3 Review(s)

Hailed as one of the most important portrayals of the dark years of Nazism, this powerful chronicle by the Romanian Jewish writer Mihail Sebastian offers a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a Jew's diary, a reader's notebook, a music-lover's journal. Despite the pressure of hatred and horror in the "huge anti-Semitic factory" that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its perceptive and luminous intelligence. The legacy of a journalist, novelist, and playwright, Sebastian's Journal stands as one of the most important human and literary documents of the climate that preceded the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.