This is a wonderful story written in journal/diary form.

Romanian Mihail Sebastian’s novel For Two Thousand Years reads like a memoir at times, and then occasionally like a diary. This is a remarkable, closely autobiographical book that begins and ends in antisemitism from 1923 until the early 30s. Hailed as a seminal novel that charts the rise of fascism, for this reader the novel is shocking in its portrayal of the national acceptance of antisemitism which is captured in raw moments, casual encounters and even from close friends.

For Two Thousand Years

When the book begins, the unnamed narrator is attending university in Bucharest, studying law. Well … trying to attend, at least, as to attend almost certainly guarantees a beating. The heavily anti-Semitic student body asks for names and then beatings follow.

This morning I went to the class on Roman law. No one said a word to me. I took notes feverishly, in order not to have to lift my eyes from my desk. Halfway through the lecture, a ball of paper falls on the bench, beside me. I don’t look at it, don’t open it. Someone shouts my name loudly from behind. I don’t turn my head. My neighbor to the left watches me carefully, without a word. I can’t endure his gaze and I look up.

“Out!”

He barks the command. He stands up, making space for me to get by, and waits. I feel a tense silence around me. Nobody breathes. Any gesture from me and this silence will explode.

No. I slide out of the desk and slip towards the door between the two rows of onlookers. It all happens decorously, ritually. Someone by the door lashes out with his fist, but it is a glancing blow. A late punch, my friend.

For Two Thousand Years is divided into six sections and follows the narrator’s university career as he switches from law to architecture, and then the book follows the narrator’s career. Throughout the novel, the narrator, a gentle man, wrestles with questions of what it means to be a Jew. He’s tugged by the two rival camps of Zionism and Marxism which are manifested mainly through friendships with two other young Jewish students. Winkler wants to leave Romania and travel to Palestine while the wild S. T. Haim, in whom being a Jew is subordinated to Marxism, finds Zionism absurd.

The idea of a Palestinian Jewish state, created through an act of national will–what an absurdity! And at the same time, what savagery! Don’t you see the machinations of the English in this whole business, a capitalist venture, which the massacred native Arabs and the Jewish proletariat of the colony will pay for, their very blood exploited in the name of the national idea. Great Britain needs a right-hand man to guard the Suez Canal, so it’s invented this myth of a ‘Jewish homeland.’ ‘Homeland’ is too nice a word. No doubt some Quaker or Puritan came up with it. But millions of sentimental Jews have taken it at face value.

Contrasting with these two extremes is the marvelous Maurice Buret, a character who appears later in the book, and who, according to the narrator, operates in “the total moral vacuum in which he lives.” The term “two thousand years,”of Jewish history is debated when the narrator meets an elderly Jewish bookseller on a train who argues for the beauty of Yiddish and the “folklore of the ghetto.” While the narrator argues that Jews naturally assimilate into various cultures and that Yiddish “however beautiful it may be” is a “precarious thing” with which “to bind a culture,” the bookseller has a different opinion:

Have you forgotten that, luckily, there are still anti-Semites. And, thank God, that there are pogroms from time to time? However much you’re assimilated in a hundred years, you’ll be set back ten times as much by a single day’s pogrom. And then the poor ghetto will be ready to take you back in.

The narrator is an astute observer and chronicler of human nature, and his descriptions breathe life into characters, who in the hands of a less nimble writer, would appear as cardboard cut-outs–embodiments of political ideals.

Throughout the novel, as the years pass, we follow the narrator through his friendships, his admiration for an anti-Semitic professor who persuades him to change his field of study, love affairs and even, eventually, work contracts. Through all of this there’s the threat of violence, of revolution, of massacre, a “great historical conflagration,” faint rumblings like the foreshocks of a major seismic event–an event that we readers know will occur. “Death to the Yids” is called in the streets so casually, that no one even pays attention anymore:

At the corner, towards Boulevard Elisabeta, was a group of boys selling newspapers. “Mysteries of Cahul! Death to the Yids.!”

I have no idea why I stopped. I usually walk calmly by, because it’s an old, familiar cry. This time I stopped in surprise, as if I had for the first time understood what these words actually meant. It’s strange. These people are talking about death, and about mine specifically. And I walk casually by them, thinking of other things, only half-hearing.

Yet with such deeply rooted antisemitism defining society for so long, even we are shocked when the narrator is calmly told by a friend, who asserts that he’s not antisemitic, but simply Romanian, that he wants to “eliminate several hundred thousand” Jews. His wish was soon to come true.

Mihail Sebastian’s real name was Iosif Mendel Hechter (1907-1945). He was killed crossing the street on the way to teach a class on Balzac.

