BEN-GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV FACULTY OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF JEWISH HISTORY

A Journey into the Intellectual World of the Romanian Jew Mihail Sebastian: Works, Testimony, Identity

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

YEHOSHAFAT CHRISTIAN POP

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROF. TUVIA FRILING

November 2013

Abstract

Both historiography and history of the Romanian Shoah are a matter which could be tackled without obstruction only after the fall of Communism (from the last decade of the past century on) with the accretion of documentary collection and the opening of archives that began in the 1990s. Then and then only, maybe finally and certainly more comprehensively, documents from Romania offered opportunities for studying a wartime regime that was second only to Germany in the killing of the Jews. The intention of my thesis is to create a very specific picture within the historiography of Romania’s fascism as well as its Holocaust, through the lenses of a historical figure who turned out to be one of the main catalysts for awareness of the Shoah in post-communist Romanian culture and society, namely that of Mihail Sebastian (born Iosef Hechter) and three sources written by him: the first one being his novel For Two Thousand Years / De două mii de ani (1934), the second a follow-up journalistic essay to his novel, entitled How I Became a Hooligan / Cum am devenit huligan (1935) and the third, his posthumously released Journal, 1935-1944, originally unintended for publishing. This study will deal with events and phenomena leading up to the Romanian Holocaust. The chapters are divided in chronological order according to the time of the works' writing and publishing, beginning with the first primary source, a novel which has often been called – against the author's will – autobiographical, and which will start the first chapter with a short literary critique, contextualizing afterwards the novel and using it to naturally call for a biographical portrayal of the Romanian Jewish intellectual Mihail Sebastian. The second chapter will focus on the essay Sebastian had written as a response to the scandal following the printing of For Two Thousand Years, entitled How I Became a Hooligan. The third and last chapter will look at the years during which the Journal was written. Each of the three works' discussion will intersect and raise questions of intellectual history, politics and identity as these emerge from the testimony and personal journey of the young author, playwright, lawyer, journalist and intellectual, Mihail Sebastian. The occupation with these various forms of literary witness will investigate the contribution of Sebastian to understanding the political but especially intellectual picture of the 1930s in Romania, up until the end of WWII. Last but not least, my hope is that the research will address questions referring to the protagonist's personal journey, his identity and position as Jew and intellectual in the midst of an increasingly anti-Semitic and fascist Bucharest intelligentsia.

Table of Contents

Introduction. 1

Chapter 1. For Two Thousand Years and the Period of 1907-1934 7

1.1. Literary Introduction to the Novel and its Context 7 1.2. The Novel and the Historians 19 1.3. The Author behind For Two Thousand Years 22 1.4. For Two Thousand Years and Dictatorship 33

1.5. For Two Thousand Years and Anti-Semitism 39 1.5.1 The Anti-Semitic Preface to the Novel 40

1.5.2. A Jewish Novel in an Anti-Semitic Milieu 49

Chapter 2. How I Became a Hooligan: The Hooligan Year 55 1934-1935

2.1. Mihail Sebastian's Hooliganism: Neither Right nor Left 57 2.2. The Credo and Testimony of a Romanian Jewish Intellectual 66

Chapter 3. The Journal and the Fascist Years 1935-1944 73

3.1. A Jewish Journal 79 3.2. A Historian's Journal 84

3.3. A Public Intellectual's Journal 88

Conclusion 100

Bibliography 102

Introduction

Both historiography and history of the Romanian Shoah is a matter which could be tackled without obstruction only after the fall of Communism, from the last decade of the past century on, with the accretion of documentary collection and the opening of archives that began in the 1990s. Then only, maybe finally and more comprehensively, “documents from Romania offered opportunities for studying a wartime regime that was second only to Germany in the killing of the Jews.”1 The intention of my dissertation is to create a very specific picture within the historiography of Romania‟s fascist years as well as its Holocaust, with the help of and through the lenses of a historical figure who turned out to be one of the main catalysts for awareness of the Shoah in post-communist Romanian culture and society: namely that of Mihail Sebastian and three of his written works2: his novel For Two Thousand Years (De două mii de ani) (1934), the follow-up essay to his novel, How I Became a Hooligan (Cum am devenit huligan) (1935) and his posthumously released Journal, 1935-1944, published for the first time in 1996. The awareness caused especially by the publication of the last of these three works was desperately needed in a society whose Holocaust denial was ranging from sheer negationism – in the form of collective defense of national “historic memory”; politically and governmentally empowered negationism; academic distortions and minimalization in a post-communist era; explicit-aggressive as well as implicit- defensive negationism; and all the way to the merely banal and cynical forms of denial.3 The character found in the Romanian Jewish intellectual, Mihail Sebastian, born Iosef Hechter, who had become a voice in Romanian intellectual and cultural circles already during the years in which ethnocratic, anti-Semitic and legionary commitment

1 Raul Hilberg. “Sources and their Uses”, in: Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (editors). The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), p. 9. 2 These are actually the only three of Mihail Sebastian's works that made their way into the Hebrew language with the help of Yotam Reuveni, Israeli poet, author and editor of the Nimrod publishing house: מיכאיל סבסטיאן. מה זה אלפיים שנה )תל אביב: נמרוד, 2004(; מיכאיל סבסטיאן. איך הפכתי לחוליגן )תל אביב: נמרוד, 2008(; מיכאיל סבסטיאן. יומן: 1935-1944 )תל אביב: נמרוד, 2003(. 3 See introduction of Michael Shafir. “Between Denial and 'Comparative Trivialization': Holocaust Negationism in Post-Communist East Central Europe”, in: ACTA – Analysis of Current Trends in Antisemitism (Jerusalem: SICSA, 2002). Retrieved from: http://sicsa.huji.ac.il/shafir19.htm. 1

were forming deep roots and providing the pathway for the fascist turn (I am referring here to the years between 1930-1938)4, is the very same character whose voice became gradually and increasingly silenced during the years of 1935-1944. A complete stifling of this man‟s voice did not occur, however, with his rather absurd death (at 38 years of age) due to an accident at the end of May 1945, a few months after the total overthrow of the old regime and the already newly established Soviet presence in Bucharest . It was a rather temporary silence, which began with the last entry in his diary at the end of 1944 and the fulfillment of the very repression Sebastian had foreseen in the last pages of his journal, namely Stalinism, and the Romanian version of it. Even the half decade of suppression could not fully dampen the Star without a Name5, and the Jewish playwright could still shed his creative light during and upon communist darkened decades. In 1996, however, his prophetic voice would resound again and help reignite a historical flame which Romania had tried to extinguish for too long. Dr. Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu, acting as Foreign Minister of Romania when introducing the fresh off the press Final Report, i.e. the International Commission‟s report on the Holocaust in Romania6, explained to the Israeli academic public at the harbinger event organized by Hebrew University in July 20057, that Sebastian‟s Journal was the “testimony that turned on the light” in 1996, and the witness that released “the wave of emotions that would finally catch up with Romanian readers”; that it was this man‟s too long silenced voice that “called those [hundreds of thousands of] souls”, murdered on Romanian soil (or Ukrainian – under Romanian

4 1930-1938 are the years marked by the gradual steady growth of fascist ideology in the political, cultural and social sphere. See chapter 2 in Leon Volovici. Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism: The Case of Romanian Intellectuals in the 1930s (Oxford, England: Pergamon Press, 1991). 5 Mihail Sebastian's play Steaua fără nume (A Star without a Name) written during the war years, was originally intended to be named "Ursa Major", and the playwright watched it at the Alhambra theatre in Bucharest, where it opened in 1944 under a pseudonym – Victor Mincu – in order to hide Sebastian's Jewish identity. The play is a bitter comedy that becomes a pinnacle in terms of style and dramatic structure. The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama states that today, hardly a season passes without one of Sebastian‟s plays being produced around the world‟s theatres. In Israel, as well, “A Star Without a Name” has been performed numerous times under Nicu Nitay‟s direction. See: "כוכב בלי שם" בהצגה של ניקו ניתאי: /http://www.epochtimes.co.il/news/content/view/2413/89 6 Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, Mihail E. Ionescu. (editors). Final Report: International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania; president of the commission (Iași: Polirom, 2004). 7 Regarding the complexity of Romania‟s official stand on the Holocaust and its discrepancies, see Radu Ioanid: "Vivid: Romania through International Eyes," at: www.vivid.ro/vivid72/pages72.holocaust72.htm. See also: Jean Ancel's introduction to his outstanding two-volume works on the history of the Holocaust in Romania: Jean Ancel. History of the Holocaust: Romania. Volume One (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002). [Hebrew]. 2

administration), “back to life”. Mihail Sebastian's diary caused the many voices, impossible to be heard over many decades, to sound an alarm. It became the “switch that Romanian culture needed, in order to arrive at its present stage of historical démarche”.8 More than 17 years have passed since Dr. Leon Volovici, dedicated scholar of Romanian Jewish intellectual life, managed to bring back to Romania the nine exiled hand-written notebooks he received from Mihail Sebastian‟s younger brother, Andrei Benu Sebastian, who had kept the documents in France ever since 1961.9 With the publication of the journal in the last decade of Romania‟s 20th century, not only has the cultivated Romanian reader been faced with one of the most extraordinary testimonials about a resurfaced and indigenous Silent Holocaust10 in national “historic memory”, as well as with a much needed contextualizing of Eugène Ionesco‟s process of “rhinocerization,”11 i.e. the intellectual conversion to the right, but, furthermore, the student of history has been confronted with questions regarding Jewish identity and existence during the period of the "fascist years."12 In addition to Sebastian's journal, the historian interested in researching these subjects will find a complementary nature in the two earlier written works by the same author, which present corresponding material to the same fields of interest: his novel For Two Thousand Years published in June 1934 with a notorious and anti-Semitic preface by Nae Ionescu, the mentor of a "young generation" of thinkers during the interbellic period – a preface that is a "global act of injustice… of cold, methodical and

