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Rating: 
Summary: With the wing of death on his shoulder
Review: 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
Rating: 
Summary: Great literature, vastly influential in Romania today
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great literature, vastly influential in Romania today
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Good Morning Heartbreak
Review: Mikhail Sebastian was the Romanian Walter Benjamin. Trained as a lawyer and a literary critic, Sebastian published a highly-regarded novel at the age of 23. He held one of those literary-functionary jobs requiring very little actual work or presence at the office which Europe once awarded to its philosophers and artists. Like Benjamin, Sebastian was a skittish, highly personable writer: a professional skeptic, an independent thinker, who could amuse himself indefinitely with his own thoughts and company. To see the War through Sebastian's eyes in this diary is to finally understand it. The journal - together with Radu Ioanid's recently published history of the Romanian holocaust - certainly explodes the myth that Romania was a "good" place to be Jewish during WW2. In fact, the Antonescu's wartime government - reactive always to the country's popular ultra-fascist Iron Guard - annhilated half the country's Jews, some 150,000 people. The "cut" was purely geographic: Bessarabia and Bukovina, two cities bordering Odessa with large Jewish populations, were targeted for ethnic cleansing; whereas the Jews of Bucharest were merely subject to statutes barring their employment, use of amenities, etc. But what's most extraordinary about the Journals is the way that it gives this kind of victimage-by-chance a human face: curious and halting. Over the course of two years, Sebastian is exiled from the inner circles of the Bucharest literati. His close friends and mentors, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, have become intelletual leaders of the Iron Guard. Sebastian waits in Bucharest, increasingly unemployable due to anti-Semitic statutes and restrictions, borrowing money to pay the rent while fully aware of the massacres and pogroms that were taking place in the northern regions of his country. The apartments of Bucharest Jews were confiscated; and then their telephones; and then eventually their skis?! Each week brought new onslaughts of mad and crippling restrictions. Sebastian notes tbe "mute despair that has become a kind of Jewish greeting." He witnesses this, with no illusions, while trying to piece together a subsistence living for himself and his parents, at times writing plays which would be produced under the names of non-Jewish friends, which he was eventually best known for. Sebastian never married; he had a number of simultaneous & consecutive affairs with married and independent women, as was the custom at that time and place. He had no children. He has a great sense of vocation as a writer and a thinker, and this Journal comes closer than any document I've read to conveying a sense of the "dazed stupor ... with no room for gestures, feeling, words" that comes from living alongside horror.
Rating:
Summary: Good Morning Heartbreak
Review: Mikhail Sebastian was the Romanian Walter Benjamin. Trained as a lawyer and a literary critic, Sebastian published a highly-regarded novel at the age of 23. He held one of those literary-functionary jobs requiring very little actual work or presence at the office which Europe once awarded to its philosophers and artists. Like Benjamin, Sebastian was a skittish, highly personable writer: a professional skeptic, an independent thinker, who could amuse himself indefinitely with his own thoughts and company. To see the War through Sebastian's eyes in this diary is to finally understand it. The journal - together with Radu Ioanid's recently published history of the Romanian holocaust - certainly explodes the myth that Romania was a "good" place to be Jewish during WW2. In fact, the Antonescu's wartime government - reactive always to the country's popular ultra-fascist Iron Guard - annhilated half the country's Jews, some 150,000 people. The "cut" was purely geographic: Bessarabia and Bukovina, two cities bordering Odessa with large Jewish populations, were targeted for ethnic cleansing; whereas the Jews of Bucharest were merely subject to statutes barring their employment, use of amenities, etc. But what's most extraordinary about the Journals is the way that it gives this kind of victimage-by-chance a human face: curious and halting. Over the course of two years, Sebastian is exiled from the inner circles of the Bucharest literati. His close friends and mentors, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, have become intelletual leaders of the Iron Guard. Sebastian waits in Bucharest, increasingly unemployable due to anti-Semitic statutes and restrictions, borrowing money to pay the rent while fully aware of the massacres and pogroms that were taking place in the northern regions of his country. The apartments of Bucharest Jews were confiscated; and then their telephones; and then eventually their skis?! Each week brought new onslaughts of mad and crippling restrictions. Sebastian notes tbe "mute despair that has become a kind of Jewish greeting." He witnesses this, with no illusions, while trying to piece together a subsistence living for himself and his parents, at times writing plays which would be produced under the names of non-Jewish friends, which he was eventually best known for. Sebastian never married; he had a number of simultaneous & consecutive affairs with married and independent women, as was the custom at that time and place. He had no children. He has a great sense of vocation as a writer and a thinker, and this Journal comes closer than any document I've read to conveying a sense of the "dazed stupor ... with no room for gestures, feeling, words" that comes from living alongside horror.
