Mihail Sebastian.(Review)

Mihail Sebastian Journal: 1935-1944, translated by Radu Ioanid. Ivan R. Dee, 641 pages, $36

Right up until the middle of the 1930s, Mihail Sebastian, a young Bucharest writer, lived a life that would have been recognizable to any other young writer in the Manhattan or London of the same era. His days were passed in thinking, writing, day-dreaming, socializing. He worried that his books were not selling enough and wondered whether to make his plays more accessible to a wider public. He thought about whether he had chosen the right sort of publisher and avidly read the comments of his reviewers. He conducted complicated love affairs. He learned to ski. He went to dinner parties given by other writers and counted among his friends actresses, university professors, and the odd rich businessman with literary pretensions.

Like his friends, Sebastian argued about aesthetics and politics. Like his friends, he went to literary cocktail parties. Like his friends, he wrote criticism for small magazines. But Sebastian was not like his friends; he was Jewish. And in the middle of the 1930s, his Bucharest slowly ceased to resemble Manhattan or London. In the latter half of that decade, latent Romanian anti-Semitism began to grow more powerful, both on the streets and in the intellectual circles that Sebastian frequented. Writing in his diary, which he began to keep right about at this time, he described the effects of this change in both spheres. The result is a genuinely original literary achievement, whose first Romanian publication in 1996 sparked off a tormented national debate about anti-Semitism, the Romanian intellectual tradition, and Romania's role in the war.

At first, it isn't easy to see why this book caused such a fuss. Its early pages obsessively recount a love affair. Because it was never meant for publication, Sebastian sometimes recounts stories which are impossible to understand out of context, or tantalizingly fails to explain something: "I regret not recording it here but I don't feel up to writing a longer note." Round about 1936, however, the diary's tone begins to change. On June 24 of that year he notes that

 
   Yesterday evening there was a street-fighting atmosphere on Strada 
   Gabroveni.... The Jewish shopkeeers had lowered their shutters and were 
   waiting for their attackers, determined to resist them. I think that's the 
   only thing to do. If we're going to kick the bucket, we might as well do it 
   with a club in our hands. It's no less tragic, but at least not so 
   ridiculous. 

Then, on June 25, he meets a friend, Camil Petrescu, at a Bucharest restaurant. The Jews have brought anti-Semitism upon themselves, Petrescu tells him: "there are too many of them." Sebastian marvels at the conversation:

 
   That is Camil Petrescu speaking. Camil Petrescu is one of the finest minds 
   in Romania. Camil Petrescu is one of the most sensitive creatures in 
   Romania.