Review copy

Translated by Philip Ó Ceallaigh

For Two Thousand Years by Mikhail Sebastian was first published in Romania in 1934 and only recently translated into English by Philip Ó Ceallaigh, the author of the excellent Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and two other short story collections. The Other Press has done a service by publishing For Two Thousand Years in the U.S., and I would like to thank the Other Press and NetGalley for providing it to me.

For Two Thousand Years is a remarkable novel, interweaving several themes.

Underlying For Two Thousand Years are the reflections of a young Jewish intellectual coming of age in the politically chaotic interwar period in Romania. The Montaigne quotation that Sebastian placed at the beginning For Two Thousand Years is perfectly apposite: “I not only dare to talk about myself but to talk of nothing but myself. I am wandering off the point when I write of anything else, cheating my subject of me.” And so it is with the young narrator, who yearns to be left alone to pursue his law studies, despite roiling arguments among his friends about Zionism: “[E]ven though I’m in the midst of ten people who believe me their ‘brother in suffering,’ I am in fact absolutely, definitively alone.” Similarly, the young narrator yearns to be left alone, despite the political turmoil and virulent anti-Semitism surrounding him. He wants to continue plumbing his own melancholies, hopefully accompanied by occasional sexual assignations and by stimulating discussions with his academic mentors, rather than engaging politically. When Ghita Blidaru, a much-respected and anti-Semitic professor, challenges the narrator to abandon law and pursue architecture since it “connects you to the soil”, the narrator ponders, seeks the advice of his then female companion, and ultimately agrees to leave behind his beloved law studies and to switch to architecture. Some years later, after the narrator has established himself as an architect, he seeks to understand the anti-Semitism of a colleague: “What I find interesting about Parlea’s problem is that its origin lie in the movement of 1923. What remains from those years is not only the bloodied heads, the careers that were made and a steady engagement with anti-Semitism, but also a revolutionary spirit, a seed of a sincere rebellion against the world in which we live.”

The narrator’s struggles to define himself as a Romanian, an architect, and as a Danubian, rather than primarily or solely as a Jew and certainly not as a Zionist. Although surrounded by politically-sanctioned and accepted anti-Semitism, the narrator rejects what he views as the limits of Zionism. In the narrator’s Romania, beatings of Jews are common, evictions of Jews from university classrooms are common, and anti-Semitic street rallies are common. The narrator recognizes the “For Two Thousand Years” of anti-Semitism with the two thousand years clearly referring to the birth of Christianity as well as “two thousand years of Talmudism and melancholy”, but he opts to view anti-Semitism as a seemingly minor foible of his mentors, his friends and classmates, and Romanian society.

A minor but interesting theme, introduced late in For Two Thousand Years, deals with the role of facts versus the role of phantasy in politics. As the narrator says to a colleague, “It’s not about how many of them [Jews in Romania] there are, but how many of them you think there are. Why do you—so critical in architecture and so rigorous about every fact and affirmation. . . why do you become suddenly negligent and hasty when you start to speak about Jews, casually accepting a ninety percent approximation, when in any other domain you’d balk at an approximation of 0.01?” Of course, in highlighting this issue, Sebastian touched on a basic facet of fascism and a basic issue so central to contemporary U.S. politics.

Reading For Two Thousand Years more than eighty years after its initial publication is chilling, just as reading Anne Frank’s Diary is. Sebastian correctly identified the cross-currents tearing and Europe apart, but not surprisingly he could not foresee the massive horrors that would ultimately flow from those cross-currents. The few rays of optimism, desire for social acceptance, and wishes for social and political comity that range through For Two Thousand seem tragic in retrospect.

I received a free electronic copy of this novel from Netgalley, and Penguin Classics - Other Books in exchange for an honest review. This manuscript was originally published in Romanian in 1934. This 2017 release is the first English language translation of this work.

This is an exceptional story, written as a journal or diary, by a young Romanian Jew as he moves through the late 1920's early 1930's. Sharing these glimpses into the difficult daily life of young Mihail Sebastian as he struggles through his schooling and into a career as an architect is heart wrenching. As the world crumbles around him, there is so much to learn of this time, this place. The first and hardest lesson is absorbing the fact that Mihail expects and accepts the bullying and harassment he encounters at school and on the streets without resentment. Add in the fact that you know what is coming for this community, this country, this young man, For Two Thousand Years can break your heart.

There is a lot out there to read in an effort to understand about World War II from the aspect of Europeans who suffered through these hard times. I have not found a great deal about Romania written by Romanians. I was most pleased to find this treasure. It will go into my history bookcase to read again at leisure. Thank you, Other Books, for bringing this work into our world. With more understanding of what folded our world into World War II perhaps we can back up and avoid WWIII.