Right up until the middle of the 1930s, Mihail Sebastian, a young Bucharest writer, lived a life that would have been recognizable to any other young writer in the Manhattan or London of the same era. His days were passed in thinking, writing, day-dreaming, socializing. He worried that his books were not selling enough and wondered whether to make his plays more accessible to a wider public. He thought about whether he had chosen the right sort of publisher and avidly read the comments of his reviewers. He conducted complicated love affairs. He learned to ski. He went to dinner parties given by other writers and counted among his friends actresses, university professors, and the odd rich businessman with literary pretensions.

Like his friends, Sebastian argued about aesthetics and politics. Like his friends, he went to literary cocktail parties. Like his friends, he wrote criticism for small magazines. But Sebastian was not like his friends; he was Jewish. And in the middle of the 1930s, his Bucharest slowly ceased to resemble Manhattan or London. In the latter half of that decade, latent Romanian anti-Semitism began to grow more powerful, both on the streets and in the intellectual circles that Sebastian frequented. Writing in his diary, which he began to keep right about at this time, he described the effects of this change in both spheres. The result is a genuinely original literary achievement, whose first Romanian publication in 1996 sparked off a tormented national debate about anti-Semitism, the Romanian intellectual tradition, and Romania’s role in the war.

At first, it isn’t easy to see why this book caused such a fuss. Its early pages obsessively recount a love affair. Because it was never meant for publication, Sebastian sometimes recounts stories which are impossible to understand out of context, or tantalizingly fails to explain something: “I regret not recording it here but I don’t feel up to writing a longer note.” Round about 1936, however, the diary’s tone begins to change. On June 24 of that year he notes that  

Yesterday evening there was a street-fighting atmosphere on Strada Gabroveni… . The Jewish shopkeeers had lowered their shutters and were waiting for their attackers, determined to resist them. I think that’s the only thing to do. If we’re going to kick the bucket, we might as well do it with a club in our hands. It’s no less tragic, but at least not so ridiculous.

Then, on June 25, he meets a friend, Camil Petrescu, at a Bucharest restaurant. The Jews have brought anti-Semitism upon themselves, Petrescu tells him: “there are too many of them.” Sebastian marvels at the conversation:

That is Camil Petrescu speaking. Camil Petrescu is one of the finest minds in Romania. Camil Petrescu is one of the most sensitive creatures in Romania.

By the end of 1937, a full-fledged anti-Semitic government was installed in Romania, and these experiences were to repeat themselves many times. With every passing day, Sebastian witnessed increasing public bullying of the Jews, some truly frightening, some petty: “Starting from tomorrow, Jews will pay twenty lei for a loaf of bread instead of the fifteen lei for Christians,” he notes morosely in August 1942. A few days later, Jewish bicycles were confiscated; Jewish skis had been taken already. Although he himself was never interned, in the course of the war Sebastian lost his job, his apartment, and the possibility of publishing the novels which, as he was desperately trying to earn money by teaching or translating, he no longer had time to write.

Yet Sebastian went on half-participating in the social milieu he had always been part of, despite the fact that the changes in his private world were no less profound. Still doing the rounds of fashionable restaurants and parties, he looked on as the conversation and manners of his friends grew increasingly brutal. Many joined the fascist Iron Guard and started spouting anti-Semitic propaganda. Others didn’t join openly, but didn’t protest or complain either. All grew awkward in their conversations with him. But it took some time before the awkwardness grew into an open break, and it is this which makes Sebastian’s journal unique: he became, in effect, the witness to the corruption of an entire intellectual generation. By day, he kept in touch with his friends, went to parties with them, went to lunch with them. By night, he described their moral cowardice in his diary.

He records, for example, a conversation he has had with a friend who starts denouncing a mutual acquaintance. Why the vehemence, he wonders at first. Then he realizes:

He imagines that I could land, as Poldy has landed, in some kind of serious trouble—and he is warning me not to rely on him. “How shameless to turn to a friend, just because he is less exposed than you are.” Maybe he wants to warn me against one day being so “shameless.”

Later, a publishing acquaintance gives him a few children’s books to translate. “It’s to do you a favor,” the man says grandly—and, taking advantage of Sebastian’s poverty, offers to pay him a pittance. Then, a few days after the German surrender at Stalingrad, Sebastian encounters one of the more open fascists at a party:

It amused me to hear him talk about the war. I realized that, seen from the other side, things can even today have a different aspect. It is not the facts that count but the eyes that behold them… . In his opinion, nothing new has happened. The Russians will be annhilated in April (“the Führer said this to Antonescu”) or in July, or at worst in the autumn. The Germans are stronger than ever; their reserves untouched… . Stalingrad will be recaptured very soon, perhaps in the next few days.

He manages, almost, to make the encounter sound funny. But much as one would like to describe Sebastian laughing at the shabbiness of his milieu, seeing the lighter side of life, this isn’t really an amusing book. His writer’s ear is able to pick out telling phrases that make those uttering them sound like fools. His detached, intellectual wit enables him to express a morbid sort of irony when, at a dinner party, a visiting Frenchman is prevented from making anti-Semitic remarks by the host, who admonishes, “Notre ami est juif,” stopping the man in his tracks. “For my part,” writes Sebastian, “I’d have preferred it if the guy had been allowed to speak.”

At a deeper level, however, it is clear that he is profoundly disillusioned with the shallowness of his society. At times he tries to describe this sensation, but when he does so, his customary wit and cleverness deserts him. “I am vegetating, dragging myself from one day to the next, becoming old and worn out, losing myself,” he writes. Or “Everything passes slowly and with exasperating difficulty, endless and seemingly hopeless.” Even after the war’s end, he feels no pleasure when those who have tormented him beg forgiveness. Rather than feeling hatred, he has a terrible rush of nostalgia and sadness when he learns of the death of the wife of his former best friend, a man who had become a committed fascist and broken off all communication. He was indeed one of the few men of his intellectual generation to see through the evil which temporarily gripped his country, and in the end he is vindicated. Those who have fired him from jobs beg to have him back, those starting new newspapers and periodicals knock constantly at his door. But this gives him no pleasure. Nothing brings back his former belief in the fundamental goodness of those around him.

In the end, Sebastian feels, simply, terribly alone. In the final entry of the diary, written in 1944, after the Russians had occupied Bucharest and the war was effectively over, he tries to describe this feeling:

I can’t say or write anything; words do not help me. A few times I stood still and watched the view, with the idea of fixing the contours in my mind… . I must be getting very old. I didn’t find my old exuberance in the mountains. I was melancholic, rather, almost despondent. I feel an old weariness, and everywhere I go I carry an incurable loneliness with me.

A few months later, Sebastian died in a car accident in Bucharest. He left behind him a handful of books and plays—and this diary, a small reminder of how thin is the veneer of Western civilization, how close to the surface are brutality and hatred.

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