he and Zissu were both touched by the wild landscape of the Ceahlău Massif and Piatra's shtetl atmosphere. In another one of his texts, Relgis recalled having been influenced in childhood by selective readings from the Romanian Jewish scholar Moses Schwarzfeld and his Anuarul pentru Israeliți journal (he told that, during later years, he had collected the entire Anuarul collection). Taking his first steps in literary life, Eisig Sigler adopted his new name through forms of wordplay which enjoyed some popularity among pseudonymous Jewish writers (the case of Paul Celan, born Ancel). He was from early on a promoter of Symbolist and modernist literature, a cause into which he blended his left-wing perspective and calls for Jewish emancipation. Writing in 2007, literary historian Paul Cernat suggested that Relgis, like fellow humanitarianist and Jewish intellectual Isac Ludo, had a "not at all negligible" part to play in the early diffusion of Romanian modernism. Relgis' main contribution in the 1910s was the Symbolist tribune Fronda ("The Fronde"), the three consecutive issues of which he edited, in Iași, between April and June 1912. Like Ludo's review Absolutio (which saw print two years later), Fronda stood for the radical branch of the Romanian Symbolist movement in Iași, in contrast to both the left-leaning but traditionalist magazine Viața Românească and the more conventional Symbolism of Versuri și Proză journal. Its editorial board, Relgis included, went anonymous, but their names were known to other periodicals of the day and to later researchers. According to Cernat, Relgis was "the most significant Frondiste", seconded by two future figures in Romanian Jewish journalism: Albert Schreiber and Carol Steinberg. Like Ludo and poet Benjamin Fondane, the Fronda group represented those Romanian Jewish aficionados in Iași who followed the Symbolist-modernist school of Arghezi, and who promoted Arghezi's poetry in northern Romania: Frondas writers were noted for saluting Viața Românească when it too began hosting poems by Arghezi. Fronda put out three issues in all, after which time Relgis became an occasional contributor to more circulated periodicals, among them Rampa (founded by Arghezi and the socialist agitator N. D. Cocea) and Vieața Nouă (led by Symbolist critic Ovid Densusianu). In 1913, he collected his loose philosophical essays, or "fantasies", in the volume Triumful neființei ("The Triumph of Non-Being"). He published his first two books of poems during World War I, but before the end of Romania's neutrality period. The first one was