October 18, 2017
A Romanian Jew’s Private Judgment of a World Bent on Condemning Him
By Dr. Ruth WisseIn brilliantly charting the psychological effects of anti-Semitism on both its perpetrators and its victims, a newly translated 1934 novel outdoes even such master analysts as Freud and Proust.
Had my parents read Mihail Sebastian’s novel For Two-Thousand Years when it was published in Romania in 1934, they would have been mad to conceive a Jewish child there two years later.
The novel, only now translated from Romanian into English, is a close-up view of anti-Semitism overtaking a country not from the depths, not through vulgar populism, but through the ideas of its leading intellectuals. Who would be equipped to write such a book, and why? Only a Jewish intellectual himself, one intimate enough with his antagonists to know them as they actually were and artistically brilliant enough, and bold enough, to register exactly how and why they despised him.
Until now I was unaware that such a book existed, and since I am that improbable Jewish child, I must also be thankful that my parents did not know any Romanian intellectuals when they lived there.