8 Dr Mihai Răzvan Ungureanu. "Facing History: Romania and the Holocaust," Lecture held at the Hebrew University Conference organized by the Vidal Sasoon International Center for the Study of Anti-Semitism in July 2005. The entire lecture may be retrieved at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXpqBwNaavs&feature=feedf. 9 See editorial notes by Leon Volovici in: Mihail Sebastian. Jurnal. 1935-1944. Text îngrijit de Gabriela Omăt. Prefață și note de Leon Volovici (București: Humanitas, 1996), p. 13. 10 The term is borrowed from Butnaru's work on the Romanian Holocaust. See: I.C. Butnaru. The Silent Holocaust (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992). 11 Similar to Michael Kelly's term of "nationalization of the French intellectuals", researchers of Romanian intellectual life have come to use the Eugene Ionesco's term of "rhinocerization" when it comes to Romanian intellectual conversion to fascism during the interbellic and WWII period. The term rhinocerization derives from Eugene Ionesco's play Rhinoceros, an allegorical play of "the birth of a totalitarianism that grows, propagates, conquers, transforms a whole world and, naturally, being totalitarian, transforms it totally." See Norman Manea. "Romania, the Holocaust, and a rediscovered writer," in: The New Republic (April 4, 1998). 12 In the English edition of Sebastian's Journal, which was first published in Romanian as Jurnal: 1935-1944, Radu Ioanid added "The Fascist Years" to the book's title, however, one might regard the entire fourth decade as a fascist period, as do Volovici in Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism or Zigu Ornea in his work The Nineteen Thirties: The Romanian Extreme Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), or one might well argue for a periodization of 1938-1944 as a de facto fascist period. 3

indifferent brutality,"13 which Sebastian chose to publish nevertheless, and last but not least, the follow-up essay How I Became a Hooligan, by which the young writer attempts to give a logical, calm, sensible response to five months of intellectual passions, curses, scandals, accusations, religious, political and social polemics, even legal and criminal threats, coming from right and left, anti-Semites as well as revisionist Zionists, "democrats" and reactionaries, all surrounding this novel. These three works together, all written during the period between 1930 and 1944,14 present an interconnected resourceful platform, which shall take us on a journey into Mihail Sebastian's intellectual world. The witness of this man's work and life during the fascist years allows for fresh insight when establishing a history of Romanian fascism, especially from an intellectual approach. One may go to Sebastian's journal and find therein sobering, horrifying and most disturbing accounts of the Legionnaires butchering of Jews, records regarding pogroms and the anti-Semitic reality so common for much of the European space in this period. Nonetheless, the reading of Mihail Sebastian's diary, done in the context and company of his two written works preceding the journal, texts dealing with culture, Jewish identity and witness in the emerging fascist Romanian state, one a literary piece and the other a journalistic essay, raises a discourse that can be far better corroborated and included in research than mere citation of the journal as an example of literary testimony in the reading of Holocaust diaries and memoirs.15 My hope is to achieve a proper contextualizing of these three documents through the journey into the spiritual and intellectual world of a Romanian Jew, whose individual and collective identity as well as personal witness may create a field of tangency between Romanian Holocaust history, politics of the period, as well as cultural identity discourse. While for the Romanian speaking Israeli public Mihail Sebastian remains a cultural symbol, the general culturally interessé in Israel's wider public might have

13 Mihail Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan: texte, fapte, oameni (Bucureşti : Editura "Cultura Natională, 1935), pp. 120-121. 14 Mihail Sebastian explicitly states at the end of 1934, with the publishing of his responsa-type essay How I Became a Hooligan, that he had started writing his novel For Two Thousand Years four years earlier, i.e., around the beginning of 1930. See: Mihail Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan: texte, fapte, oameni (Bucureşti : Editura "Cultura Natională, 1935), p. 6. How I Became a Hooligan is completed at the end of 1934, and the journal ends with the very last day of December 1944. 15 James E. Young. "Interpreting Literary Testimony: A Preface to Rereading Holocaust Diaries and Memoirs" in: New Literary History. Vol. 18, No. 2 (Winter, 1987). 4

encountered him mainly through Nicu Nitay's direction of the Hebrew version of "A Star without a Name", a play that, after failing in 1962 under Moshe Yassur's direction,16 found itself re-discovered and appreciated in 2006 , with a love that endures today. In academic circles, it was mostly Friedländer's work17 that set the stage for Mihail Sebastian's diary. The real battle around this figure and his work took place on Romanian ground, where the Journal's apparition continues to stir reverberating polemics to this day. The same Leon Volovici, historian of Romanian Jewish culture, literature and intellectual life, who managed to publish the diary after the fall of Communism, helped arrange an international symposium at the Hebrew University on the subject of Mihail Sebastian, in the fall of 2007. Corresponding with the centenary anniversary since the Romanian Jewish intellectual's birth, this symposium gathered a number of erudite scholars, historians, philosophers and belletrists, such as Paul Cornea, Moshe Idel, Andrei Oișteanu, Lya Benyamin, Liviu Rotman , Marta Petreu, and others, around a discourse on the author's "dilemmas of identity".18 The conference, even though providing some historiographic insight, left also lacunae, as well as questions, historical and methodological flaws to be addressed. Apart from the condensed edited work by Volovici on Mihail Sebastian: Dilemmas of Identity, most of the material written on Sebastian has been done by journalists. Their work, often polemic, is at times surprisingly similar to the wave of emotional and inflammatory responses to his novel For Two Thousand Years in 1934/35. Literary critiques have often been historically more accurate than the actual historical treatment that exists on the subject of Mihail Sebastian. The Romanian discourse on Sebastian has often been presented itself as a political podium or an amalgam for slogans, rather than well founded historical writing. This work will attempt a historical approach to the man of letters, a lover of literature and literary criticism, and an apolitical public intellectual, in the French sense of the word, where intellectuals embodied "both creativity and courage… essential building blocks

16 The first staging of "Steaua fără nume" occurred under the direction and translation of Moshe Yassur on 28.6.1962. The premiere show took place at the YMCA auditorium in Jerusalem. 17 Mihail Sebastian's Journal is a springboard for the distinguished historian. The "literary" nature of the witness serves throughout Friedländer's book as a venue from which the scholar illustrates the greater picture of Romania's years of extermination. See Shaul Friedländer. Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1939-1945. The Years of Extermination (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). 18 Leon Volovici. (editor). Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identității (Cluj-Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 2009). 5

of … authority to speak out on broad issues of public concern…," and where they were still "guardian(s) of universally grounded values of truths," responsibility and "belief in the value of science, readiness to confront repressive authority, defense of justice, reason and truth in the name of moral universalism."19 It is my preliminary opinion that of the few solid works that have focused on Mihail Sebastian in the Romanian Jewish historical context, none has approached a combined research using Sebastian's novel For Two Thousand Years, his journalistic essay How I Became a Hooligan, and his Journal, as a lens for reading intellectual history of the epoch. It is to be hoped that my thesis shall provide a novel and creative entry into this area of historiography on the fascist period. The chapters are divided chronologically, beginning with (1) the first primary document and a literary critical introduction to the novel which has often been called – against the author's will – autobiographical, and then a historical use of this same source naturally allowing a biographical portrayal of the Romanian Jewish intellectual Mihail Sebastian, especially during the years 1907-1934, (2) the second chapter continuing with the essay Sebastian wrote as a response to the scandal following the printing of For Two Thousand Years, which will mainly cover the period between 1934-1935, and (3) the third chapter dealing with the years between 1935-1944 during which the Journal was written. Each one of these three chapters will allow Sebastian's writings to raise appropriate questions on the historical context of the document and its author; they will investigate how the writer's testimony could witness concerning the process of "rhinocerization,"20 i.e. the intellectual turn to fascism of Bucharest's interwar intelligentsia, as well as of the tainted nature of intellectualism during Romania's 1930s and 1940s. Lastly, my thesis will be devoted to the disputed 'Jewish' identity of Mihail Sebastian, raising and addressing questions of individual and collective distinctiveness.

