Mihail Sebastian

 

It's an interesting experience to read a novel seemingly at random. This was the case recently when taking up Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years. Published in 1934 in Romania, this is a book far from my usual tastes and interests. 

Strangely, I'd read another of Sebastian's novels -- Women -- a few years ago, and I'd enjoyed it. But this novel -- Two Thousand Years -- is far darker, far more foreboding. This is a book, in effect, which charts the emergence of a more virulent form of anti-Semitism in Romanian culture. The novel does not makes its way to the Second World War, but the themes which are uncovered anticipate what was to come. Except, of course, that what came was far worse. 

Two Thousand Years is more, though, than a historical novel: it is one profoundly focused on identity, and on Sebastian's conflicting, almost tortured, sense for his own Judaism. There are parts of this novel which are very difficult to read -- in part because Sebastian has allowed that anti-Semitism to encroach on his moral judgments. Much more can -- and has, I'm sure -- be written about this troubling dynamic: as I say, I found it to be quite upsetting, not least because Sebastian seems at moments to negate Jewish contributions to the European past. 

In the end, Two Thousand Years is a novel in search of Romania: of its workers, its ethos, its history and culture. That does seem, truly, to be Sebastian's objective: to describe this place through its people and their conflicts, and their intractable march toward something far more sinister. Sebastian has an aphoristic way of writing which provides rewards to the patient reader. Here is one of the most memorable: 

"Aren't you traveling light for a man who's making history?"

"No. It's all I need. I'm leaving the rest behind."