Journal 1935-44

''Deserves to be on the same shelf as Anne Frank''s Diary and to find as huge a readership'' - Philip Roth Mihail Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in pre-war Bucharest, a novelist, playwright, poet and journalist who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. Because of Romania''s opportunistic treatment of Jews, he survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in a road accident early in 1945. His remarkable diary was published only recently in its original language and is here translated into English for the first time. Sebastian''s Journal offers not only a chronicle of the darkest years of European anti-Semitism but a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a reader''s notebook, and a music lover''s journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the major Romanian intellectuals, Sebastian''s friends, writers and