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When Ytzig Met Shtrul: On Schmoozing and Jewish Conspiracy in Romanian Art When in office they [the National Peasants] will be/ We will surely be carefree/ And our life would be so fine,// There’s no sweeter Palestine!” (ill. 226). But the rising popularity of the Jewish téte-a-tétes surpassed gradually any political intentions and, more strikingly, the bounding ethnicity and cultural identity of the protagonists. In a 1930 cartoon from a very popular satirical magazine, Furnica, two Jewish friends are having a day on the beach (ill. 227). They make some observations, as in front of them an obese woman is ready to go into the water: “Do you see her, Ytzig? ... This one is the Red Sea ...” says one of them. Ytzig continues: “... which goes to flow into the Black Sea ...”, at which point his friend adds up: “... and they'll pull her out the Dead Sea.” The caricaturist coined a pun. In Romanian, the word sea is a homonym with the word dig, the woman’s progressive identities being the “Big Red” and the “Big Dead.” However, the two observers do not need to be Jews. Apart from the geographic connotations, alluding to the Land of Israel, the dialogue is not specifically Jewish. Ytzig and his friend are two partially deethnicized wags, and the two would remain, for many decades, central figures for humorous masquerades that sometimes have nothing specific of a Jewish dialogue. In the diary of Ion Hudita, a Romanian historian and politician, we discover a surprising Jewish joke; in spite of the fact that the characters are Israelites, the subject of the dialogue is not Jewish, but surprisingly enough it also involves other nationalities (2000: 118). It was the year 1940. Two Jews talk about the catastrophic earthquake that had stricken Romania a few days before. Bercu tells Ytzig that the epicenter of this earthquake was in the region of Vrancea (a seismically active zone of Romania). It’s not true, replied Ytzig, the epicenter is considerably further, precisely in Albany, where, in an enormous cave, two Italian divisions shiver with the fear that the Greeks would take them prisoners. The anecdote is a short, but fully developed double act, as we are in the presence of a stooge and a comic. Ridiculing the Italian courage proved even more hilarious, as the interlocutors’ ethnicity was in fact associated with the lack of courage. Two Jews, that is two cowards, were pointing out the faintheartedness of another nation. With the communist dictatorship installed by the Soviets, the open illustrated jokes with Jews were put to an end. New subjects of mockery and new national enemies emerged—the imperialists, the rich landlords—at the same time that the Jew, as literary or artistic subject, was placed under taboo. From the pages of the national newspapers, the Jewish jokes were confined to small social gatherings. Predictably, the visual disappeared; only the story survived. Their existence can now only be recounted.” 23 Furnica, year XXV, no. 2, July 1930. 24 Tn the 1990s, the actor Cornel Vulpe recalled the following story that happened four decades before. Mircea Crisan, a colleague of the actor, quite famous in the 1950s, met Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dgj, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party and first ruler of Socialist Romania at a jamboree. 501
