Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years [Hardcover]

Mihail Sebastian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 29, 2000

This chronicle of the dark years of Nazism by the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian, long delayed in its publication, has aroused a fury in Eastern Europe where appraisals of the Nazi period have been frozen in the clichés of old Communist regimes. In this respect the book resembles Victor Klemperer's massive diary from Germany, but Sebastian's Journal is a much greater literary achievement. It is now translated into English for the first time. Sebastian—journalist, novelist, playwright—was an elegant stylist who moved from theme to theme with admirable ease. His Journal offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's diary, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's journal. Above all, it is an account of the "rhinocerization" of major Romanian intellectuals whom Sebastian counted among his friends, including Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran, writers and thinkers who were mesmerized by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's "reactionary revolution." In poignant sequences that are not easily forgotten, Sebastian touches on the progressions of the "machinery" of brutalization and on the historical context in which it developed. Under the pressure of hatred and horror, his writing maintains the grace of its intelligence. Today Sebastian's Journal stands as one of the most important human and literary documents of the climate that preceded the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Published in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When first published in Romania in 1996, Sebastian's journal from the period of Romania's fascist past met a stormy reception, for Romania was none too eager to explore anew its dark years of dictatorship and Nazism. Sebastian's journal, much like Victor Klemperer's recently celebrated diaries from Nazi Germany, stands as an extraordinary document of daily life as fascist powers gained control in the years before and during WWII. Sebastian, a Jewish writer of fiction and literary criticism, was active in Bucharest intellectual society. It was good fortune and connections that saved him from deportation (he continued to teach during the war); death came when he was hit by a truck in May 1945. Sebastian's journal offers a fascinating look at the political and intellectual life of Romania in the decade 1935--1944, from the literary scene in which he was so active to the musical tastes of himself and his friends, to the critical political shift from democratic sympathies to dictatorship and fascism. Interwoven with the panoramic view of society at large are the details of the author's stormy personal life, spiced by countless unsatisfying love affairs and close friendships with Romania's leading intellectualsDamong them Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran. Supported by an excellent introduction by Radu Ioanid and an adept translation, Sebastian's Journal represents an important source for understanding the dynamics of Romanian intellectual society in the 1930s and 1940s. This is being published in association with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and it should appeal to a wide readership interested in learning more about life in Europe before and during WWII. First serial to the New Yorker. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

First published in Romania in 1996, this is the first English translation of the personal and literary diary of a young man in a unique position to chronicle and interpret social and political climate in the increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Eastern Europe. Living in Bucharest during a time when it was known as "little Paris," Sebastian was a young man during the years he wrote the journal. A lover of music and women, he was well known as an intellectual, playwright, and novelist. He was also a Jew. The journal chronicles his life as a writer, his involvement with others in the intellectual community, and his relationship with a University of Bucharest philosophy professor and leading figure in the community, a friend and mentor who eventually turned against him. The journal is fascinating on many levels, as a personal diary, a richly detailed record of historical events (later confirmed by archival documents), a glimpse of the lively literary world Sebastian lived in, and a horrifying account of escalating Romanian fascism. European editions have generated explosive debate over Romanian anti-Semitism. Grace Fill
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 669 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R Dee; 1St Edition edition (August 29, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566633265
• ISBN-13: 978-1566633260
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,482,311 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sebastian's Complaint, March 14, 2003

By 

Noam Eitan (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (Hardcover)

This is a unique document from any perspective you approach it. I found it particularly revealing about my father's background; Bucharest's middle class before WWII. The author came from a Jewish community who regarded itself as an assimilated part of a basically friendly Rumania. The amicable feelings towards Rumania have always run deep in its Jewish expatriates. Those who immigrated to Israel recreated a piece of pre-war Bucharest in Tel-Aviv. The book's description of a specific social set fascinates, with its elegant frivolity and gregarious bonhomie that was stifled under Ceausescu, but survived in my parent's social circle and in that of the Rumanian Jewish community.

Sebastian parades a delightful set of characters. From the comical Prince Antoine Bibescu, who walks to theatre among the barbarians "en pantoufles," to the playwright Eugène Ionesco, Sebastian's pen never fails to capture the essence his friends' personalities. Ionesco is mentioned only in passing but his predicament is sobering, if not unique. He was not able to keep his job because of his mother's Jewish background. Ionesco, who never identified himself as Jewish, had not experienced life as a minority and had difficulties dealing with his new status. Apparently he had an emotional breakdown before he finally succeeded in returning to France. I do not think that Ionesco or his biographers ever expounded on that chapter of his life from this perspective. What he had experienced in Rumania at the time may explain the inspiration for his play, Rhinocéros (1958).

This amusing social tapestry is but a background and introduction to the real drama of this diary. The author portrays the gradual evolution of a very sinister external reality, and more significantly, his own reactions to it. It illustrates a difficult and conflictual internal process of disillusionment, of realigning one's internal alliances, or, perhaps, the creeping realization that your friends are turning into rhinoceroses. As the author discovers during the peak of the persecutions, this is a process many assimilated Jews went through in past centuries under similar circumstances.

Sebastian refers to his homeland as "a Balkan swamp," where people change political affiliations like they change their shirts (something at which Ionesco's father was particularly good). He makes some lucid observations about Rumanian Jews' easy optimism and, contrary to common belief, the Jews' short memory of past tragedies. This selective amnesia of prior calamities is an attitude prevalent among Rumanian Jews in Israel, who nurture a sympathetic viewpoint about the events described in this book.

