Awards

• Short-listed for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize: Non-fiction 2002
• Shortlisted for Jewish Quarterly Wingate Literary Prize: Non-fiction 2002.

Overview

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.

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9780712683883

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Reviews

'This extraordinary personal diary, describing, day by day, the huge anti-Semitic factory that was Romania in the late 1930s and early 1940s, deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Frank's Diary and to find as huge a readership.' Philip Roth; 'One of the most important testimonies of the Jewish tragedy...comparable to Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz or the Diary of Anne Frank...Sebastian writes with honesty and analytical acuity, from the purgatory of his own room in Bucharest, where he lives with the impending danger of deportation and death, questioning the moments of ease that his provisional freedom allows him.' New Yorker; 'Sebastian's prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candor, and subtleness of observation. Here is a life, and an absurd death, whose spell will last a long time.' Arthur Miller

This book is alive, a human soul lives in it, along with the unfolding ghastliness of the last century, which passed an inch away from Sebastian's nose. His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation. Here is a life, and an absurd death, whose spell will last a long time -- Arthur Miller This humane masterpiece deserves to be ranked alongside the diaries of Victor Klemperer for its quiet, and indeed humorous, insights into the nature of wickedness -- Paul Bailey * Times Literary Supplement * A brilliantly haunting account of the rise of anit-Semitism and Fascism. At times it gives so intimate a feeling of fear that it is painful to read * BBC History * Moving, perceptive and sharply observed...the journal is a valuable addition not just to the canon of wartime and holocaust literature, but to that of all humanity * Literary Review *

This diary, wonderfully well translated, provides a scarifying new look at a corner of the Holocaust. The author was born Iosif Hechter in 1907 at Braila on the lower Danube, a Romanian Jew. He changed his name to Mihail Sebastian, and became in his 20s well known in cultural circles in Bucharest. On the cover Philip Roth remarks that the book should be shelved with Anne Frank's; yet it lacks the pathos of her story of an aspiring writer's career nipped in the bud. Sebastian was past the budding stage: with several novels and plays to his credit before this book begins, he was a full-blown author - blasted in his prime by the frosts of Romanian fascism. He describes the plausible balderdash mouthed at public meetings by men he had thought were his friends, who took up with Antonescu and the Iron Guard. He recounts how, bit by bit, his freedoms got cut down: he lost his flat, his radio set; was compelled to ten days' forced labour clearing snow, plus a penalty charge for each day; had a smaller bread ration than a gentile, at twice the price; had one sixth of the gentile sugar ration; never knew from month to month where the rent was coming from, never knew when he went to bed each night whether during that night he too would be arrested, and packed off to a camp. And yet he kept alive his passion for classical music, and - like Viktor Klemperer, a fellow sufferer in Dresden - went on reading and writing when he could. Twice, reduced to his last few lei, he spent them on gramophone records (Mozart and Bach); at the worst crises of the war, he was reading Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, and he translated Shakespeare's sonnets and Austen's Persuasion. He lost his library to one of the last bombs that fell on Bucharest. A few days later the Russians overran the capital, and he could emerge into a sort of freedom, only to be wiped out in a banal road accident in May 1945. His fearful story is enthrallingly well told. (Kirkus UK)

Author Information

Mihail Sebastian was the pen-name of the Romanian writer Iosif Hechter. Born in the Danube port of Braila, he died in a road accident in 1945. During the period between the wars he was well-known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays.

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