19 Barbara A. Misztal. Intellectuals and the Public Good: Creativity and Civil Courage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 15. 20 See footnote 11. 6

Chapter 1 For Two Thousand Years and the Period of 1907-1934 "I believe I have never been afraid of people nor things, but have only dreaded signs and symbols. My childhood had been poisoned by that third poplar tree from the garden of St Peter's Church, mysterious, tall, dark, with its shadows falling in the summer nights, right through my windows, all the way over my bed – like a black ribbon cutting stripes on my bedcover – a presence that makes me shiver, without understanding it, without questioning."21

1.1 A Literary Introduction to the Novel

The erudite in Romanian literature tried for decades to do practically everything in order to bury alive the first source chosen to examine in this research: the novel For Two Thousand Years. Before contextualizing this source historically and using it, its conception and its inception in the intellectual world of Mihail Sebastian, a short literary critique has become a prerequisite to any in depth historical analysis. The furious indictment of the novel as well as its author lasted from the very moment it was published, in 1934, and until 1946, two years after the author's sudden death. An exemplar of the 1946 edition of For Two Thousand Years, kept at the National Academic Library, showed an especially attached etiquette bearing the inscription "secret", in other words: undesirable, calamitous, and reactionary.22 Among all Sebastian's published literary works, excluding his posthumously published journal (never intended for publication), no other entered the row of 'literatura non grata' as did this novel. Until the collapse of totalitarianism in 1990 the novel would see neither reediting, nor would it receive any serious critical literary attention. Two years after the appearance of For Two Thousand Years, the exasperated tone of the young author places this novel above all his other works written by that time, as he confides in his journal: "[it] strikes me as exceptional... There is no doubt, of everything I have written, that this is the book that will live on," and a bit later,

21 Mihail Sebastian. De două mii de ani (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1990), p. 29. 22 So according to a recently published book by literary critic Geo Şerban. (editor). Dimensiunea Sebastian – Incursiuni documentare (Bucureşti: Hasefer, 2013), p. 34. 7

"…in the last few days I have reread some pages of For Two Thousand Years. Will I ever write anything that serious again?"23 What is the seriousness that this novel presents to its reader? What is its historical value? What happens there and who are its main characters? What is clearly portrayed in it and what is hidden? And what is the novel's relation to reality? These are just a few of the questions I would like to address here. Before one's own attempt to give literary answers to basic questions of criticism and analysis, we must let the author himself answer at least some of our questions. In a dialogue with Camil Baltazar, the well-known Romanian Jewish writer, poet, and friend of Sebastian, published in the "Reporter" magazine in June 1937, the author of For Two Thousand Years, was saying: "I find it very hard to talk to you about my novel. When I actually wrote it? Why I wrote it? These are questions that go beyond literary confidences and the readers may have the right, or interest to find answers to them. For Two Thousand Years is and is not a novel, at the same time. Moreover, it is a piece of writing so intimate, that today, with its appearance, I wonder – dread – whether I have not betrayed too many things from an experience which I attempted to hide for too long beneath my own smiles. I knew that one day I would write this book. In a sense. Maybe, in a sense, it was the only rationale behind wanting 'to become a writer'. I had to say certain things, which had been choking me ever since my earliest memories in childhood and adolescence. I felt that, had I said them, I would feel more liberated. And there you go… I did."24 In the same interview, it is Sebastian himself who divides the book into three chapters, each one connected to a specific year: 1923, 1929 and 1933. He underlines that the book however is not dealing with the events of those years, such as the socio- political changes from 1933 and the fascist resurgence that was on the rise in that same period. This literary project had been thoroughly planned by Sebastian a long time before its actual writing. The plot, we discover quickly, is a rather static one, beginning with an intimate journal of "confession", in which a young Jewish student, and an arising intellectual, confides his deepest fears and feelings of loneliness as he

23 "Wednesday, 27 May, 1936," and "Wednesday, 7 October," in Mihail Sebastian. Journal: 1935-1944 – The Fascist Years. With an Introduction and Notes by Radu Ioanid (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 51-52, 80. 24 "Explicaţii ȋntr-un dialog cu Camil Baltazar," in "Reporter", Wednesday, 27 June, 1937, published in: Şerban. Dimensiunea Sebastian. Op. cit., p. 37. 8

faces the drama of a Jew born "in the city at the Danube river", a Jew who feels desperately alone, divided in his identity, describing his only comfort in the tragic destiny of suffering as that of isolating himself between the two worlds: the Romanian and the Jewish. The hero of the novel decides to study law despite the anti-Semitic beatings and outbursts of violence against Jewish students. Having left the provinces and moved to the capital, he is confronted with the grotesque spectacle of racism. He soon leaves the Jewish dormitory in Văcăreşti and prefers isolation to identification with his co-religionists, not because of shame but rather because of the honest split in his perception of communal belonging, because of the utter loneliness "in a world which thinks you belong to it."25 The actual spiritual formation of the young Jew does not occur, as we might expect, either in the religious heder or in the Jewish emancipation movements, but rather under the influence of a Christian professor called Ghiţă Blidaru, who is concerned with issues such as the crisis of modernity, the negative effects of Cartesian thinking (or the processes of de-vitalization by technology) and the age of the automatic industrialization of daily life. The common themes instilled in him by this mentor are transcendence, metaphysics, and the loss of being in touch with experience. The course of the young Jew is completely turned around by this professor who convinces him to leave his study of the law and become an architect, convincing him therefore to cut himself off from a speculative, fruitless life and "come back to the earth," the soil, which "simplifies everything and creates a new order."26 During this journey of the protagonist's spiritual and intellectual formation we get to know several other characters from his Jewish environment, who offer various "solutions" to the drama of the Jewish problem of "two thousand years passing through fires, drowning, and endless wandering through the history of the ghetto."27 The nameless protagonist is not attracted by the Zionism of Sami Winkler who envisions a new national home in the Eretz Israel, as well as a new identity established there, free from persecution and injustice. Neither does he accept the Marxist solution to the Jewish problem, embodied by the character of a Jew called S.T. Haim who believes that all identity problems are taken care of by the international revolution against bourgeois oppression. A third Jewish presence and

25 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 35. 26 Ibid., p. 44. 27 Ibid., p. 101. 9

aspect is embodied by the antiquarian Abraham Sulitzer, a fascinating figure who travels and sells books, but whose staunch defense of Judaism and Yiddishkeit, leaves the hero once more dissatisfied: "I was wrong. Abraham Sulitzer is not the gentleman Bergeret I thought him to be, except in relation to being husband to his Madame Roza. As an intellectual, however, relating to ideas, he becomes categorically cruel. Defending the ghetto he is just as intolerant as Winkler defending Zionism and S.T. Haim cursing both of the former. The belief in absolutes is their common vice."28 The first chapter leaves us therefore with a Jewish taste of solitude. The second part of the book, picking up in 1929, starts focusing on racial confrontations. A few years have passed, and the author introduces the protagonist in different circumstances than the racial conflicts. Here, he is working on a development site under the supervision of Mircea Vieru, in the company of his colleague Marin Dronţu and the young Hungarian Jew Pierre Dogany. This site attempts to urbanize a rural region in Prahova, co-managed by the Ralph I. Rice foreign oil-bearing company. An increasingly violent conflict arises between the local farmers and the „omnipotent‟ industrialists, a conflict that remains less analyzed by the author. The novel does not attempt any openly stated economic criticism. The only concept reappearing in this chapter is the metaphysical approach of the same professor Blidaru. The "Jewish question" reappears here in the sense that we now encounter Romanian nationalism and the impossibility of assimilation. The hero comes across hostilities similar to those he had met in the past. The nihilist Pârlea, for example, harshly replies that "the two of us will never be able to be friends. Not today. Never. Don't you feel that I smell like soil?" The Jew cannot be rooted in Romanian soil, no matter how hard he tries. In the following chapter the young architect, having to work for his company in Paris, leaves Romanian soil. Here a new character appears, a French psychologist, whose raison d'être in the novel can be summarized in his statement: "Life is possible only for self-disciplined people who know how to control their thoughts, check their sentiments and keep their interior crises to themselves. I am a Frenchman. Moreover, I am from Brittany. I have patience neither for Teutons nor for Jews. – An anti- Semite? – Yes. Not in politics, but psychologically speaking I am with no doubt anti- Semitic. You must understand it and not be offended."29