Indeed, this book confronts basic notions many people hold about that era of Rumanian history; making it highly controversial. My parents are a perfect illustration of the strong but contradictory feelings it arouses. My mother, deported from Cernauti (Chernovitz) in Bucovina to a concentration camp with the rest of her family, had no problems accepting Sebastian's account. My father, on the other hand, who hails from Bucharest, responded with disbelief to my reports about my revelations from the text. He remembered many of the events reported, for example the confiscation of the radios and the forced labor, but he refused to put it in any special context. His recollection was suffused with what seemed to me like heavy denial of the meaning and purpose of the regime's behavior. He combined this with a peculiar version of the history of those times, and a disturbing set of rationalizations of events ("it was only the Iron Guard," or, "everybody I knew survived"). He agreed to read the book, but after he received it, changed his mind and refused. Needless to say, my family, like many others, has never reached an agreement about the basic facts of the period. Another way of understanding the kind of condoning spirit displayed by my father is that it is representative of ethnic minorities' traditionally docile attitude towards authority. This deference, accentuated by fear, may also explain how millions of Jews were gullible enough to allow the Nazis to gas them. The Israelis' intransigence represents a backlash against generations of this servile obeisance, not unlike the kind of militant political transformation experienced by American blacks in the 20th century.

44 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars With the wing of death on his shoulder, October 21, 2000

By 

Henry Caraso - See all my reviews

This review is from: Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (Hardcover)

Born 1907, in the Danubian port of Braila, Romania, Mihail Sebastian studied law in Bucharest and was quickly seduced by the intense literary life of the Thirties, in a Romania where the generous thoughts of the French Revolution were twisted by Gobineau, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Spengler et al. He was thrilled, together with other writers like Mircea Eliade, by the personality of Nae Ionescu, a Fascist philosopher who gave him his first chance in his newspaper. Sebastian distanced himself from him afterwards, still maintaining friendly relations. He wrote his first novel, SINCE TWO THOUSAND YEARS, in 1933, with a foreword by Ionescu, which was a real stab-in-the back. Disgusted, Sebastian moved to less engaged pieces such as THE ACACIAS TOWN and popular plays like HOLIDAY GAMES. His activity as a lawyer was interrupted by the arrival of the fascism in Romania, in 1940. He survived WWII with temporary employments, but was able to write two other plays, STAR WITH NO NAME and BREAKING NEWS, plus a novel, THE ACCIDENT. Most of his Romanian friends maintained relations with him, even helping him materially (one of them staged STAR WITH NO NAME in 1944) but after USSR invaded Romania, most of them were worried by the ascension of the Jews in the hierarchy of the Communist Party. So, Sebastian found himself torn between friends who avoided him and his Jewish companions, who were condemning him for such odd ties. They offered him a position in their paper, but he refused, and was trying a new career as a teacher when he was run down by a truck, dying instantly in May 1945. BREAKING NEWS was staged at the National Theater in 1945, then Sebastian was forgotten until 1956, when the play was shown by the same National Theater, in Paris, for the Romanian colony. Then he fell into oblivion until the fall of the Communist Romanian regime, in 1990, when a lot of old books were re-printed, including 2000 YEARS, with a great succcess, partly owed to the ominous foreword. Then, in 1996, the personal diary he had written between 1935 and 1944, slipped to Israel by his brother Ben, was published in Bucharest under the supervision of Leon Volovici, an Israeli researcher, who had previously published, for Pergamon Press, a very interesting essay on the Fascist romanian writers of the Thirties. The success of the JOURNAL was colossal; a lot of Romanians discovered what their own life (or their parents') had been during WWII, learning that the spoliation of the Romanian Jews was not a matter of "a few rags, a few money, a few working camps eight hours a day, with sleeping at home", as boasted in prison by a notorious fascist. Later, the reactions became lukewarm: the publisher of the book tried to make a comparison between the ordeal of the Jews and the sufferings of the Romanian deviationists from communism, starting a controversy which is still ardent today, trying to pave the way to a Nurnberg for the Communism. The JOURNAL of Mihail Sebastian can be read on several levels (literature, intimity, an essay of reflexion on WWII), and will be a joy for the "people who know". It may attract other readers, preoccupied with Romania, a country little known in the US, described by a fine essayist, a great amateur of Western civilization, who play a very small in those events, still describing with sorrow the "liberation" of Romania. This Journal was certainly not meant for printing, which explains the cruelty of certain descriptions of the author's life. Nobody may guess what Sebastian's life would have been, without that murderous truck. He may have joined his friend Patrascanu, one of the first leaders of the Communist Romania, trialed and murdered by his own people in 1948-54.Otherwise, he would probably have sought asylum in the West - Israel was not his cup of tea. Whatever certain critics may think, Sebastian was not a "loser". If you want a conclusion, I would choose a description of the best book of his preferred French writer, Etienne de Senancour: an existential malaise, becoming the hopeless sadness of the hero, tasting the sore delight of the melancoly. Should I add that Mihail Sebastian was my teacher of French, in Bucarest? harry carasso

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great literature, vastly influential in Romania today, October 25, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years (Hardcover)

First of all, the "Journal" is exquisitly written.
Then, this is The Book for understanding multiple facets of life in war-time Romania, shining light on previously hidden places.

A note of strong dissagreement with a previuos reviewer's assesment of reasons for which the book is supposedly absent from Romanian bookstores:

This book is not "out of print" in its original version, it has been printed multiple times (last time in 2002) and is available as we speak. It is being bought off the shelves like fresh bread every time Humanitas re-prints it.
Thousands and thousands of Romanians bought, read, discussed, reviewed and raved about the Journal. We were changed by it, as any other feeling human would! Countless echoes in the press, radio and TV shows were generated by this publication.

Sebastian's Journal became a cornerstone of our perception of Romania's past, not just for a handful of passionate readers but for a whole nation.
Noam, research before you write.