Journal 1935-44

by Mihail Sebastian (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $29.45

  The diary of a Rumanian Jewish writer who lived in Bucharest throughout the thirties and the war, The Fascist Years records Mihail Sebastian's increasing experience of anti-semitism, the increasing restrictions on his freedom, his increasing alienation from his Aryan friends as they compromise with Rumania's fascist regime, as well as his love of music, reading and books.. The obvious comparison is with Victor Klemperer's diary, published recently in two volumes by Weidenfeld, another diary of a Jew who survived the war and escaped the camps, but Sebastian is by far the better writer and by far the more interesting person.

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $23.42

  Mihail Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in pre-war Bucharest, a novelist, playwright, poet and journalist who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. Because of Romania's opportunistic treatment of Jews, he survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in a road accident early in 1945. His remarkable diary was published only recently in its original language and is here translated into English for the first time. Sebastian's Journal offers not only a chronicle of the darkest years of European anti-Semitism but a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a reader's notebook, and a music lover's journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the major Romanian intellectuals, Sebastian's friends, writers and thinkers who were mesmerised by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's 'reactionary revolution'. In poignant and memorable sequences, Sebastian touches on the progression of the machinery of brutalisation and on the historical context that lay behind it. One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the Nazi period, Sebastian's journal vividly captures the now-vanished world of pre-war Bucharest. Under the pressure of hatred and horror in the 'huge anti-Semitic factory' that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its intelligence, standing as one of the most important human and literary documents to survive from a singular era of terror and despair.