28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 179. 10

After coming back to his home country in 1933, the returning architect is once again placed in the midst of anti-Semitic scenarios, the streets of Bucharest being filled again with men in uniforms calling for "death to the Jews." The protagonist finds himself once more in utter solitude, working as an architect on the house of his master and mentor, Professor Blidaru. Winkler has made his way to Palestine, S. T. Haim had been condemned to prison, embracing the cause of revolution, yet our hero chooses to remain "a man of the Danube," despite the fact that his right to belong to this soil has been denied on numerous occasions by his Romanian friends. Even though Mircea Vieru, one of the more anti-Semitic characters and one of the protagonist's Christian friends, strongly states that "nevertheless, there remains a Jewish problem and it must be solved," the author himself gives no clue regarding the nature of such a solution. When asked again by the poet Baltazar regarding any "directives" in the novel, Sebastian answers: "No. I have no such directives to give. Each one must solve his own inner conflicts. I would be very happy to find out that one single person had discovered some consolation reading this work, that I might have helped someone to single out his path, yet I doubt I will ever have this joy. My book was written to untie some sad personal memories. But today, this book in itself has become nothing but a very sad memory."30 The tone of the novel is a tragic. It is a novel that illustrates a problem. It contains no intrigue, rather ideas without real action. The characters themselves are schematic and each is a mere "spokesman" of ideologies, be it Zionism, Judaism, Marxism, assimilation or anti-Semitism. The novel's structure contains three "moments": the first, the pseudo-journal, with the outbreaks of anti-Jewish attacks; the second moment – a return to "normalization" with a continuing discourse of isms that interact with the identity of the Jewish intellectual living between worlds; and the last, a return to political and cultural excesses, outbreaks of violence. Iulian Băicuşi compares its structure to the concept of Gianbattista Vico, a corsi et recorsi, reminiscent maybe of the dialectics of Hegel.31 The static plot, all the events, the characters, thoughts and doubts portrayed in this book lead to one major problem which has no solution, namely that of a dual

30 "Explicaţii ȋntr-un dialog cu Camil Baltazar," in: Şerban. Dimensiunea Sebastian. Op. cit., p. 38. 31 Iulian Băicuşi. Mihail Sebastian. Proiecţii pe ecranul culturii europeene (Bucureşti: Editura Hasefer, 2007), p. 131. 11

identity. Lévinas once said that "questioning one's Jewish identity is already to have lost it. But it is still to hold on to it. Since otherwise one would be avoiding the question."32 Mihail Sebastian, an Eastern European Jew living in the Romanian context of the 1920s and 1930s, nothing but a "pandemonium of ethnic, religious, economic and ideological groups that could only imagine or invent a nationality,"33 with its ever expanding anti-Semitism, initiated in the novel he had called "an act of courage" an intellectual endeavor similar to Lévinas‟, the construction of an approach to Jewish identity discourse. A misplaced trust and petition for an introduction from his mentor and professor Nae Ionescu, whose thoughts imbue the metaphysical sparks of the novel, led this courageous writing to cause of the greatest scandals of interwar literature. For Two Thousand Years is not an autobiographical novel, but may be interpreted as such mostly through its conceptual meaning rather than its plot or epic moments, explained Sebastian in his excellent essay written a few months later. This essay appears as an almost legal plea of defense arising from the scandal following the novel's publication.34 However, the confessional quality of the novel has been recognized by literary critics such as Şerban Cioculescu, Ieronim Şerbu, Octav Suluţiu, and many others.35 It is into this category that this novel can be classified – the confessional kind – and one whose problematic touches on the cultural self- examination of the author caused me to use this literary source as a historical one. Of all Mihail Sebastian's literary writings, none deals with the "problem" of Jewish identity. The printing of this novel caused such fierce discussion that the author felt compelled to write an essay and address the cultural war of his epoch. The introduction by Nae Ionescu ruins the aesthetic aspect of a confessional novel, but in a strange way, this assemblage of a problem-novel with an anti-Semitic foreword by the "intellectual mentor of an entire generation," Nae Ionescu, as well as the author‟s later public response in How I became a Hooligan, allow the historian who looks back at the figure of Mihail Sebastian to enter a discussion of identity, which, joined by the

32Gary D. Mole. Lévinas, Blanchot, Jabès: Figures of Estrangement (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1997), p. 1. 33 Donald R. Kelley. "Romanian Cultural and Political Identity," in: Journal of the History of Ideas. Vol. 59. No. 4 (October, 1998), p.735. 34 Mihail Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 319. 35 Maria Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian – Publicist şi romancier (Bucureşti: Editura Du Style, 1998), pp. 77-78. 12

years of the posthumously published Journal helps create a more comprehensive portrayal of the historical figure of the Romanian Jewish intellectual. The novel For Two Thousand Years with its highlighted problem, a Jewish problem, speaks mainly of a metaphysical problem, and the sufferings of which the author is writing seem to be both a psychological state of mind and an almost pathological state of being for the novel's hero. The „Jewish‟ condition is presented - that the Jew "has to suffer" and that there is no escape to this destiny. While Sebastian manages to pose this idea aesthetically in an almost romantically tragic fashion, the very concept is cut off from reality and cannot be regarded as a valid truth. The problem of the hero's predicament, isolated from his community, may well stem from the "apolitical" stand of the author. If in this sense, the novel is an autobiographical one, it is all the more fascinating to recognize a transformation in the author's identification with his community towards the end of the confessional pages in his other, real-life journal, ending in 1944.

Introducing the Novel's Context Mihail Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years, which from its very publication date until today has been "high-jacked from the artistic to the political vendetta,"36 as literary critic Dan Mihăilescu poignantly put it, caused, if not "the greatest scandal of Romanian history of literature,"37 certainly the most intense one in the 1930s. This novel chooses to focus on questions of Jewish value and identity in the Romanian context. For the author, a Romanian as well as a Jewish intellectual concerned with issues of self-image and collective image, which times of political, cultural and

36 Paula Daniela Ganga. "Being a Jewish Writer under the Romanian Fascist Regime: The Case of Mihail Sebastian", in: SLOVO 24, No. 1 (Spring, 2012), p. 4. I should add here, that the same Dan C. Mihăilescu quoted here, who gives a good literary critique of the For Two Thousand Years, proves to be rather detached from historical reality, in other articles, when he unashamedly defends the intellectual right of the thirties and puts intellectuals' fascism off as a "youthful mistakes and passing rains". When it comes to Sebastian's Journal and his witness of the radicalization of the intellectual group around the author, Sebastian, all of a sudden, loses "objectivity", and the reader of such "any such memory related document", according to Mihăilescu, must understand the essence of its recording "under either imposed present moments, or some evocative nebulous nostalgia." See: Edward Kanterian. "Subiectivitate şi obiectivitate in Jurnalul lui Mihail Sebastian", in: Observatorul cultural 398 (November, 2007). Retrieved from the Internet: http://www.observatorcultural.ro/Subiectivitate-si-obiectivitate-in-Jurnalul-lui-Mihail- Sebastian*articleID_18736-articles_details.html 37 This is how Peter Hamm, prominent German writer, journalist and literary critic, introduced Mihail Sebastian's novel at the renowned and extravagant annual "Geschwister-Scholl-Preis" award ceremony for literature in 2006. The jury decided then to award Mihail Sebastian's journal, prior translated into German, for its literary discourse. 13

economic crises always seem to realign or challenge, the novel's questions arise certainly, but not exclusively, from what Robert Wistrich has called the longest hatred, namely the problem of anti-Semitism, as well as from Jewish realities in 'exile', often depicted as a tragic period of two thousand years,38 hence, the title for the novel. The content of this work, permeated by a good amount of distressing sentiment, and maybe by what Salo Baron designated a "lachrymose reading of Jewish history", takes place mainly within the years following World War I. Being of rather static nature, without thrilling intrigues and fundamental plot,39 Mihail Sebastian's novel is more of an intellectual discourse led by a nameless Jewish intellectual protagonist who faces the dilemmas of differing identities, who interacts with various Jewish expressions of existence from the Jewish collective, such as Abraham Sulitzer, the 'eternal Jew' and wandering peddler from the Jewish ghetto selling books, the Zionist revisionist friend, Sami Winkler, who is carefully preparing his departure for Palestine, or the rigorously dedicated Marxist Jew, S. T. Haim, who is awaiting the revolution and relentlessly fighting for the cause of internationalist socialism. These, of course, are just a few among the fictional Romanian Jews portrayed in the novel. Then, on the other hand, again on the Romanian fictive spectrum of the book, we find a mixture of Weltanschauungen that could well sum up the common trends of Sebastian's time and space: Ghiţă Blidaru, "the only one behind whom a model from real life is hiding,"40 as Sebastian confessed in his follow up essay, illustrates his traditionalist and autochthonous professor Nae Ionescu. The spectrum also includes the cosmopolitan Marin Vieru, who despite his modernist Cartesian rationalism can turn into quite an anti-Semite, and Ştefan Pîrlea,

