Publisher's Synopsis
Dan Stone, author of The Holocaust: An Unfinished History says:
Holocaust literature is, for explicable reasons, centred on Auschwitz. What happened in supposedly peripheral parts of Europe such as Romania is much less well known. Mihail Sebastian was not only one of Romania’s greatest twentieth-century authors; he was also a Jew in Romania’s small elite intellectual circle in the 1930s, a me when that elite, like the country itself, swung firmly toward the German orbit and was characterised more and more by ethno-nationalism and anti-Semitism. Sebastian’s diary documents this slide into fascism and the personal toll it took on him, as his friends – such as Mircea Eliade, Nae Ionescu and Emil Cioran – turned against him. In For Two Thousand Years, Sebastian fictionalizes these people and this process of political radicalization and personal ostracization. In a way reminiscent of Sartre’s argument that an-Semitism creates Jews, Sebastian’s novel – which reads like a fictionalized version of his diary – portrays how the author is pressed into ever narrower social confines, shrinking his identity, and forcing him to think of himself not as a Romanian playwright but, in the end, as nothing more than a provincial Jew. As he is splitting up with a girlfriend, and as he is losing his friends, Sebastian reflects: ‘I think from here, from this slow slipping into too many attachments, comes the Jew’s taste for solitude, a nostalgia for being on your own, like a stone.’
A prescient interwar masterpiece, available in English for the first time
'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him.
Mihail Sebastian's 1934 novel was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a lucid, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.
