Max Blecher was born in 1909 in Botoşani, Romania. After being diagnosed with Pott's disease (tuberculous spondylitis)--at the time, as was all tuberculosis, incurable--he was forced to abandon his medical studies in Paris, and spent the last ten years of his life in sanatoriums in France, Switzerland, and Romania, where he died in 1938.
Blecher published one volume of poems, Corp transparent (1934), and two autobiographical novels in 1936 and 1937; a third appeared posthumously in 1971. He corresponded with main figures of the Romanian literary avant-garde, such as Geo Bogza (who facilitated the publication of his books), Ilarie Voronca, Saşa Pană, and Mihail Sebastian, as well as with André Breton, André Gide, and Martin Heidegger. While the young critic Eugène Ionesco situated Blecher's writing in the vicinity of Franz Kafka, Ury Benador, his countryman and a writer of novels with Jewish themes, found him "a vibrant and authentic Jewish personality."
