Accident (35 page)

Bucharest in the mid – 1930s was both the best and the worst place imaginable for Sebastian to develop as a writer. This was the era when the Romanian capital was praised as “the Paris of the East,” a title that was partly a comment on the Francophilia of the city's educated classes. (Olivia Manning's
The Balkan Trilogy
, though problematic in other aspects of its depiction of Romanian society, conveys a vivid sense of this culture.) The Great Depression had filled the streets of Bucharest with destitute peasants, but the city's cultural life was energetic and cosmopolitan. The theatres were packed, numerous newspapers and literary journals competed for the attention of the literate public, there was a cultivated classical music scene and the middle classes, when not in the mountains or at the Black Sea beaches, travelled to Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. Never before or after would Romania be home to such a talented group of writers confronted in such acute form by the question of the nation's identity.

In 1920 the Treaty of Trianon had ceded Transylvania to Romania. This culturally rich region of mountains and hilltop towns, inhabited by a Romanian majority and large Hungarian and German minorities, had been governed by Austria-Hungary
until the Austro-Hungarian Empire's destruction in the First World War. The addition of Transylvania, in the northwest, to Wallachia and Moldavia, the two regions whose union in 1859 had created modern Romania, was matched in the south by the acquisition of the former Bulgarian territory of northern Dobrogea, and in the east by the recovery of largely Romanian-speaking Bessarabia and Bukovina from the defunct Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires respectively. These gains resulted in a Romania that had more than twice the territory and population of the pre-1914 nation. Between 1920 and 1939, for the first – and, as it would turn out, only – time in their history, nearly all Romanians lived together in one country. This unexpected good fortune created a cultural ebullience that inspired a vigorous search for national self-definition. At the same time, 28% of the expanded nation consisted of ethnic minorities, as opposed to 10% before the First World War. The 1923 Constitution, which had guaranteed equal rights for these minorities, came under ferocious attack from the far right. Sebastian's intellectual and creative growth is inseparable from the debates stirred up by this atmosphere, even though in the end they would destroy him.

In Bucharest, Sebastian studied and practised law and frequented restaurants, night clubs and literary and theatrical events. His status as a well-regarded journalist earned him a government pass that granted him free travel on the nation's railways, enabling him to retreat to mountain cabins to write. He became sufficiently prosperous to rent a small but well-appointed apartment in the city centre. He had various romantic relationships with women, but did not marry. He began to write for the theatre, and became part of an engrossing literary society that saw Bucharest surpass Iaşi to become Romania's literary heartland. Here established older writers mingled with the new wave, the “Generation of 1927,” to which Sebastian belonged. The patriarch of Romanian literature, the prolific Moldavian historical novelist Mihail Sadoveanu (1880 – 1961), moved to Bucharest in the mid-1930s, although he soon left after becoming embroiled in a scandal. The Transylvanian Liviu Rebreanu (1885 – 1944), author of the internationally published
novels
Ion
(1920) and
The Forest of the Hanged
(1922), had also relocated to the capital, where he served two terms as the artistic director of the National Theatre, edited a literary magazine and worked as a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education. Among the younger writers of the Generation of 1927 was the talented novelist Camil Petrescu (1894 – 1957). A fellow Proust enthusiast, Petrescu became one of Sebastian's closest friends. Sebastian's confidantes and intellectual sparring partners included young writers such as the essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995), who would become famous in Paris, the novelist and later professor of religious studies Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986), who also contributed articles to Nae Ionescu's
Cuvântul
(and was introduced to his first wife by Sebastian), and the absurdist playwright Eugen Ionescu (1909 – 1994) (who was not related to Nae Ionescu, and, in fact, was partly of Jewish origin).