38 One could easily and appropriately place Sebastian's novel within the discourse of Jewish exile, suffering, Christian and non-Christian context, created by various historians such as for example: Yitzhak F. Baer. Galut (Schocken Books, 1947) or A.M. Isen. Modern Jewish Reflection on Homlessness and Homecoming (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Mihael Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years perception of Jewish suffering, as I shall note later on, is likely to be analyzed within the framework of "Christian versus Jewish historical perception of historical time." There is no doubt that the non-Jewish context and especially the anti-Jewish polemics are most likely a stimulating factor for the author to name is novel For Two Thousand Years, even if it actually deals with the decades between the two World Wars. For a framework on this various perceptions of time, history and Jewish suffering and exile, see: Israel Jacob Yuval. "The Myth of the Jewish Exile from the Land of Israel: A Demonstration of Irenic Scholarship", in: Common Knowledge, Vol. 12.1 (Winter, 2006), pp.16-33, or a more concise study in the Hebrew language, in: ישראל יעקב יובל. "מיתוס ההגליה מן הארץ – זמן יהודי וזמן נוצרי", בתוך: אלפיים 29 )2005(, עמ' 9-25. 39 See Băicuşi's literary critique of For Two Thousand Years in: Iulian Băicuşi. Mihail Sebastian, proiecţii pe ecranul culturii europene (Bucureşti: Editura Hasefer, 2007), pp. 125-163.. 40 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 178. 14

reminiscent of E.M. Cioran's frantic, negative, pessimistic and anti-decadent outcry for violent revolution, to name just a few. The protagonist's story of alignment, integration and his discourse of identity are gradually built with the help of such figures, yet not without dramatic external realities, pogroms, radical and anti-Semitic phenomena, beatings and "banalities" of either barbaric (Eastern) or 'rationally' calculated (Western) hatreds of the Jew. Social and cultural historian Eugen Weber calls Sebastian's work, "not an autobiography or a novel or a diary, although a bit of each. The hero, who is never named, lives the tragicomedy of assimilation in a land and culture that both invite and repel. A rich country full of ragged people, Romania uneasily combined a 19th- century rural and suburban servitude with the sophistication of 20th-century Paris fashions and very mod cons. Politics was about patronage: Parliament was a den of time-servers and leeches, democracy a word but not an option, the monarchy a plaster on a wobbly leg. Home-bred troubles are better blamed on others, and the blame for arrogance and intellectual brilliance amid the wretchedness was assigned to Jews."41 Rather than a "tragicomedy of assimilation," the novel is closer to a quest for integrative identity as both Romanian and Jew. Behind the raising of each question, by means of which the protagonist ego looks for self-attributions, there seems to be an appearance of 'the other' on the horizon, writes Michèle Mattusch. "When the protagonist sees himself as individualist, who won't accept being fit into a preconditioned scheme, it is only because he reacts to the collectivism of the ideological discourse. When he envies collective living, he feels excluded from it because of his Jewishness. When he is a mere observer, passing life by, he perceives himself as a peripheral intellectual unable to participate in occurring events. When seeing himself as a Jew, beaten, weak, spit-upon, landless and disconnected from his soil, he responds to Nae Ionescu's "earthen, soil-bound rootedness," which the latter automatically connects to the Romanian organism. The personal drama goes so far that the judgments of the others are being applied to his identity.42

41 Eugen Weber. "You have to hang on," in: London Review of Books Col. 23. No. 22 (November, 2001), p. 32. 42 Michèle Mattusch. "Identiätskonstruktion gestern und heute – Lektüregeschichte zu Mihail Sebastians 'De doua mii de ani', in: M. Anghelescu and L. Schippel. (editors). Im Dialog: Rumänische Kultur und Literatur (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitäts Verlag, 2000), p. 239. 15

When Sebastian allows his protagonist to raise Jewish self-accusations, these are simply explained as an inherent Jewish tendency to suffering, and not only because of anti-Semitism but moreover because of an inherent ancient belief.43 Thus, when speaking of "spiritual suffering", the author uses – in the writing of this novel – a method of a paradoxical leading conclusions onto the ego and onto others, and drives himself as well as the people he encounters into a rhetorical state of puzzlement. Only towards the end of the book, does one get the sense that the protagonist "frees himself" from the symbols he feared the most, the symbols with which he started the first part of the novel. The young Jewish boy who in the beginning feared nothing but signs and symbols, no people nor things, but nevertheless dreading, for example, that poplar tree from the garden of St. Peter's Church, mysterious, tall, dark, with all that its shivering presence stood for, and all this tree stood for, completes the novel's journey in a serene, quaint scenery, in front of the house he had always dreamed of. His very own villa, in Snagov, is "a house for sunshine. When evening falls, its shade goes to sleep onto the length of the lake, just like a plant's shade."44 The protagonist, having found a place of being-with-himself, a very earthen, soil-bound, so in line with the timely discourse of the 1930s place,45 shares a final contemplation: To discuss a political solution to the Jewish problem is for me a rather dead-end…. I believe that the only way, in which some things can be clarified in this very ancient suffering, is for me to… try to resolve this node of adversities and conflicts which bind me in the Romanian experience. And I do not believe that this lonely path is a flight, a lack of solidarity with my own people, but just the opposite, for it is impossible for a man who accepts and lives a drama with all sincerity not to elucidate for the rest of the others some form of guidelines. I find it more urgent, as well as more effective to be able to achieve in my life an accord for both Jewish and Romanian values, rather than obtain or lose who knows what civic rights. I want to find out if there is any such anti-Semitic heritage that can annul in my very being the irrevocable fact of having been born along the Danube River and of loving this landscape.46

For Two Thousand Years belongs to one of the more important cultural epochs of Romanian literary history, namely that which has become known as "the 1927 generation," named so because of the beginning of a "spiritualist" publication series called Itinerar spiritual (Spiritual Itinerary). Written in 1927 by Mircea Eliade, this

43 For Jewish approaches to an "inherent suffering in Judaism," see: Bernd Janowski and Peter Stuhlmacher. (editors). The Suffering Servant: Isaiah 53 in Jewish and Christian Sources (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 2004). Mihail Sebastian's view is not at all theological, but his metaphysical and philosophical contemplation is no novelty in Jewish thought. 44 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 226. 45 See Mattusch. "Identiätskonstruktion gestern und heute." Op. cit. pp. 249-250. The literary critic dedicates the last part of her article to Sebastian's "conquering of symbols." 46 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 225. 16

was a series of sketches filled with metaphysical fervor and tragic destiny. Those who eventually gathered around the Itinerary and its accompanying publicist activities were all aged between 20 and 25.47 "They," and hereby cultural historian Zigu Ornea meant the distinct, but not necessarily ideologically united, body of writers within this new generation, "were all in search of points of orientation."48 To this group belonged, without giving an exhaustive enumeration: Mircea Eliade, Mircea Vulcănescu, Paul Sterian, Dan Botta, Emil Cioran, Constantin Noica, Henri H Stahl, Ion I. Cantacuzino, Mihail Polihroniade, Mihail Sebastian, Petru Comarnescu, Petre Ţuţea, Traian Herseni, Paul Constantin Deleanu, Arşavir and Haig Acterian, Gheorghe Racoveanu, Eugen Ionescu, Petru Manoliu, Nicolae Roşu et.al. After 1933, few among the prominent members of this "spiritualist generation" remained independent of political affiliation, or to use Eugen Ionescu's expression, refusing "rhinocerization." Amongst these few could be mentioned Henry H. Stahl, Petre Comarnescu, Eugen Ionescu and Iosef Hechter, known by his pen-name Mihail Sebastian. He was the Jew standing out in this 'new generation' group. Until the writing and publishing of For Two Thousand Years, it was mostly his Romanian voice that had been heard in various published essays. For this young generation, this season was evocative of Kafka's Aufbruch,49 and in the midst of the interbellic fervor