Rating:
Summary: Politics and Memories
Review: That Sebastian would have never thought of becoming an international name through his diary rather than his plays is something that should provoke some meditations. Why is Sebastian's diary so important in the end? Besides his intellectually compelling narrative, the historic substance traversing his account is highly dramatic. And although the diary is much more than a historic testimony, unfortunately, it is this side of it that has been stressed in recent Romanian-French polemics, downplaying the cultured style and general Bucharestian climate of the 1930s and 1940s described. And if today it is fashionable in Romania to uncritically publish inter war fascist intellectuals such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Constantin Noica (in this last case the author being accompanied by his disciples' cult recounts from Paltinis) hand in hand--that is, by the same publishing house--with Sebastian's diary (a Jewish victim of Romanian inter war fascism) one wonders if this is not a sign of ignorance over the Jewish Holocaust or a tendency to aestheticize history. After all, all four intellectuals mentioned here were highly prestigious and brilliant in their domains, although Sebastian had to ultimately "pay" for his "foreignness." The publication of Sebastian's journal in Romania, France, and the US should mark a starting point for a realistic debate over the Jewish Holocaust in Romania--marginalized or obliterated by the Romanian national-communist historiography. It should also help understand why, after half a century from the Holocaust, it is still fashionable in Romania to use nineteenth century anti-Semitic stereotypes of essentialist Jewish identification--and this not only by declared xenophobic anti-Semites, but by leading self-declared liberal intellectuals and would-be human rights activists. It should also enlighten the conditions in which, after the Nazi and Romanian legionnary discrimination, some Jewish intellectuals adhered to Marxism along with many other gentiles, Romanians and non-Romanians as well. Finally, it should trigger a wider debate on whether the regime in Romania until 1989 was communist, Marxist, Stalinist, populist, Ceausescuist-torturous in order to avoid summary equations between fascism and communism, Holocaust and Gulag. It is not only the Holocaust that must be "revisited" in that country but communism as well, as it remains a matter of mystification in order to serve the interests of the day, whereby Romanian communism meant only the Secret Police in its torturous arm instantiation, a Gulag, and the Securitate personal files. Maybe it is time for social scientists to step in and clearly delineate the domain of philosophers, writers, and journalists from thoroughly grounded research. If Sebastian's diary helps at least one of these debates than his torment was not in vain.
Rating:
Summary: Roumania , the antisemitism factory of Europe during WW2
Review: The fabricated myth, by the Roumanian Nationalists, that Roumania was a "good" place to be for a Jew, during the Holocaust is to be completely and forever forgotten. From the accounts of Mihail Sebastian, it is obvious that the Roumanian intelligentia, the literary circles were filled with Legionairs that spreed antisemitism in a most vicious manner. The German SS Killing Detachments were, according to Eichman's testimony during his trial, abhorred and disgusted by the crude cruelty of the Roumanian troups during the deportation of the Jewish population from Bassarabia to camps in Transnistria. The Roumanian Nation as a whole, is guilty of the extermination of is Jewish population, collectively the Nation should repent just like the Germans. This of course requires self-examination, admission and a certain degree of intelligence. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the true socio-political climat in Roumania during WW2.
Rating:
Summary: Roumania , the antisemitism factory of Europe during WW2
Review: The fabricated myth, by the Roumanian Nationalists, that Roumania was a "good" place to be for a Jew, during the Holocaust is to be completely and forever forgotten. From the accounts of Mihail Sebastian, it is obvious that the Roumanian intelligentia, the literary circles were filled with Legionairs that spreed antisemitism in a most vicious manner. The German SS Killing Detachments were, according to Eichman's testimony during his trial, abhorred and disgusted by the crude cruelty of the Roumanian troups during the deportation of the Jewish population from Bassarabia to camps in Transnistria. The Roumanian Nation as a whole, is guilty of the extermination of is Jewish population, collectively the Nation should repent just like the Germans. This of course requires self-examination, admission and a certain degree of intelligence. In conclusion, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the true socio-political climat in Roumania during WW2.
Rating:
Summary: Sebastian's Complaint
Review: 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. This book is out of print in Rumania. On a trip there shortly after its publication, I could not find it anywhere. Thinking that it might be sold out, I inquired. No bookseller that I spoke to in Bucharest had even heard of it. Some of the author's works are available on Rumanian web-sites, but not this one. The book's continued availability in English, rather than in its original language, at first appears puzzling. It may attest to ongoing confusion about how to interpret that troubled time. I believe this explains the widely divergent ratings that reviews of this book receive here. The first reviewer, Henry Caraso, gives the work a particularly intriguing single point rating, after a basically positive evaluation. His negative assessment cannot be explained, other than possibly by the last sentence, which reveals an acquaintance with the author. Is this a personal antipathy?
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