Governed by a series of inept, semi-democratic governments that coexisted with a fumbling monarchy while besieged by radicals of the far right who sometimes took to the streets to demonstrate their muscle, interwar Romania was never peaceful. But it was an exciting environment for a talented young writer like Sebastian – until his literary world began to unravel. In 1934, having completed his second novel,
De două mii de ani
(
It's Been Two Thousand Years
), about the condition of being a Romanian of Jewish ancestry, Sebastian asked his mentor to write a preface to his new work. Nae Ionescu agreed, but loaded his essay with refutations of the novel's claim that Jews' first allegiance was to their Romanian identity. “It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian [...] Are you Iosef Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.”

On receiving this preface, Sebastian decided that the only honest course of action was to publish it. The publication of a novel on the theme of Jewish integration into Romanian life would have been controversial under any circumstances; the addition of Ionescu's preface made the book incendiary.
De două mii de ani
caused possibly the most violent scandal in Romanian literary
history. The right accused Sebastian of being a Zionist agent, while Jews spurned him as a fascist lapdog. Many of his closest friends abandoned him. Sebastian refused to yield, insisting on his right to regard himself first and foremost as a Romanian: “As for anyone who tells me that I'm not a Romanian ... go talk to the trees, and tell them they're not trees.” In a letter to a fellow writer in 1936, while the scandal was still raging, Sebastian wrote: “My maternal great-grandfather was a banker in Bucharest in 1802. He contributed money to help the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Both of my parents, born in this country (my father in 1868), speak only Romanian and brought me up as a Romanian.”

More ominous signs appeared.
Cuvântul,
Sebastian's long-time intellectual home, became the official newspaper of the Iron Guard fascist movement. His friend Mircea Eliade campaigned for the Iron Guard in 1937, savaging the government for its “tolerance” of Jews, and boasting that he welcomed having the adjective “Hitlerian” applied to him. Sebastian struggled to sustain his friendships with Eliade, Cioran and Petrescu. The crisis seems only to have spurred his creativity. In 1935 Sebastian collected his ripostes to the attacks against him in a volume entitled
Cum am devenit huligan
(
How I Became a Hooligan
) – a book that inspired the contemporary Romanian novelist Norman Manea's memoir of his return to Bucharest after the fall of communism,
The Hooligan's Return
(2003).

How I Became a Hooligan
was only one of two books published by Sebastian in 1935. His third novel,
Oraşul cu Salcâmi
(
The Town of Acacias
), also appeared that year. A coming-of-age novel that explores the traditional Romanian theme of the differences between life in the provinces and life in the capital,
Oraşul cu Salcâmi
remains arguably Sebastian's most popular novel with Romanian readers. In September of that year, he wrote a series of highly regarded articles on Romanian theatre. He continued to practise law, write the French books column for the magazine
Vremea
(
The Times
), and contribute to the French-language Bucharest newspaper
L'Indépendence roumaine
. In 1938 his first play, the comedy
Jocul de-a vacanţa
(
The Vacation Game
), was produced and received a warm reception. In 1939 he published a book-length study
of the correspondence of Marcel Proust and in 1940, with Romania at war,
The Accident
appeared. After this, the walls closed in on Sebastian; he published no more books in his lifetime.

Sebastian survived the Holocaust, but at a terrible price. Romania remained neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, but, sympathetic to Nazi Germany, found itself under threat from the Soviet Union. Moscow annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and pressured the government in Bucharest to return northern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. On January 2, 1938, in the first of a series of blows that would cripple Sebastian's ability to earn a living, all Jewish lawyers were expelled from the bar association. As the war advanced, Sebastian lost the right to publish his journalism. He was ejected from the Romanian Academy, membership in which had provided him with a modest stipend. His railway pass was withdrawn, ending, almost forever, his relationship with the mountain landscapes, hiking and ski trails he loved (he made a final trip to the mountains, in a state of deep depression, in December 1944). Anti-Semitic residency laws artificially inflated the rent of his downtown apartment to a price far beyond his means, forcing him to move into a gloomy slum with his mother and one of his brothers. (His other brother lived in France.) In order to pay the humiliating tariffs imposed on Jews in either cash or extensive donations of clothing to the war effort, he had to borrow money from friends, who now pretended not to know him when he passed them on the street. But the most unendurable blow came in 1940 when Nae Ionescu, having been interned in a concentration camp as the anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza government tried to subdue the competing right-wing force of the Iron Guard, fell ill and died at the age of forty-nine. Sebastian wept uncontrollably. Long afterwards, Ionescu came to him in dreams to shake his hand.

