The Journals of Mihail Sebastian

by David Auburn (Adaptor), Mihail Sebastian

In the decadent, politically explosive Bucharest of the 1930s and 40s, a young writer struggles to maintain his career, his integrity and his Jewish identity, even as his closest friends ally themselves with Fascism. Based on the controversial journals, this epic one-man play spans eight tumultuous years and opens a uniquely personal window on the Romanian Holocaust and the Second World War.

54 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2005

About the author

David Auburn is an American playwright, screenwriter, and theatre director. He is best known for his 2000 play Proof, which won the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play and Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Reviews

[Helen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a powerful one-man play drawn from the journals of Mihail Sebastian, a Romanian Jewish writer who lived in Romania when the country became more fascist, prior to the Second World War, then began vacillating as the Nazis began losing the war, etc. The politics of the era in Romania was driven by anti-Semitism, and a blind faith in Hitler - when Hitler's fortunes began to decline, the population switched back to being anti-Nazi, or pro-democracy. The whipsawing had a bad effect on Sebastian, though he did manage to survive the war, while many other Romanian Jews did not. Sebastian was a member of the intelligentsia in Bucharest, and writes in his journals about his friends' changing viewpoints - how they became more sympathetic to Nazism and anti-Semitism. How the effects of fascism were felt as one by one analogous anti-Semitic laws were introduced just like in Germany. By the time the war is over, Sebastian is simply exhausted, his home was destroyed in Allied bombing - or German bombing - and it will probably take a long time before he can trust his erstwhile friends, the ones that went along with the tide of fascist public opinion.

Here are some quotes from the play, which are as noted above, direct quotes from Sebastian's war-time journals:

"Nae's lecture yesterday was suffocating. [Fascist] Iron Guard-ism pure and simple -- no nuances, no complications, no excuses. "A state of combat is what we call politics. One party contains in its very being an obligation to wipe out all others.""

"[Sebastian's friend] Mircea is passionate about the Iron Guard and expects it to be victorious. "

"He's neither charlatan nor a madman. He's just naive. But there are such catastrophic forms of naivete!"

"Marietta [another friend] has been having an attack of Antisemitism. "The Yids are to blame. They take the bread from our mouths; they exploit and smother us. They should get out of here. This is our country, not theirs. Romania for the Romanians!""

"Train passes are being withdrawn from journalists. Jews have been forbidden the occupation of journalist."

"The radio is right now broadcasting Hitler's speech in Nuremberg. My own set is broken, but snatches of the broadcast drift up from the floor below, or maybe from across the way. I can't make out what he is saying, but I easily recognize Hitler's guttural voice and especially the cheering that continually interrupts him: cheers and roars that are simply insane."

"Paris was occupied today."

"On the Eiffel Tower, the swastika. At Versailles, German sentries. At the Arc de Triomphe, the "unknown soldier" with a German "guard of honor.""

"We have been living with General Antonescu and his fascist dictatorship since September. Now it seems that he is being challenged by those even farther to this right."

"I can hear groups of them passing beneath my window, singing in chorus. Police headquarters has been occupied by Legionaries and is now under army siege. The Radio too has been seized by the Legion. The shooting never ends."

"Previously antisemitism was bestial but outside the law. That, in a way, was how it was excused. At any moment, however formally, you could appeal to the authority of the state: a minimum of legality was preserved in official actions. Now, however, even that precarious sense of official justice has gone."

"The tragedy is that no one has anything to do with it. Everyone disapproves and feels indignant -- but at the same time everyone is a cog in the huge antisemitic factory that is the Romanian state, with all its offices, authorities, press, institutions, laws, and procedures. I don't know if I should laugh when a friend assures me that some general is "staggered" and "disgusted" at what is happening. But whether or not they are staggered or disgusted, they and tens of thousands like them sign, endorse and acquiesce, not only tacitly or passively but through direct participation. As for the mass of people, they are jubilant. The bloodying and mocking of Jews have been public entertainment par excellence."

