Mihail Sebastian

Mihail Sebastian was born Iosif Mendel Hechter on October 18, 1907, in Brăila, the Danube port in southeastern Romania, the son of a Jewish family, Mendel and Clara Hechter. He studied law in Bucharest and spent 1930 and 1931 in Paris; the French novelists, Marcel Proust and Jules Renard above all, would leave a deep mark on his own fiction. Back in Bucharest he worked as a lawyer, journalist and critic, and joined the Criterion circle of young writers around the philosopher Nae Ionescu, alongside Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and Eugène Ionesco. His novel For Two Thousand Years (1934), the diary of an unnamed Jewish law student caught between Romanian nationalism and Zionism, appeared with a preface by Ionescu arguing that Jews were fated to suffer for having rejected Christ. Sebastian printed it anyway, calling that the only intelligent revenge, and answered the uproar in the essays of How I Became a Hooligan (1935). That year he legally took the name he had been writing under, and began the journal that became his lasting work: a decade-long record of Bucharest's intellectual life as friends he loved, Eliade among them, turned toward the fascist Iron Guard while the laws closed around him. Antisemitic legislation ended his public career, forced him out of his home into a tenement, and kept his name off the poster when his comedy The Star Without a Name opened in 1944. He was never deported, and he survived the war. After liberation he agreed to work for the foreign ministry, and on May 29, 1945, walking through Bucharest to give a lecture on Balzac, he was struck and killed by a truck at the age of thirty-seven. His brother smuggled the journal out of Romania in 1961; published in Bucharest in 1996 and then across Europe and America, it was judged by Philip Roth to deserve a place on the same shelf as the diary of Anne Frank.

On 1 March 1944 a comedy called The Star Without a Name opened at Bucharest's Alhambra theatre. The poster credited an unknown Victor Mincu, because a Jewish author's name could not appear on it. The secret held so well that Radu Beligan, the young actor playing the astronomy teacher Miroiu, had no idea whose lines he was speaking.