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500 Pádurean mentioning the bathhouse, the author alludes, not only to the fact that in public baths the discussions were trivial, but also to the fact that public baths were places where the Jews regularly gathered.” The derision is therefore extended. It is the Jewish community, in fact, who is making politics in the way the two gullible Jewish “media analysts” are, and it is not only the Jews who fell into derision but also the radical anti-Semites, set on seeing in each Jew a frightening political conspirer. Of course, there were also highly xenophobic viewpoints that restructured the cartoons from humorous to accusatory. An anti-Semite brochure from the interwar period put together several critical alerts and, among them, some Jewish dialogues. The high level of criticism was manifested in the anatomical reconfiguration of the protagonists, which are big-bellied, ugly, and animalized. ‘The skinny underprivileged Jew was replaced by the fat, rich capitalist, largely entailed in the gloomy imagination of the caricaturist, rather than in his social experience. In one drawing, two oil kings are planning their business: “Dear Shmil, prick up your ears,/ In let’s say two or three years,/ I'll have new oil wells, old boy,/ From Moreni to Baicoi [two Romanian towns, with a developed petroleum industry].// Dear Shtrul, the Romanian is a dunce/ As one might find such only once/ All that gold that he should keep/ He’s selling us on the cheap// What Palestine could we still need,/ When we took this garden by deed,/ We would be stupid if we didn’t rout/ The locals from their country out” (ill. 225). Another drawing from the same brochure incriminates Jews, who came to unjustly benefit of the journalists rights: “On the road, our Ytzig ran/ Into Ghidale sin Avram,/ One sells ice whereas the other/ Is a prosperous stockjobber.// — Dear Ytzig, how is it with you, / — Just like any poor Jew,/ I’m going on a train trip/ — Was it high or was it cheap?// - Oh Ghidal, my old friend,/ Not a penny need I spend/ And I travel high class/ Cause I own a ... press pass”. Finally, a serious indictment refers to the fact the Jews supposedly had the support of a very important political formation, the National Peasant Party: “Ghidal and Leiba Zipstein/ Plan the country down the line/ And they'd bring at any hour/ The National Peasants to power.// My dear Leiba, please take note/ With the Peasants we shall vote,/ Only they will not refuse/ To sell the country to the Jews.// 22 Alongside the synagogue, the school, and the burying ground, the bathhouse was a benefice that was granted to the Jews, in the effort of the nineteenth-century Moldavian authorities to populate burgs. And just as the synagogue, the bathhouse was perceived as a place of Jewish vociferation. Ion Luca Caragiale, a great Romanian playwright, during a voyage at Piatra-Neamt, a Moldavian town, complained to a friend in a letter about the noisy Jewish clutter at the local bathhouse: “There is a bathhouse with hydrotherapy here, but it’s a shame that we have to cram with all these Jews. Every Friday evening there is a hubble-bubble that gives you head-aches; because on Friday evening, every Jew, no matter how devious, is bided by his [religious] Law to wash, to go to the synagogue and to lay with his wife. And then, lo and behold, what Jewish rabble and dirt there is in the pool. One actually gets dirtier [when getting in]” (Caragiale 1942: 439).
