews from Targu-Cucului (Targu-Cucului was the Jewish suburb of Jassy), Bancila reintroduced the same financial street discussion: the good-business “announciation,” the Informer with the hand outstretched in the same ring gesture, and the pondering Informed. A council (1907) represents a packed group of four Jews, involved in a secluded conversation. The items on their agenda are unknown, however, the Jassy Museum Complex that has the painting in custody catalogued the work under the name A Good Deal. A copy of this painting, dating from 1910, is today in the custody of Ploiesti Art Museum, under the original name. M Their presence is strongly justified by the fact that Sighet (Sighetu-Marmatiei in present-day Romania), proportionally concentrated the largest Jewish community from Transylvania. In the interwar period, one out of three locals from Sighet was Jewish. Ladislau Gyemant estimated that 40% of the total population were Jews (2004: 112).