47 Zigu Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties. The Romanian Extreme Right. Op. cit., p.31. For more on the "young generation see all of chapter 3 in Ornea's book. 48 Ibid. 49 Roger Griffin, a historian who has dealt largely with the subject of fascism as an expression of modernism, believes that Franz Kafka' Aufbruch describes the avant-garde fascist breakout. Kafka's short story is mainly a conversation between a servant and his master. The master orders his servant to saddle his horse, the servant fails to understand. The master, then, hears a trumpet blow, which his servant does not hear, and as he sets about leaving the servant asks where he is going. "Where are you riding to, my lord?" "I don't know… just out of here. Away from here, and for good. Only like this, will I be able to reach my goal." "So, you have a goal in mind?" "Yes… I have already told you: 'out of here'. That is my goal." "You have no food supplies for the road." "I do not need any, the road is so long, that I will have to starve, if I don‟t manage finding anything to eat on the way. Luckily, it is a tremendously long journey." Franz Kafka. Sämtliche Erzählungen. Herausgegeben von Paul Raabe (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970), p. 321. The master leaves, breaks out, irrupts. Hoofs of horses trampling. A trumpet sounding. Impulsive irrational action. His only goal is "bloß weg von hier", "out of here", taking no food provision, and no plans either. Griffin quotes the cultural historian Siegfried Kracauer describing the interwar mood that "can best be defined by the word Aufbruch. In the pregnant sense in which it was used at the time, the term meant departure from the shattered world of yesterday towards a tomorrow built on the grounds of revolutionary conceptions.[…] People suddenly grasped the significance of avant-garde paintings and mirrored themselves in visionary dramas announcing to a suicidal mankind the gospel of a new age of brotherhood. […] They believed in international socialism, pacificsm, collectivism, aristocratic leadership, religious community, life or national resurrection, and frequently presented a confused mixture of these variegated ideals as a brand-new creed." Robert Griffin. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (New York: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 9-10. While "the confused mixture of elements" in developing Romanian 17

for new spiritualist points of reference, Sebastian dared to write a Jewish novel, which not only becomes a brave act of sincerity, but eventually leads to "a lost house, a fallen symbol, and a great friendship stabbed,"50 as Sebastian would later confess. With the printing of the Jewish novel, in 1934, which Sebastian allows to be published with a notoriously anti-Semitic preface by the same Nae Ionescu who mentored and hired him (and also offered a model for the fictional character Ghiţă Blidaru in his novel) in his launching years, this "lost house" means more than losing his work place in the Cuvântul enterprise, but a growing detachment and distancing from the entire spiritual house of that generation. The "stabbed friendship," is none other than that of Nae Ionescu, much like the fictional figure of Ghiţă Blidaru, who, in the scene of the beating of the nameless Jewish protagonist student, feeling "alone among ten thousand" violent anti-Semites, has nothing to say but, "What is it that you want from me?… And he left without waiting for an answer. I should walk the streets for an hour, two or three, and fight with ten thousand at once, take an axe and cut an amount of logs that fit in a whole wagon, and then, in the evening, collapse from tiredness and be able to forget all this."51 Of the reenactment of Nae Ionescu's friendship and its nature, we read later again: One recent evening, returning from Ghiţă Blidaru, I remembered the brutality of that first conversation I had with him. Conversation! If one can call it such a thing. I stopped to complain because I had been thrown out of his class. How intimidating had been his browbeating. He did not even want to look at me. Even today, remembering that incident I cringe with shame. "How much I suffered then," I told him and even though I did not want him to think of my question as some sort of bold rebuke, I could not stop myself from asking him about that day. -Could you please tell me, what had happened on that day? Why had you been so abrupt to me, so severing? -I don‟t know and I don't remember. Maybe I was bored, maybe simply upset. I have no recollection of it. But, to be honest with you, I have no remorse whatsoever. I have never liked to be too courteous with people, not even with those closest to me. Especially with those I hold dear. I am telling myself that from a hundred pokes thrown at someone incidentally maybe two will hit the mark and bring fruit in the end. When I walk through grass, I never pay attention not to crush a blade of grass or to kill some bug. The earth doesn't like to be shown too delicate an attention. Step on it, and crush as much as you please – after you step on it, the roots will continue to grow, if they truly are roots. When you walk on earth, then it must be on earth that you walk. When you walk amongst people, then walk among people. Be a little blind. It won‟t hurt. You may destroy a few things – those especially that are debilitated. Yet you will fertilize the other ones. Eating a "mad cow" is an indispensable exercise. I did not spare myself from doing such and I will never spare someone else either from engaging in it, intellectual fascism of the 1930s – phenomenon which shall be discussed mostly in the second chapter of my thesis – were different than Kracauer's enumeration, still we are dealing here with a new spiritualist generation which feels "a sense of a beginning"; is disoriented and looks for new orientation. It could be described as the Romanian retrograde Aufbruch, as we shall see later on. 50 Mihail Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan (Bucureşti : Editura "Cultura Natională, 1935), p. 148. 51 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 44-45. 18

especially when that someone means something to me. It's a tonic food. You grind your teeth a little and move on. 52

The next fictional section of the novel following this proto-fascist organic speech, fittingly opens with the mention of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos epistolary novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, a work that portrays the decadent and perverse aristocratic sides of the Ancien Régime. When Sebastian started writing his novel and asked his mentor to write a foreword for a book that would be published four years later, Nae Ionescu, the one whose voice Ghiţă Blidaru resembles throughout the book, is still a supporter of mystical monarchism. By the time Sebastian has finished his work, Ionescu moves on to support totalitarian mobilization,53 and joins the ideological rank of the legionnaires, thus becoming himself a manifested symbol of the dangerous liaisons. Ionescu's very preface to the book will prove to be a stab to the heart of their friendship that will place Mihail Sebastian in the position of coping with a public battle that will shake as well as sharpen his identity as a Jew and as an intellectual.

1.2 The Novel and the Historians Weber believes that "had it not been for its introduction," written by the well- known thinker Nae Ionescu, at that point "baptized" in his new-found legionnaire anti-Semitic belief-system, "Sebastian's novel might have shared the same fate"54 as other 'Jewish' novels, which had been published in Romania but met with nothing but public indifference. A more original literary analysis of For Two Thousand Years – and one of the few exceptions among the heavily politicized reading of Sebastian's Jewish fictional work – claims that the book, which pulled an entire file of reading material behind itself, (material that belongs to a political-ideological genre), is "a study case for which there has not been found a name or category yet in literary science."55 The themes that reflect the discourse of identity found in the book, are themes that concerned interwar intellectuals in general: foreigners versus Romanians

52 Ibid., pp. 78-79. 53 For an overview of Nae Ionescu's journey of radicalization during those years see the Ph.D. dissertation written by Mihai Sebe submitted at the faculty for Political Science in Bucharest under Prof. Florin Ţurcanu's supervision. Mihai Sebe. Nae Ionescu – de la mistica monarhiei la mobilizarea totalitară (Bucureşti: Universitatea din Bucuresti. Facultatea de ştiinţe politice, 2012). 54 Weber. "You have to hang on". Op. cit., p. 32. 55 Michèle Mattusch. "Identiätskonstruktion gestern und heute." Op. cit., p. 233. 19

(and then, of course, the Christian Orthodox), questions of Romanian collective-ness and Romanianism, conflict between East and West, rural versus urban, autochthonism versus cosmopolitanism, models of culture and society, peasants, intellectuals, aesthetics, modernism and anti-modernism, sickness, disease, hygiene, natural organisms, and artificiality,56 and last but not least, the Jewish question interwoven through all these. Michèle Mattusch, explains that the book has been so far wrongly defined as "a presentation of the Jewish thesis," or an example of a "polemic essay". Until today the book has been misunderstood, under-evaluated, or even discriminated against. In 1982, George Călinescu, author of the History of Romanian Literature writes, "the pathetic nature of this novel proves the exaggerated sensitivity of the Jew, his delight in feeling victimized, and his congenital inability to conceive a fight with all its risks."57 Before the Communist era in Romania comes to an end, the last time that the novel is published is in 1946. Ovidiu Crohmălniceanu devotes only four lines to For Two Thousand Years in his survey of interwar literature in 1967.58 Over the years, literary historians such as Cornelia Ştefănescu, Dana Dumitriu, Ion Rotaru and Dorina Grăsoiu have continued to hold views similar to those of Călinescu. In post-totalitarian Romania the novel continues to be reduced to an "ideological polemic-novel" with the exception of very few references. On the Jewish spectrum of scholarship, several allusions to Sebastian's novel occur on platforms for comparisons and discussions of Marx, Freud, Einstein, Bergson, Husserl, Wittgenstein, Popper, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Hanna Arendt, such as Paul Cornea's "Mihail Sebastian and the Problem of Identity in For Two Thousand Years",59 or Michael Finkenthal's "For Two Thousand Years – A Postmodern Reading," which leaves the reader with a statement that Sebastian's book was not meant to be a book at all, and that the last two chapters had one aim: for modernity to provide a solution to a problem that started two thousand years ago.60 Neither is Moshe Idel's "A Shadow among Rhinoceros: Mihail Sebastian and the Scandal of a Dual Identity" more promising. He mistakenly uses the same tools of historical analysis when it comes to For Two Thousand Years. Idel claims that Sebastian tries "to secularize the Jewish

