Miron Grindea (31 January 1909 – 18 November 1995) was a Romanian-born literary journalist and the editor of ADAM International Review, a little magazine published for over 50 years.
Born Mondi Miron Grunberg in the Moldavian town of Târgu Ocna, he moved with his Jewish family after the First World War to the capital, Bucharest. Having studied humanities at the University of Bucharest and at the Sorbonne in Paris, Miron Grindea from 1929 began reviewing music and literature for the Jewish cultural review ADAM and became its co-editor in 1936. That same year, he married the pianist Carola Rabinovici (1914-2009); their daughter Nadia was also to become a pianist. Grindea and his wife arrived in Britain in September 1939,[1] two days before the outbreak of the Second World War, and he was soon employed in the BBC’s European Intelligence Section at Bush House, London.
When in 1941, many émigré authors, including Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig, gathered in London for a meeting of the international writers' club PEN, under the presidency of H. G. Wells, Grindea was inspired to start an international literary journal. To avoid wartime restrictions on new publications, he revived ADAM in September that year.
His eminent associates and contributors included Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, J.B. Priestley (who were all among the several members of ADAM’s editorial board) and T. S. Eliot. Grindea’s personal library (housed at the Foyles Special Collections Library at the Maughan Library) includes signed copies of works by Arthur Koestler, André Gide, Robert Graves, Bertrand Russell, Tristan Tzara, Patrick Moore and Graham Greene and many others.
Grindea edited and, with subsidies, financed ADAM from his London home at Emperor’s Gate in Kensington, over the decades featuring an eclectic range of subjects in the magazine (its title was an acronym for Art, Drama, Architecture and Music), and attracting an illustrious list of unpaid contributors who at various times included George Bernard Shaw, Cecil Day-Lewis, W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Anthony Powell, Lawrence Durrell and Winston Churchill. Among those who made their debut in ADAM are Maureen Duffy and Wolf Mankowitz.[2]
In 2006 ADAM: An Anthology of Miron Grindea's ADAM Editorials (2 volumes), selected and edited by his grand-daughter Rachel Lasserson, was published (London: Vallentine Mitchell).
Contents |
Miron Grindea's papers and the ADAM archives are largely held at King’s College, London. A commemorative exhibition, Miron Grindea and the Art of Literary Journalism, was held at the Weston Room, Maughan Library and Information Services Centre, Chancery Lane, in 2003.