This is by Mihail Sebastian (1907-45), who was born Iosif Mendel Hechter in the Danube port of Braila, Romania. He was something of a polymath, working as a lawyer, as well as a dramatist and literary critic. For Two Thousand Years was first published in Romanian in 1934; Philip O Ceallaigh's English translation came out in 2016. And it has been sitting on my reading list since we were in Romania in 2023...

It's a harrowing book. It covers the period from December 1922 to December 1933, in a Romania that was increasingly hostile to Jews, among them our narrator, who is never named. He doesn't dramatize his situation, but he conceals nothing either. So we watch him move from a university environment where Jewish students are subject to exclusion or physical attack (even in class), and then on to a professional environment where many of the people he most respects gradually reveal themselves to be hardened anti-Semites.

There's no "story" as such. Rather, the book explores what it meant to be Jewish in that place at that turbulent point in history. It unpacks what two thousand years of persecution end up doing to an individual, and explores what pathways lay open (none of them good). As Dorian Stuber puts it: "To be a Jew and to be Romanian: the impossibility of this 'and' is Sebastian’s great subject."



Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem, notes that Romania was "the most anti-Semitic country in prewar Europe". There, she says, "even the SS were taken aback, and occasionally frightened, by the horrors of old-fashioned, spontaneous pograms on a gigantic scale; they often intervened to save Jews from sheer butchery, so that the killing could be done in what, according to them, was a civilized way." Sebastian's book illustrates how that situation came about. Anti-Jewish sentiment seems to have come in waves, receding slightly only to crash in bigger than ever later on. It's sobering reading in our current age, when anti-Semitism can hide behind legitimate criticism of the Israeli Government and armed forces.

The casual violence is the first thing that shocks the reader. The narrator remarks, laconically: "I received two punches during today's lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches." Fleeing violence, he stumbles by accident into an economics course taught by Ghita Blidaru. He has already been forced out of the civil law and aesthetics courses, and is determined not to be excluded from this one. But one day he is thrown out, and the lecturer -- whom our narrator greatly admires -- makes clear that he has no intention of doing anything about it.


Commemorating the 125 victims of the pogrom in Bucharest, January 1941

The next thing that evokes our horrified response is how the narrator feels about himself. As Marty Roth remarks: "Sebastian has a tortured relationship to his Jewishness. (To smother it with the current label of Jewish self-hatred feels utterly reductive.)"

He continues: "Welcome to the moody, meditative, introspective Eastern European Jewish sensibility of the early twentieth century. If this sensibility reminds you of Kafka, you’re on target."

It DOES, to the uninitiated, feel like self-hatred. He's struggling every way there is -- financially, socially, and scholastically -- and therefore finds it hard to remain clean and respectable. Yet his thoughts turn to self-blame: "Haven't they always told us we're a dirty people? Maybe it's true. Perhaps our mysticism, our asceticism, our piety is just that -- dirtiness. A way of getting down on your knees, a form of slow, voluptuous self-mutilation, ever further from the white star of purity."

Later, more complicatedly, he tells us: "No, we’re not an easy-going people. I am so ill at ease in my own company: how badly another person must feel being with me. We’re impulsive. We’re more than we can deal with. And on top of that, we’re impure... I regret that, in this internal conflict, I retain some sympathy for myself. I’m sorry I catch myself loving my destiny. I'd like to hate myself, without excuses or forgiveness. I’d like to be an anti-Semite for five minutes. To feel an enemy in myself who must be vanquished."

And again: "Let’s presume that the hostility of anti-Semites is, in the end, endurable. But how do we proceed with our own, internal, conflict? One day -- who knows -- we may make peace with the anti-Semites. But when will we make peace with ourselves?... All they have to use against us are stones, and sometimes guns. In our eternal struggle with ourselves, we have a subtle, slow-working but irremediable vitriol in our own hearts."

Later again, when he is already a professional architect, he spots a procession of university students, chanting, "Down with the Yids!" His reaction smacks of masochism: "It was beautiful: I ask myself if that's a ridiculous thing to say, but it really was beautiful. A crowd of young men... Tremendous high spirits, an atmosphere of schoolyard fun. Nothing serious."