56 Ibid., p. 234. 57 Ibid., p. 235. 58 Ibid. 59 Paul Cornea. "Mihail Sebastian şi problema identitară ȋn De două mii de ani", in: Leon Volovici. (editor). Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identităţii (Cluj-Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 2009), pp. 13-26. 60 Michael Finkelthal. "O lectură postmodernă", in: Apostrof, An. 18, No. 10 (October, 2007), pp. 3-5. 20

condition in Romania", and sees a common ground in both Sebastian and his "mentor's" mythical approach when tackling the issue of Jewish collective (national) destiny.61 At times, it seems that Idel's reading of the book occurs through the lense of the preface, maybe because his point of departure is actually in agreement with that of Nae Ionescu in the sense that they both perceive the novel as an autobiography. Nae Ionescu as well as the historians seem to agree on one thing: the problem lies with Mihail Sebastian and Iosef Hechter – "the scandal of a double identity,"62 forgetting the mere nature of a novel having nothing to do with solving collective problems, or solving anything, at all. "The Jewish novel of Sebastian was minutely planned," Idel explains. He furthermore claims that, "the double identity of the author, as Jew and Romanian, represents the major theme of the book… Sebastian and Ionescu are not consistent when writing about the nature of Jewish people. Their position changes with the passing of time. Moreover, they prove inconsistency even in other published writings of the same period. … True understanding does not mean a mere ability to present a system; it rather requires for a perspective regarding the history of ideas that gave birth to it, just as much as it demands an identifying of tensions and ulterior given interpretations… Personally, I did not expect any special coherency neither from Nae Ionescu, nor from Sebastian, notwithstanding his appetite for correct thinking.… As concerns Sebastian, he was even less interested in a systematic character analysis of his message…"63 It is a great pity that Idel fails to address the core of the scandal that dominated for months the cultural gazettes of Bucharest's intellectual scene, namely the printing of For Two Thousand Years along with its notorious anti-Semitic preface, as well as to look at the novel for what it is, namely a literary piece of creation, not an attempt to systematize thinking, (for example in his non-fictional essay How I Became a Hooligan). Here, therefore, lies Idel's core methodological mistake. For Two Thousand Years is a literary piece, not a politically planned project. Moshe Idel coming primarily from the area of research of mysticism

61 Ibid., p. 42. 62 The Jewish philosopher and researcher of religious thought and Kabbala, Moshe Idel, thinks that this is the core problem of the issue, for he calls Sebastian, "a shade amongst rhinoceroses," a shadowy figure, that has lost his Jewish identity and lives in the midst of "rhinoceros-ized," radicalized fascist thinkers. The complexity of this problem - the scandal - has its origin in Sebastian's "double identity," according to this scholar's interpretation. 63 Moshe Idel, "O 'umbră' prientre rinoceri: Mihail Sebastian și scandalul unei duble identități," in: Leon Volovici. (editor). Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identității (Cluj-Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 2009), pp. 41-42. 21

and Jewish philosophy sees Sebastian as a mere "shadow" between rhinoceros (radicalized-fascist intellectuals), not as actual matter, as empty of real content. Apart from the fact that the rhinoceros appear only in the journal, and not in the novel, Idel's approach to the novel is neither one of literary criticism nor historical comment or analysis. His article is mainly a philosophical dispute with the scandal caused by Sebastian's story. Two additional rather outstanding articles worth mentioning are: Camelia Crăciun's "Between traditionalism and Modernity: Old and New Polemics around the Novel For Two Thousand Years,"64 and "Obsessions of Identity: From Jacob Wasserman to Mihail Sebastian,"65 written by historian Lya Benjamin. While the former relates primarily to the polemics created around the novel's printing (in 1934 as well as in post-Communist Romania), discussing the novel through the prism of the author's modernist outlook at life (and conflicting with Romania's interbellic social and political conservatism), the latter adds to this discourse by focusing on the generic identity conflict of the "modern intellectual Jew."

1.3 The Author behind For Two Thousand Years The substance in Mihail Sebastian's fictional deliberation in For Two Thousand Years does not start off in a vacuum. The cultural and political climate in which he was born prepared him for such a novel. So did the day-to-day realities in the approximately thirty four years he had reached at the time of the book's publication. The story of For Two Thousand Years, though a reflection on why "Judah must suffer"66 throughout centuries, occurs mainly within an approximate timeframe of 10 years, between 1923 and 1933. And in this story, the author is simply asking for the free "right to look at life with all sincerity. This very right might have been deemed pretentious or exaggerated, by others. I do not care, however," writes

64 Camelia Crăciun. "Între tradiţionalism şi modernitate: Polemici vechi şi noi ȋn jurul romanului De două mii de ani," in: Leon Volovici. (editor). Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identității (Cluj-Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 2009), pp. 77-100. 65 Lya Benjamin. "Obsesii identitare: De la Jakob Wassermann la Mihail Sebastian," in: Leon Volovici. (editor). Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identității (Cluj-Napoca: Biblioteca Apostrof, 2009), pp. 101-114. 66 Both Mihail Sebastian and the philosopher and professor concerned with logics and metaphysics, Nae Ionescu, believe that there is an inherent suffering tendency in the Jew, yet their methods of arriving at such conclusion could not be further from one another. The "suffering of Judah" for Sebastian has a completely different meaning from Ionescu‟s mixture of theological, ideological and anti-Semitic elements that lead Judah to suffer. The only common ground is that both try to give "metaphysical" explanations of suffering. 22

Sebastian, "I repeat it and I make mention of it again. That's why I write. Therefore I exist." When facing Jewish values, Sebastian claims, a series of local values must arise, such as Romanian ones in Romania, French in France, German in Germany: To face these two parallel cycles of values, to think them through, to try to establish a relationship between them, is, in my opinion, one of the most normal internal obligations there is. Is there any writer, Jewish by origin, and French, German, Italian and Hungarian by culture and formation, who has not faced this conflict? Jakob Wassermann wrote already in 1920, when Hitlerism had not yet come into existence, a book of such cogent sadness: "My Path as German and as Jew." Every Jew living in any other culture but a Hebrew or Yiddish one, has to pass and think his way through such a double path – Ludvig Lewinson in America, Benjamin Crémieux in France, F. Aderca in Romania. For Two Thousand Years is not the first book in Romanian culture to have formulated this drama.67

Mihail Sebastian, (actually a pen name) was born in 1907 as a Romanian Jew called Iosef, son of Mendel and Clara Hechter, in the town called Brăila, right on the banks of the Danube. The town, a multi-ethnic port and lively trade center, had a lively Jewish community. Ion Ursulescu counts numerous Jewish publications around the time of Sebastian's birth, such as "Macabeii Dr. Th. Herzl", "Pessah," "Sionistul," "Insitutorul evreu," etc.68 There, Iosef Hechter spent the early part of his life, and there he completed high school in 1925. His spiritual formation started very early on. Already at the age of seven, when other children barely get to know the alphabet, Iosy Hechter was reading Maurice Maeterlinck's The Life of the Bee, Carlo Collodi's Adventures of Pinocchio and Cuore by the Italian novelist Edmondo De Amicis. At nine years of age he moved on to Dostoyevsky, Daudet, Maupassant, Sienkiewicz,69 works he gets access to thanks to the translation and printing of the Alcalay library and publishing house, initiated by a Jew, Leon Alcalay (1847-1920). He had started his profession by selling second-hand books in public fairs, at street corners and in marketplaces.70 One year later Sebastian has read Münchhausen and Sherlock Holmes, and at nine years old, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, one of the first written novels on the subject of World War I. To say the least, Iosef Hechter's development proves to be much ahead of his childhood years.71 At the end of his high school period, the young, talented man attracts the attention of a visiting professor and lecturer from Bucharest, Nae Ionescu, especially

