by Mihail Sebastian (Author)
Hailed as one of the most important portrayals of the dark years of Nazism, this powerful chronicle by the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's diary, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's journal. Despite the pressure of hatred and horror in the "huge anti-Semitic factory" that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its perceptive and luminous intelligence. The legacy of a journalist, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian's Journal stands as one of the most important human and literary documents of the climate that preceded the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.
Author Biography
Mihail Sebastian was born in 1907 to a middle-class Jewish family in the Danube port of Braila; he died in an automobile accident in the spring of 1945. During the period between the wars, he was well known for his lyrical and ironic plays and for urbane psychological novels tinged with melancholy, as well as for his extraordinary literary essays.