For Two Thousand Years

Description

The searing Eastern European masterpiece translated into English for the first time 'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him. Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now available in English for the first time, was written as the rise of fascism forced him out of his career and turned his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.

Mihail Sebastian was born in Romania in 1907 as Iosef Hecter. He worked as a lawyer and writer until anti-Semitic legislation forced him to abandon his public career. Having survived the war and the Holocaust, he was killed in a road accident early in 1945 as he was crossing the street to teach his first class. His long-lost diary, Journal 1935-1944- The Fascist Years, was published to great acclaim in the late 1990s.

His prose is like something Chekov might have written - the same modesty, candour, and subtleness of observation -- Arthur Miller Philip O Ceallaigh's meticulous and vibrant translation restores to us the wry, bitterly intelligent, endlessly self-castigating yet dauntingly perceptive and prophetic voice of Mihail Sebastian. For Two Thousand Years is a masterful book charged with the tension and paranoia that preceded one of the bloodiest convulsions in the history of the 20th century, and the terrifying thing is, it could have been written yesterday, today, tomorrow -- Colin Barrett, author of Young Skins [Praise for Mihail Sebastian's Journal 1935-1944] Deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Frank's Diary and to find as huge a readership -- Philip Roth A humane masterpiece -- Paul Bailey Times Literary Supplement Brilliantly haunting BBC History Moving, perceptive and sharply observed... the Journal is a valuable addition not just to the canon of wartime and holocaust literature, but to that of all humanity Literary Review