The war aged and impoverished Sebastian. He ate poorly and rarely went out. Unlike Bukovina and Bessarabia, where the majority of Romania's nearly 500,000 Holocaust victims were murdered, in Bucharest anti-Semitic oppression took the form of daily humiliations and sporadic, unpredictable pogroms against Jewish neighbourhoods rather than mass slaughter. Unable to publish,
Sebastian devoted much time to the diary he had begun to keep in 1935, taught himself English and read the complete works of Honoré de Balzac. He listened to the radio to follow the progress of the war, practise English and take in the classical music concerts that transported him (only late in the war did it strike him that most of these broadcasts came from German-speaking cities where he would have been killed). He planned and wrote fragments of an epic novel that was to open with a theatre company's tour of the Romanian provinces. Sebastian used his knowledge of English – a language little studied in Romania at that time – to earn money surreptitiously by doing anonymous translations, notably of Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice
and Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The promise that others might sign his work yet allow him to receive the royalties, gave him the energy to write again for the theatre. In 1944, after the fascists were removed from office and Romania nominally joined the Allied Powers, he succeeded in publishing illegally in the newspaper
România Liberă
(
Free Romania
). The first of the three plays he had been working on, the Chekhovian
Steaua fără nume
(
The Star Without a Name
), now regarded as one of the classics of Romanian theatre, was staged in Bucharest that same year. It was advertized as the work of another writer to circumvent the ban on performing plays by Jewish authors.

The Mihail Sebastian who emerged from the Second World War was an angry man. During the war, his friends had prospered by professing fascism, while he had been ostracized and consigned to a slum. Cioran had been living in Paris on a scholarship; Eugen Ionescu, in spite of his Jewish ancestry, had succeeded in escaping to France in 1942. Eliade had been rewarded for his collaborationism with plush diplomatic posts in Lisbon and London. Camil Petrescu had been named Director of the National Theatre for the duration of the war years. When the Red Army rolled into Bucharest at the end of August 1944, the collaborators began to greet Sebastian again. Some of the more conspicuous fascist supporters, such as Petrescu, made a public display of their friendship with the man they had not spoken to in five years in the hope of warding off anti-fascist retribution. Other Romanian intellectuals,
however, held Sebastian, as a contributor to the notorious
Cuvântul
, partly responsible for bringing fascism to Romania.

In the rush to dismantle the far-right state apparatus under watchful Soviet eyes, magazines, newspapers and government ministries offered Sebastian opportunities to contribute or work for them, as though his return to public life were perfectly natural, as though these same people had played no part in his oppression. But Sebastian's vision of his country had changed. In the final pages of his wartime diary, the adjective “Balkan,” wielded as an insult, recurs in his descriptions of Romanians and their culture. He felt foreign to Bucharest intellectual life in a way he never had before; oppression had made him see the world as a Jew, a stance that in the 1930s he would have considered parochial and artificial. In late 1944, he turned down offers of at least half a dozen good jobs out of disgust at the “terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights.” Finally, he accepted a post as a press officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new pro-Soviet government. He agreed to give a lecture series on the novels of Balzac at the Free Workers' University. On May 25, 1945, hurrying across Bulevardul Regina Maria to make a class, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed instantly. He was thirty-seven years old. In 1946 and 1947 the two remaining plays he had completed at the end of the war,
Ultima oră
(
Breaking News
) and
Insula
(
The Island
) were staged, with the former becoming a smash hit and an indispensable part of the repertoire of Romanian comedy. In 1947, King Michael abdicated under Soviet pressure and fled to Switzerland. Romania began to be absorbed into the Soviet Bloc and the era to which Mihail Sebastian and his work had belonged became part of history.