In brilliantly charting the psychological effects of anti-Semitism on both its perpetrators and its victims, a newly translated 1934 novel outdoes even such master analysts as Freud and Proust.
Had my parents read Mihail Sebastian’s novel For Two-Thousand Years when it was published in Romania in 1934, they would have been mad to conceive a Jewish child there two years later.
The novel, only now translated from Romanian into English, is a close-up view of anti-Semitism overtaking a country not from the depths, not through vulgar populism, but through the ideas of its leading intellectuals. Who would be equipped to write such a book, and why? Only a Jewish intellectual himself, one intimate enough with his antagonists to know them as they actually were and artistically brilliant enough, and bold enough, to register exactly how and why they despised him.
Until now I was unaware that such a book existed, and since I am that improbable Jewish child, I must also be thankful that my parents did not know any Romanian intellectuals when they lived there.
Mihail Sebastianwas born Iosif Mendel Hechter in 1907 to traditional Jewish parents in the Romanian town of Brăila on the Danube. As a boy (and for the rest of his life) he felt at once rooted in the river landscape and respectful of his Jewish ancestry, but, with limited education in Jewish sources or Jewish languages, he was much more at home in the Romanian culture of his formal schooling. Once he began studying law in Bucharest, and simultaneously took up writing, he adopted a Romanian pen name and drew close to the local literary-intellectual elite.
Plus or minus the assumed name, the same path was taken by many of Sebastian’s Jewish contemporaries in France, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and elsewhere. In each case, their literary prospects were conditioned by the linguistic community they aspired to join. For Sebastian, an additional constraint was the open anti-Semitism that accompanied Romania’s heightened nationalism after World War I and that to a greater or lesser degree infected the country’s finest minds. It was his genius not to be deterred by the hostility but to train his eye on what Jews and others tried to ignore.
He did this by keeping a diary: a well-proved means of maintaining one’s intellectual independence. In this medium, even while pursuing a career in law and while pouring out a succession of books, plays, and essays, Sebastian made a habit of recording his private judgment of the world that was bent on condemning him. Indeed, the first of his works to attract international notice, a full half-century after his death, was a portion of his diary encompassing the years leading up to and through World War II. (The English translation, Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, was released in 2000.)
As for the book before us, published in Romania in 1934, it is, to repeat, a work of fiction—but one that itself purports to have been composed out of diary selections tracking the narrator’s development through the prior, eventful decade of 1923-33. Both works richly repay reading, but the fictional form of the latter makes for a tighter and more consciously developed story—and a more mesmerizing one.
At the outset, our fictional diarist declares an obsessive fidelity to his own mind and imagination, an intent signaled by his epigraph from Montaigne: “I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself.” Although so constricted a focus would seem ill-suited for capturing the essence of an era of political upheaval, the narrator’s rigorous self-scrutiny, which extends to what he is upagainst, yields page after page of coruscating political reportage. Our solipsist becomes a masterful witness to his times.
As the book opens, the Jewish students of Bucharest are under harassment and physical attack by their Gentile classmates. Some resist as best they can, but the unnamed diarist—shall we call him Iosif?—will not be goaded into action. His reason: “I don’t have that kind of vanity.” (Sensing suspect motives in others, he imputes them to himself as well.) When a single Jewish student in a large class rises to protest gross mistreatment, Iosif rails not at the school but at him:
What absurd need to denounce injustice inspires you to cry out? From what ancestral education in humiliation and revolt? . . . I’m furious with you because I can’t hate you enough and because I, along with you, belong to a race that can’t accept things and shut up.
But just as he shrinks from manifestations of Jewish collective pride or courage, so does he recoil from manifestations of Jewish collective timorousness:
If I cry, I’m lost. Clench your fists, you fool, if necessary, believe yourself a hero, pray to God, tell yourself you’re the son of a race of martyrs, yes, yes, tell yourself that, knock your head against the wall, but if you want to be able to look at yourself in the mirror and not die of shame, don’t cry.
By the time Sebastian composed this book in the early 1930s, the tortured psychological effects of anti-Semitism on Jews had already been variously charted by the likes of Sigmund Freud, Max Nordau, Otto Weininger, and Marcel Proust—the last of whom our narrator has read with admiration. His own dissection of the phenomenon exceeds them all. “Let’s presume that the hostility of anti-Semites is, in the end, endurable,” he writes. “How do we proceed with our own, internal, conflict?” Intent on not becoming “a fellow sufferer and sympathizer,” he declaims, a little too defiantly, that he—not yet twenty years old and just beginning to experience himself as an individual—will not be typecast as the member of a group on any terms other than his own. “Jewish fellow feeling—I hate it.”
Still, even while deploring that he is “at two removes from the active game of existence, firstly as an intellectual and secondly as a Jew,” Iosif is not too removed to study everyone around him, including his own kind, in his search to “overcome 2,000 years of talmudism and melancholy and to recover—supposing one of my race has ever had it—the clear joy of life.” That search leads him to three of the leading Jewish ideologies of the period, which he presents to us through the characters who espouse them.
