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