There's much more like this. It's heart-rending. It reflects the internal struggle of any group that has been rejected, year after year, century after century, on the grounds of religion, or ethnicity, or sexuality, or gender, or whatever. It's hard to accept yourself if you've been told over and over again that you're not acceptable. It's very easy to slide along with the current, and disrespect yourself and those like you. There are plenty of female misogynists, after all. And Stuber compares the plight of our narrator with the way W.E.B. Du Bois describes the "double consciousness" forced on the Black population in the United States of his day: "This sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity". Likewise, there has been plenty of literature charting the obstacles to self-acceptance thrown in the path of the queer community by centuries of ostracization and vilification (Giovanni's Room is just one example of many).

There is something of an arc, however, in For Two Thousand Years. Later still, when the chant of "Death to the Yids!" resounds again, the narrator thinks: "I wonder why it is so easy to call for 'death' in a Romanian street, without anyone batting an eyelid." It's like the ticking of a clock, he thinks -- normally you don't really hear it, but suddenly you do. People don't really hear this death call -- until suddenly they do: "What is required is a period of exhaustion, of stress, of tense expectancy, a period of disillusionment. And then the unheeded voices are audible again."

Illustrative, too, are specific encounters with anti-Semites whom he regards as friends, and to whom he starts to respond differently.

He meets Maurice Buret, for example, during his time in Paris, and pushes back against Buret's contention that Jews espouse emotionalism rather than clarity.

Then there's a bust-up with Marin Drontu, a colleague, who suddenly and unexpectedly reveals his true colours after a minor disagreement: "Don't act the Jew. I'm from Oltenia. Don't speak that Jew-talk with me." Later, there's a kind of apology. The narrator is resigned; this is just how things are.

But then Mircea Vieru, the master architect he has worked for, articulates the idea that there's "a Jewish problem", and it needs a solution. He says there are 1.8 million Jews in Romania: "If it was up to me, I'd try to eliminate several hundred thousand." It's still too early in the 1930s for those words to strike in the narrator the chill that they strike in us now. Nevertheless, the narrator had never expected anti-Semitism from this man, and in his response, he moves from a kind of fatalism ("the Jew has a metaphysical obligation to be detested...") to an astute and still-apposite analysis ("you're not an anti-Semite because you believe in certain Jewish threats, you believe in certain Jewish threats because you're an anti-Semite... Do you not see that what you call 'intuition' and what I call your 'anti-Semitism' select examples that can nourish it and ignore those which can refute it?")



The (relative) firming of the narrator's responses parallels the changing shape of anti-Semitism in the early 1930s, as the movement became more organized and more menacing. But there's one figure he can't counter. That's Stefan Parlea (a character based on Sebastian's friend, the philosopher Emil Cioran). Parlea has become a kind of friend, despite his presence in the ranks of the abusers in the early part of the book ("I realize," muses the all-too-forgiving narrator, "that the same winds buffeted us both and that we were being wrecked in the same sinking vessel").

Parlea represents, according to Matei Calinescu, "the nihilistic-apocalyptic sensibilities of the young generation of Romanian intellectuals". He's "a theorist of despair", and he doesn't mind what gets broken in the process of turning theory into practice: "If the revolution demands a pogrom, then give it a pogrom," he tells the narrator, "It's not for me, or you, or him. It's for everybody. Whose time is up and whose isn't, I don't care, even if I myself die. I only care about one thing: that there's a drought and rain is needed."

The narrator sees all the danger in this: "I could reply," he tells us, "I could tell him that a metaphor is inadequate in the face of a bloodbath. That a Platonic inclination for dying doesn't balance out the serious decision to kill. That through the ages there has never been a great historical infamy committed for which there couldn't be found a symbol just as big, to justify it. That, in consequence, we would do well to pay attention to great certainties, to great invocations, to the great 'droughts' and 'rains'. That the temper of our most violent outbursts might benefit from a shade less enthusiasm. I could reply. But what good would it do? I have a simple, resigned, inexplicable sensation that everything that is happening is in the normal order of things and that I am awaiting a season that will come and pass -- because it has come and passed before."

Parlea accuses him of being too lucid, too cautious. "The intolerance of the inspired is dreadful," reflects the narrator. "It has been my fortune to have grown up by the Danube... I don't know any inspired boatmen, only those who take care. All your nebulous intuitions are worthless on the Danube. What you need is good judgement."

And he ultimately finds comfort in his Danubian identity: "The state may declare me what it will, but I won't stop being a Jew, a Romanian and a Danubian. 'You might be overdoing it,' whispers my anti-Semitic voice (as I have an anti-Semitic voice, with which I converse in moments of reflection)... It seems more urgent and effective to me to achieve a harmony in my own life between the Romanian and Jewish parts of my character than to obtain or lose certain civil rights... The example of the regal indifference of the river has risen against my Judaic taste for personal catastrophes. The simplicity of the landscape has countered my inner complications. And insecurity and worry have been shown the ephemeral yet eternal play of the waves."


