For Two Thousand Years
The Classic Novel
by Mihail Sebastian
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Pub Date Sep 12 2017 | Archive Date Sep 12 2017
Description
This literary masterpiece revives the ideological debates of the interwar period through the journal of a Romanian Jewish student caught between anti-Semitism and Zionism. Although he endures persistent threats just to attend lectures, he feels disconnected from his Jewish peers and questions whether their activism will be worth the cost. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and conversing with revolutionaries, zealots, and libertines, he remains isolated, even from the women he loves. From Bucharest to Paris, he strives to make peace with himself in an increasingly hostile world.
For Two Thousand Years echoes Mihail Sebastian’s struggles as the rise of fascism ended his career and turned his friends and colleagues against him. Born of the violence of relentless anti-Semitism, his searching, self-derisive work captures a defining moment in history and lights the way for generations to come—a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, resistance and acceptance.
Advance Praise
“For Two Thousand Years wonderfully captures the sense of prewar Romania in all its sophistication, its beauty, and its horror…I love Sebastian’s courage, his lightness, and his wit.” —John Banville, author of The Sea
“This novel, published in 1934 and ably translated for the first time into English, traces the path of its protagonist from his university days to a career as an architect, during which he frequently hears the cry ‘Death to the Yids.’ It’s so pervasive, in fact, that he seems inured to it and is shocked to learn by novel’s end that several longtime Romanian colleagues have been anti-Semites all along...Laced throughout with debate regarding the place of the Jewish people and their culture in the world, among other issues, this work sits uneasily between philosophical speculation and narrative fiction. But it is an important historical document—prophetically, the protagonist cries out, ‘Has anybody had a greater need of a fatherland?’” —Library Journal
“Mordant, meditative, knotty, provocative…More than a fascinating historical document, it is a coherent and persuasive novel…Philip Ó Ceallaigh’s translation is highly convincing and sweeps us along with its protagonist’s emotional shifts.” —Financial Times
"Eerily prophetic... a brilliant translation of a most unusual novel. For Two Thousand Years is a book of truths." —Irish Times
"At a dark moment of identity politics and resurgent nationalism, the books that have left the deepest impression have been those that offer a sense of what we might learn from times past. Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years (trans Philip Ó Ceallaigh), now available in English." —Philippe Sands, Guardian Books of the Year
"The best novel of the year was written in 1934. Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years, an account of interwar Bucharest by a nameless Jewish student, took a human lifespan to find an English translation."—Janan Ganesh, Financial Times
"It wonderfully captures the sense of pre-war Romania in all its sophistication, its beauty and its horror... I love Sebastian's courage, his lightness and his wit." —John Banville Open Book, Radio 4
"One of the most unusual, seductive and beautiful books I've read in years. It has lightness of touch coupled with astonishing range... Like any classic of a type we've not seen before, it is a book which needs to be read and re-read and which, over years, will become a reliable friend for life." —John Self Jewish Quarterly
"For Two Thousand Years is lucid, melancholy and playful—a fictional memoir recreating the night-life and love affairs, friendships and betrayals of a world that was falling apart." —John Gray, author of The Soul of the Marionette
"Philip Ó Ceallaigh's meticulous and vibrant translation restores to us the wry, bitterly intelligent, endlessly self-castigating yet dauntingly perceptive and prophetic voice of Mihail Sebastian. For Two Thousand Years is a masterful book charged with the tension and paranoia that preceded one of the bloodiest convulsions in the history of the 20th century, and the terrifying thing is, it could have been written yesterday, today, tomorrow." —Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins
"A powerful and prescient novel which throws light on darkness and disturbs as it entrances... If there is any justice [Sebastian's] posthumous profile will increase." —Malcolm Forbes, Herald Scotland
"Complex, unsettling... Sebastian seldom provoked indifference in his readers. That is why he belongs in the pantheon of classic authors... For Two Thousand Years is a work that also speaks to our own discontents right now." —Gavin Jacobson New Statesman
"His prose is like something Chekhov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation." —Arthur Miller
"Restraint is the defining mark of both For Two Thousand Years and the subsequent Journal, as it is of Sebastian's personality... In a truly atrocious time he refused to compromise on his duties as a civilized human being... Even on the darkest pages he finds room for a graceful turn of phrase, a flash of wit, a gesture of understanding and forgiveness." —John Banville New York Review of Books
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781590518762 |
| PRICE | $16.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 240 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Bonnye Reed F, Reviewer
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.
Guy S, Reviewer
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
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