"I am frightened of myself, I run away from myself, I avoid myself. Never have I been so old, so flat, so listless; I take open-eyed refuge for days on end in all manner of ridiculous dreams. I see myself in Geneva with a million Swiss francs. (Or sometimes only 300,000. Or 100,000. Or even 30,000). I see myself in London, as an editor at the BBC for forty pounds a month, or working all day at the British Museum and spending misty holidays somewhere by the sea. I see myself at the Russian front as a special correspondent of an American or London newspaper, where I am naturally an editor. I see myself in New York, and then -- weary of all the noise -- in a quite provincial town, where I write smash-hit plays for Broadway without feeling curious enough to go and see them. I stay alone at home, with a powerful radio, an automatic gramophone, and hundreds of records of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven."

"It is an antisemitic delirium that nothing can stop. There are no brakes, no rhyme or reason. It would be something if there were an antisemitic pogrom; you'd know the limits to which it might go. But this is sheer uncontrolled bestiality, without shame or conscience without goal or purpose. Anything, absolutely anything, is possible. I see the pallor of fear on Jewish faces. Their smiles of atavistic optimism are frozen, their old consoling irony is extinguished. One day, far from now, the nightmare will pass -- but we, you, he, I, who look into each other's eyes, will be long gone. Already the number of Jews murdered since June is more than a hundred thousand. How many of us are left? How long will it be before we too are murdered? My heart is weighed down with despondency. Where can I direct my gaze? What can I expect?"

"It was a strange feeling as I entered the Atheneum, where I had not set foot for so long! I couldn't overcome my shyness, my shame, my fear. I'd have liked it if no one had seen me, if I had seen no one. I felt like a kind of ghost, come back to the world for a few moments. What a rustle of dresses, of white hands, furs, uniforms! So many splendid women. Nearly all the men were well dressed, calm, exuding comfort and self-confidence. Sitting on my fold-down seat, I felt a wretched outcast, ugly, old, sad, and shabby. Has the war left its mark only on me? Have I alone been living through it? Do not all these people feel it, see it, know it? Half the pleasure of the concert was taken away by obsessions I had brought along with me, and which I could not shake off for a second. I don't know if I'll repeat the experience."

"For two years I have not been to the theater or gone to restaurants. I avoid walking around the city center; I don't see anyone or try to get in touch with anyone; I keep to myself as much as possible and let others forget about me -- and now here is my name in all the bookshops [in the list of of names of Jewish writers the Ministry of Propaganda ordered bookshops to post, along with ordering the removal of all books by Jewish authors from libraries and bookshops]!"

"Everywhere [post-war] there is terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights."

"I have tried to put together a skier's wardrobe from my remnants of the past. A bit torn, a bit stained -- but not too bad. I was delighted to find my skis and sticks again at Zoe's, hidden in her loft some three years ago when we were ordered to hand our skis in to the police."

"I must be getting very old. I didn't find my old exuberance in the mountains. I was melancholic, rather, almost despondent. I feel an old weariness, and everywhere I go I carry my incurable loneliness around with me."

[Joe Kraus · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a play. Or maybe it’s a monologue. Or maybe it’s an adaptation, as the title page says. Or maybe it’s a an edit.

In any event, it’s a powerful work that has the benefit of making Mihail Sebastian’s journals more accessible. I have a 600-page edition of those journals sitting next to me, and I have read b its and pieces in it. It’s not simply long, though. It’s also full of tangents that, while interesting for showing the full mind of a man who was watching as the world dehumanized him from friend and fellow citizen to subhuman Jew, sometimes distract from the central drama and horror of the Nazi era in Romania.

In any case, Auburn’s adaptation/condensation curates entries that bring the central story forward. These were the private observations of a talented young man, someone who – if he hadn’t died in an auto accident soon after the war – looked to be one of the leading intellectuals of 1950s and 1960s Romania. He was the representative Jew in a circle that weirdly shifted to the Iron Guard fascists, and he was friends with Mircea Eliade and others who were those leading intellectuals. His death lessened what they could all do together.

What’s bewildering is that, in something like fellow Romanian Eugene Ionesco’s (Eugeniu Ionescu, as my Romanian friends would have it) play, Rhinoceros, we watch as one after another of Sebastian’s friends shift into seeing him as an Other.

The book opens with him lusting adolescently after Lena, a Bohemian young woman whom he’s gotten to know as part of his arts-drama circle. He grows frustrated with her willingness to sleep with other men, and that feels like a universal young man’s heartbreak, but it takes on a different tone when he overhears her talking about Jews as part of what’s troubling the country. She, and others, don’t seem to realize that he is Jewish or, more properly, they don’t seem able to recognize that their friendship with him ought to imply an understanding of what it means for others to be Jewish.

