Henri Wald
Henri "Ricu" Wald (October 31, 1920 – July 14, 2002),[1] also known as Henry Wald,[1] was a Romanian professor, philosopher, logician, and essayist.[2]
Early life
[edit]Wald was born to a family of small merchants in Bucharest, the capital of Romania.[2] Wald first became interested in philosophy at age sixteen, during a lecture given by one of his teachers.[1] He was forced to leave high school in 1940 due to discriminatory anti-Jewish laws.[2] Thus, Wald studied at a private college for Jewish students.[2]
Career
[edit]During World War II, Wald served in a forced labor detachment due to him being Jewish.[2] In terms of his political views, Wald was a Communist and "a radical antifascist".[2] Wald began publishing in September 1944 in the newspaper Tribuna poporului (The People's Tribune).[2] In addition, he also contributed to several additional leftist periodicals and to some cultural publications as well.[2] Wald graduated from the faculty of philosophy at the University of Bucharest in 1946, after writing a dissertation called “The Petty Bourgeois Mentality.”[1][2] Wald became a professor of philosophy in Bucharest in 1948, a job which he occupied until 1962 (when he was fired due to his opposition to the official "nationalist-communist" stance of the then-Romanian government).[2] Wald worked in several other educational institutions as well until his retirement in 1983.[2] Due to his political commitments, Wald also worked in the propaganda department for the Communist Romanian regime in the late 1940s and early 1950s.[2] Later on in his life, Wald became significantly closer to Judaism, which he thought was a "matrix of humanist thinking".[2] Late in his life, the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Company’s Center for Oral History (C.O.H.) conducted an interview with Wald where he talked about and discussed his life story.[1] Wald died in 2002, at the age of 80.[2][1]