The Bucharest lion that celebrates 70 years of diplomatic relations between Romania and Israel

***

The book also illustrates a number of articulations of Jewishness (none, needless to say, unproblematic).

Even the narrator's family is divided into two different representations. His father's people, over four generations, grew up alongside the Danube. They mingled with Romanians, "assimiliating" insofar as that was possible (and it will never, it seems, be possible to assimilate wholly, even if such a thing were desirable).

His mother's family, by contrast, didn't leave the ghetto until much later: "From Bukovina and northern Moldova, they were all people who lived indoors, in lamplight, over books." They're delicate, whereas his father's family are tough: "What's vigour to one side is boorishness to the other. One side's sensitivity is the other's fussiness. The divide between the Danube and the ghetto."

So that's one split. We also meet characters representing other possibilities:

-- Sami Winkler, for example, is a Zionist. His philosophy: "The question for me isn’t whether Jews can create a Palestinian state, but whether they can do anything but. Understand? The chances of the enterprise succeeding matter less than the fact that it is so pressing. If we don’t do this, we die." The narrator is sceptical.
-- S.T. Haim is a "fiercely argumentative Marxist". He hates complacency, wants uproar and disturbance, and sees Jewishness as just one more attribute that will be submerged in the coming revolution.
-- Abraham Sulitzer is a conservative, anti-assimilationist champion of Yiddish culture.

For the narrator, though, no-one really has a definitive answer.



The book doesn't tell us, but smart commentators do, that Sebastian's world was one of considerable literary engagement. Active in the year of this book's appearance were:

-- Mircea Eliade, Sebastian's then best friend, and a prolific writer, who produced no fewer than five books that year;
-- E.M. Cioran, who became, after WWII, "a French author of gloomy aphorisms", but debuted in Romanian in 1934 with On the Summits of Despair;
-- Eugen Ionescu, who later moved to France, and changed his name to Eugene Ionesco, published his only major book in Romanian in 1934 (entitled No, it was "a recognizable prelude to Ionesco's later absurdism"); he commented in 1970 that his 1959 play Rhinoceros was based on the "ideological contagion" he saw spreading in Romania in the 1930s.

Also depicted are the conflicts animating Romania's burgeoning oil industry. It's classic stuff: Industrialists versus peasants; oil wells versus plum trees. (Eric Ambler's Uncommon Danger is a fictional take on this period.)


"I walked back to the site from the station, after accompanying the master, who was taking the train to Brasov..."

***

There's a very weird rider to all of this. The character of Blidaru is based on Sebastian's much-admired mentor, philosopher Nae Ionescu (no relation to Eugen/Eugene). It's not at all an unflattering portrait of a very complicated person. Even though Ionescu had already begun to make anti-Semitic statements, Sebastian asked him to provide For Two Thousand Years with a foreword. He obliged with a vitriolically anti-Jewish piece of writing...

Sebastian insisted on Ionescu's foreword appearing with the book. Bad idea... Left-wingers accused Sebastian of being anti-Semitic himself; right-wingers bought right into Ionescu's sentiments.

Nae Ionescu didn't start out as an anti-Semite, says Calinescu. But he ended up a supporter of Romania's notorious Iron Guard. And it's in that role that he wrote his infamous preface, which, "in a perverse sense... strengthens the case made by the fictional-autobiographical hero, namely, that no matter what he might do, he would be eventually rejected for his Jewishness by even his closest Gentile friends".

It's a real piece of work, that foreword... For a start, Ionescu conflates the unnamed narrator with the author, and cites his real name; he then proceeds to wheel on the most ancient anti-Jewish calumnies: "I cannot do anything for you. Because I know that your Messiah will not come. Messiah has come, Iosif Hechter -- and you did not know him. That was all that was demanded from you in exchange for the goodness God had for you: to be on the watch. But you did not watch. Or you failed to see -- because your pride has covered your eyes with scales. Iosif Hechter, don't you feel the cold and darkness that surround you?" Mad, spooky stuff...

Although he avoided deportation and death during the war period, Sebastian was unable to work, and lived as an exile in his own city. In a bizarre twist of fate, he was killed in a traffic accident in May 1945, while on his way to give a lecture on Balzac...


RIP... There could have been so much more...