Journal 1935-44

Deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Franks Diary and to find as huge a readership - Philip Roth

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 Romanias 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.

Sebastians Journal offers not only a chronicle of the darkest years of European anti-Semitism but a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a readers notebook, and a music lovers journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the major Romanian intellectuals, Sebastians friends, writers and thinkers who were mesmerised by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europes 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 it.

One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the Nazi period, Sebastians journal vividly captures the now-vanished world of pre-war Bucharest. Under the pressure of hatred and horror in the huge anti-Semitic factory that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its intelligence, standing as one of the most important human and literary documents to survive from a singular era of terror and despair.