Throughout, Sebastian writes with insight and detail. There’s a moment when he acknowledges that he might be sentenced to jail or death for keeping such a journal, but he can’t help himself. At one point, he stops for several months, but he finds he needs to write to feel as if he is fully alive.

What makes this work is the horror of the everyday proceeding even as fascism is rising. In one early scene, he thinks he might have seriously hurt himself when he was learning to ski. After a trip to the emergency room, he discovers his problem is minor. He observes, “Maybe the whole incident came at the right time to remind me that there are, or can be, worse misfortunes than an anti-Semitic regime.”

Then, we get a sense of the tension rising – something that I suspect Auburn’s adaptation makes more immediately dramatic than the longer complete journals. He spends several months working to have his play put on – Lena will actually perform well in it – and then the real world breaks in more forcefully.

There’s this excerpt: “The radio is right now broadcasting Hitler’s speech in Nuremberg. My own set is broken, but snatches of the broadcast drift up from the floor below, or maybe from across the way. I can’t make out what he is saying, but I can easily recognize Hitler’s guttural voice and especially the cheering that continually interrupts him: cheers and roars that are simply insane. // On such a day, am I supposed to take a mere play seriously?”

I would love to see the work that Sebastian wrote after the war, after he was able to return to a Romania that would fall behind the Iron Curtain but still permit something of a Jewish community to persist. In any case, the closest I think I’ll get – other than reading his pre-war novel – is this extended passage provokes by a friend of his who says he wishes he could find a way to tell every Jew, “Please believe me, sir, I have nothing to do with all this.”

From there, Sebastian writes:

The tragedy is that no one has anything to do with it. Everyone disapproves and feels indignant – but at the same time everyone is a cog in the huge anti-Semitic factory that is the Romanian state, with all its offices, authorities, press, institutions, laws, and procedures. I don’t know if I should laugh when a friend assures me that some general is ‘staggered’ and ‘disgusted’ at what is happening. But whether or not they are staggered or disgusted, they and tens of thousands like them sign, endorse, and acquiesce, not only tacitly or passively but through direct participation. As for the mass of people, they are jubilant. The bloodying and mocking of Jews have been public entertainment par excellence.

“Go over to Catholicism! Convert as quickly as you can! The Pope will defend you!” For several days I have been hearing this same refrain. My frienda ask me in all seriousness why I am still waiting. I don’t need arguments to answer them. Even if it were not so grotesque, even if it were not so stupid and pointless, I would still need no arguments. Somewhere on an island with sun and shade, in the midst of peace, security and happiness, I would in the end be indifferent to whether or not I was Jewish. But here and now I cannot be anything else. Nor do I think I want to be.

I find that a powerful summation of the best of what’s here. Whether Sebastian would have become a great writer or merely a good one, he was a thoughtful witness to madness, and he confronted it with bravery.

I’d love to see this produced sometime – or maybe not for its harrowing quality – and I suspect the woven together nature of it would make it as coherent as Auburn has laid it out.

On paper, though, I miss the context of particular dates that the full journals provide. This comes as a straightforward, unannotated monologue. But Sebastian was responding to an ever-changing situation. We do get some of his observations that one or another battle has taken place somewhere else in the world – and we get his painful acknowledgement of the pogrom in Iasi and the forced evacuation of Bukovina – but I’d like a clearer sense of the events taking place that provoke his responses.

So, the journals in full may be too long, and this may lack context, but the work as a whole is powerful. I wish Sebastian had lived to old age, but there’s a part of him that seems still to live in these pages.

[Alisu' · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Sint carti care, dupa ce le-ai uitat povestea si dupa ce si-au pierdut treptat in memoria noastra conturul, lasa in urma lor un fel de lumina care nu se stinge niciodata, un fel de sunet pe care-l vei recunoaste totdeauna printre o mie de sunete uitate."

[Sanib · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very special book and style: you can feel the worsening atmosphere for the jewish population in Bucharest, day bey day news and rumors about the progress of the war and also the evolution of personal relationships with the coming of the nazi regime.

A real testimonial of life and war in the Bucharest of the forties.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

The information and perspective is such an important one. However, as a play, it is challenging and very dry compared to Auburn's other scripts.