Journal 1935-44

This diary, wonderfully well translated, provides a scarifying new look at a corner of the Holocaust. The author was born Iosif Hechter in 1907 at Braila on the lower Danube, a Romanian Jew. He changed his name to Mihail Sebastian, and became in his 20s well known in cultural circles in Bucharest. On the cover Philip Roth remarks that the book should be shelved with Anne Frank's; yet it lacks the pathos of her story of an aspiring writer's career nipped in the bud. Sebastian was past the budding stage: with several novels and plays to his credit before this book begins, he was a full-blown author - blasted in his prime by the frosts of Romanian fascism. He describes the plausible balderdash mouthed at public meetings by men he had thought were his friends, who took up with Antonescu and the Iron Guard. He recounts how, bit by bit, his freedoms got cut down: he lost his flat, his radio set; was compelled to ten days' forced labour clearing snow, plus a penalty charge for each day; had a smaller bread ration than a gentile, at twice the price; had one sixth of the gentile sugar ration; never knew from month to month where the rent was coming from, never knew when he went to bed each night whether during that night he too would be arrested, and packed off to a camp. And yet he kept alive his passion for classical music, and - like Viktor Klemperer, a fellow sufferer in Dresden - went on reading and writing when he could. Twice, reduced to his last few lei, he spent them on gramophone records (Mozart and Bach); at the worst crises of the war, he was reading Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Balzac, and he translated Shakespeare's sonnets and Austen's Persuasion. He lost his library to one of the last bombs that fell on Bucharest. A few days later the Russians overran the capital, and he could emerge into a sort of freedom, only to be wiped out in a banal road accident in May 1945. His fearful story is enthrallingly well told. (Kirkus UK)