Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years

Having enjoyed his novel, For Two Thousand Years, I had high expectations for his journal. I was not disappointed as he brings home the horror of those days in clear and sophisticated prose. The sorrow for his former friend who dies is papable, yet he is able to relate both the horror and the humanity that he encountered on a daily basis.

The introduction compares this book to the diaries of Victor Klemperer, which is apt, but it doesn't even mention Emil Dorian, another Jewish diarist in Romania during the Holocaust. In fact, Sebastian and Dorian knew each other and Sebastian mentions Dorian in his diary once (unfavorably). Sebastian was a relatively known journalist and playwright, and mixed with Romanian writers, actors and intellectuals of all kinds. He survived the war, only to be run over by a truck and killed just days after Germany's surrender.

I found this diary to be less interesting than either Klemperer's or Dorian's. I think it begins too slowly and perhaps the editors should have cut a few years off the start. In the first four years, Sebastian mainly writes show more about his love affairs and his writing (plays and novels), which are of limited interest to me. Later he follows the tide of the war closely and also writes about the restrictions and penalties the Romanian government kept passing against the Jews, like a rope tightening around their necks. Though he is said to be a very talented writer, his entries don't have the same lyricism and honey-wine phrases Dorian frequently used.

As with Dorian's diary, I was shocked by the anti-Semitism that was deeply ingrained in Romanian society -- as Sebastian puts it, "the huge anti-Semitic factory that is the Romanian state, with all its offices, authorities, press, institutions, laws, and procedures." Nearly all of Sebastian's friends hated Jews and few of them bothered to hide it from him. I suppose you might think, well, why did he remain on speaking terms with these people, but if he cut off friendships just because his friend was an anti-Semite, very quickly he would have no friends left.

I think this diary would be of special interest for scholars of the Holocaust in Romania, and perhaps scholars of World War II in general, since Sebastian writes so much about the events of the war. The general reader wouldn't get anything out of it, though, and in any case I'd recommend the Klemperer/Dorian diaries over this one. show less

My good friend Roger Baylor bought this for me about ten years ago. What I recall with a gleam is reading it at various cafes in Louisville, coinciding with Sebastian's descriptions of the myriad cafes in Bucharest. I found his insights to be rather piercing especially as to the ambivalence of WWII policies, nothing sweeping or unified, this was all chortled fictionally later by Olivia Manning in her Balkan Trilogy.

Mihail Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in pre-war Bucharest who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. He survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in a road accident in 1945.