Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years by Mihail s> Sebastian Patrick Camiller (review)

Abstract

366 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 Sebastian, Mihail.JournalI935-I944. TheFascistYears. Translatedby Patrick Camiller. R. Dee in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Chicago, 2000. 64I PP.$36.oo. BUCHAREST after the First World War was a city of extraordinary cultural vibrancy. The creation of an enlarged Romania in I9I8 provoked a fervent intellectual debate about the definition of the national character and about the direction which the development of the young nation-state should take. Traditionand modernityformedthe two poles of the debate. At the same time in literature there emerged a third element. The conventions of literary expressionwere challenged by a clutch of avant-gardewriterswho provideda matrix for the Dada and Surrealistmovements. Even the analogies between poetry and mathematicswere explored. One has only to readMircea Eliade's Autobiography to become convinced of the vitality,diversity,and sophistication of intellectual expression which led the Romanian-born cartoonist Saul Steinberg to describe Bucharest as 'an art Deco world peopled by Byzantine man. Mihail Sebastian, born Josif Hechter in I907 in the Danubian port of Braila, made his own particularmark in the Romanian capital during these years. At the time when he starteda diaryin 1935, at the age of twenty-eight, he was a respected novelist, playwright and journalist. He counted Eliade amongst his friends, alongside Eugene lonesco, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Camil Petrescu,ConstantinVisoianu and Ghita Ionescu. The firstfifty pages of his diary record his encounters with them, as well as with a stringof girl-friendsover whose charms Sebastian self-centredlymuses and sometimes pines. Sebastian's love of French literature and classical music suffuse the journal, creatingan effectof undisturbedleisure. Yet within a year, an erosion of Sebastian's comfortable existence sets in. There is a change of tone in the diary as it becomes a unique and moving testimony to the complicity of the Romanian intelligentsia in the rise of the Iron Guard. This extreme right-wing movement brings out the anti-Semitic demons in members of Sebastian's circle. The Guard's anti-Semitism also appealed to the population at large. Under the government of Octavian Goga -an accomplished poet anti-Semitism was raised to the level of statepolicy. One of Goga's firststepsasprime ministerin December I937 was to suppress Jewish-owned newspapers on the grounds of their 'subversive meddling'. He also cancelled licences to sell alcohol held by Jews, suspended 1500 Jewish lawyers from practising in Bucharest, and placed a ban on the employment of Jews and foreigners in cafes and restaurants. In February I938, King Carol suspended the constitution and instituted a royal dictatorship during the course of which further anti-Semitic legislation was introduced. After Carol was forced to abdicate in September I940, General Ion Antonescu took over as militarydictatorin alliance with the Iron Guard. The Iron Guard government introduced further anti-Semitic legislation expropriatingreal estate, forestland, and shippingowned byJews. In January I941, after suppressing an Iron Guard rebellion, Antonescu appointed a new cabinet drawn almost entirely from the armed services and the Iron Guard was dissolved. Nevertheless, the anti-Semitic measures REVIEWS 367 introduced in August I940 were consolidated in 194I by the creation of the National Centre for Romanianization. Despite itscatalogue of anti-Semitism,it is not so much the Romanian state that disturbs Sebastian during these years, but his friends. As the diary progresses we see how they with the exception of Eugene Jonesco and Visoianu graduallywithdraw from his circle, ultimately abandoning him. The reader senses Sebastian's pain but marvels at the same time at his tolerance as he calmly endures the anti-Semitic barbsaddressedto his people by outstanding intellectual minds such as Eliade. More than once one is tempted to urge Sebastian to tell his erstwhile friendsto 'go to hell'. Yet it is precisely because he remains in contact with these figures that the true dimensions of Romanian anti-Semitismare relayedto us first-hand. Translatedinto actionbyAntonescu, thatanti-Semitismgave theHolocaust in Romania its own specific featureswhich marked it out from the killing of theJews in otherspartsof Europe and the Soviet Union. The solution to what Antonescu euphemistically termed the Jewish Problem' did not rely on the systematic, mechanical slaughter of Jews although the Romanian and German armies murdered by mass shooting more...