Dimensions
153 x 234 x 50mm
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 compelling 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, 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 hit.
One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the Nazi period, Sebastian's journal vividly capture the now-vanished world of pre-war Bucharest. Under the pressure of hatred and horror in the "huge ani-Semitic factory" that was Romania in the war years, his writing maintains the grace of its intelligence, standing as one of the most important human and literary documents to survive from a singularly era of terror and despair.