67 Ibid., pp. 34-35. 68 See Ion Ursulescu. Valori ale patrimoniului evreiesc la Brăila (Brăila: Editura Istros, 1998). 69 Maria Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian: Publicist şi romancier (Bucureşti: Universalia, 1998), p. 6. 70 Harry Kuller and Nicolae Cajal. (editors). Contribuţia evreilor din România la cultura şi civilizaţie (Bucuresti: Editura Hasefer, 2004), p. 596. 71 Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian: Publicist şi romancier. Op. cit., p.6. 23

with his final thesis on the Romanian lyrical poem. It is by means of support from another famous Romanian Jew, a poet called Camil Baltazar (or, Leibu Goldenstein) that culturally-thirsty Sebastian eventually evades his rather suffocating provincial town, and establishes himself in Bucharest. A significant segment in For Two Thousand Years parallels the identity shaping years of the author's upbringing in the town of Brăila. Even though Sebastian refuses to identify the protagonist of his novel with Iosef Hechter,72 the picturesque self-portrayal of the fictitious Jew parallels the early development of the incisive young Romanian Jew: I am a man from the Danube, before being anything else. There is my homeland. I have always found it difficult to say these two words with simplicity: "my homeland". From little age on, I have been used for my good-faith to be suspected, and, since I am already sensitive to my own ridiculous scale, I have not dared to make statements, which no one would have been ready to receive. Us, Romanians… During high school history lessons, it was almost inevitable for me, while talking about past wars, to use this plural form: us, Romanians … ("which Romanians?", shouted once another pupil sitting in class, forbidding my identification with Ştefan the Great for a long period from then onward). Cautiously, I circumvented those terms, for which I could have been inferred to as a hypocrite, despite such age when solemn words delight anybody. Country, homeland, people, heroes, an entire outlawed vocabulary. As intellectual exercise, this wasn't too that, since I was so early forced to watch my words carefully, and to expect them to say exactly that which needs to be said. I will never cease to be a Jew. This is no function one can simply resign from. Either you are or you aren't. It is not a matter of pride, nor embarrassment. It is a state of fact. If I tried to forget it, it would be redundant. If someone tried to deny it to me, it would be superfluous, as well. But I could never cease either to be a man from the Danube. This, likewise, is a fact. If this will be recognized or not, by whoever wants or does not want to, it is their problem. It is exclusively their problem. The difficulty has never consisted in the legal recognition of my situation, a minuscule matter, which does not concern me, having neither claims nor rights… I know what I am, and the difficulties, if they do exist, they can only consist in what I am myself, and not in what is written in the State's records. The State, free as it may be to decree that I be a boat, a polar bear, or a photo camera, I will nevertheless continue to be what I am: a Jew, a Romanian, and a man from the Danube River.73

Integrative identity as both Jew and Romanian is also the pursuit of Sebastian. The big city of Bucharest, and the intellectual milieu into which he has already placed one foot, seems to him to be the best paved road for achieving such a goal. Even though this developing Romanian Jewish intellectual might not be representative of the general Jewish intellectual of his time, Leon Volovici recounts that, in generic

72 "I insist," says Sebastian in How I Became a Hooligan, "that For Two Thousand Years is not an autobiographical book, only so, at most, through her senses, but in no case through its facts and epic moments. I equally confirm, that with the exception of Ghiţă Blidaru, no hero of the book is hiding any particular model from real life. As for the main character of the novel, I refuse the name to which the critic has accorded discretionary powers. There lies a confusion at hand and… something else as well: Iosef Hechter opened all of a sudden large possibilities for pamphleteering, possibilities which Mihail Sebastian was not going to see. One of the most preferred weapons of Bucharest's cultural ambiance is what I would call, with your permission, polemics pertaining to proper names (onomastic polemics)." Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan, op. cit., pp. 319-320. 73 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 221-222. 24

terms, Jewish Romanian intellectuals in the first few decades of the twentieth century in the Regat (the Old Kingdom), were "too a large degree 'emancipated,' integrated in Romanian culture, often detached from a Jewish tradition, which they thoroughly knew, keeping a strong identity as Jews, sensitive to persecutions and to barely achieved civic rights, trusting in the power of law and in democratic institutions, often sympathetic to Zionism, more "sentimentally" than pragmatically, and adopting a very moderate form of Jewish militancy."74 Mihail Sebastian definitely fits this category, even though he himself is about to enter a world in which few other Jewish intellectuals manage to linger around. He leaves the picturesque town of Brăila, of whose provinciality the young man had grown weary. It is still Iosy Hechter that writes, at this point in time to Camil Baltazar: "This town in which I have lived the same life for twenty years… is a bazaar for high school students. I have known it with all its good and bad sides. Today all of these seem to me morbidly strange and false. I want to leave… and Bucharest seems the only remedy… Nothing scares me more, than the possibility of remaining here. Its stupidity borders on despair."75 He is appealing to Baltazar's connections and with the latter's help, he starts sending essays and translation works for publication. His first written works sent to Bucharest include a translation of Hérodiade of Stéphane Mallarmé, when he is approximately 17 years old, then a translation in the journal Universul literar (Literary universe) of another French poet, Francis Jammes, added by a letter to his fellow Jewish acquaintance, Baltazar: "Will I aggravate you much if I asked you to inquire of Perpessicius what he intends to do with the rest of our translations of Jammes?" The letter to his friend was signed as "Iosy Hechter", whereas his translations were signed as "Mihail Sebastian."76 Earlier, in another letter to Baltazar, he is inquiring regarding a future job in Bucharest: "For two months I have been writing feuilletons for Cuvântul. They are being published regularly. I am sure you would most likely know if I could be hired there. Would I be paid enough to live an undemanding life – and if yes – my virtue of being a Jew (a fact that is unknown to those from Cuvântul) – wouldn't it be an impediment?"77 In August 1927 Sebastian begins his activity and

74 See foreword by Leon Volovici to: Arnold Schwefelberg. Aminitirile unui intelectual. Ediţie, prefaţă şi note de Leon Volovici (Bucureşti: Editura Hasefer, 2000), p. 7. 75 Letter quoted in Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian: Publicist şi romancier. Op. cit., p. 8. 76 Ibid., p. 9. 77 Ibid., p. 8. 25

collaboration with the newspaper Cuvântul now directed by Nae Ionescu. The young writer's debut occurs in parallel with his law studies between 1927 and 1929, in Bucharest. In November 1929, Mihail Sebastian, already established in Romania‟s capital, writes in one of the epoch‟s cultural press some reflective thoughts "between journalism and literature": Juxtaposing these two concepts has often been a main subject of discussion. May it be that journalism abuses „writing‟ and brings it to a level of cliché? Does it maybe annul literary experience or does it trivialize it? I think it does not. In reality, journalism is merely another discipline. It may only destroy that which is already caduceus in a literary work: the style, the beautiful writing. In exchange for a service of simplification – dangerous only for the languid kind of writers, those without breath and resource – journalism offers direct, ample and sharp contact with day-to-day life and psychology. The danger lies somewhere else. It‟s a real, sad, and threatening danger. Journalism forces one to lie. Living from day to day, with no other perspective than the present, enslaved to fine details and momentary fleeting images, journalism does not have its own morals. Or maybe it does have its “own morals” but these don‟t have to be ours, as well. I obstinately and proudly believe that a corrupt human being cannot be creative. And there‟s nothing that corrupts stronger, more disastrously, more profoundly than lies. Not crime, not theft, and not great con games, either. Small, uncourageous lies. Lies that claim no initiative, no responsibility… Journalism that follows lies, ends up killing the artist. That is because it wipes out its spiritual and ethical position. That which is called a talent becomes a merely technical and external banality from the moment on where moral guidelines have vanished.78

Sebastian's entire life at this point fluctuates between the world of journalism and that of literature. He starts experiencing the tensions between the poetic and the political sphere. The young journalist of only 22 years of age is rapidly discerning the high society of Bucharest, in 1929. Bucharest, was now not only the capital of the Old Kingdom, but became the center or "metropolis" vis-à-vis the newly acquired territories of Greater Romania. It was a political, commercial, social and intellectual hub. Its boulevards, laid out in an east-west direction, bearing royal names, with imposing buildings such as the Savings Bank (built in 1900), the Faculty of Medicine (from 1903), the Palace of Justice (finished in 1895), the Romanian Athenaeum (built in the 1880s), gave the city a flair that resulted in the epithet "the little Paris." More of a created myth rather than reality, Bucharest enjoyed the perception, at least by its own inhabitants, of a belle époque during the interwar years. Even the first part of Sebastian's journal with its „witnessing effect‟, which we shall look at later,

78 Mihail Sebastian, “Between Journalism and Literature” (Între gazetărie și literatură), Contimporanul, 3 noiembrie 1929, quoted in: Ștefan Iureș. (editor). Mihail Sebastian comentat – Ce vârstă dați acestor texte? (București: Hasefer. 2007), pp. 100-101. [Mihail Sebastian – Interpreted: How old are these texts]. The compilation of texts written by Sebastian was published with the occasion of the centennial anniversary of the Romanian Jewish writer (Centenarul unui scriitor actual, 1907-2007). 26

mentioning "demimondaines, love affairs, cafés and restaurants, small talk politics, royalty, and a buoyant literary scene," creates an apparent French ambiance. However, while Paris, the center of Western art and culture, and "artists from everywhere in the world looked on it as a talisman that could transform their dreams into reality…"79 Bucharest, or "little Paris," was far from being international. Similar to the protagonist of the novel For Two Thousand Years, Mihail Sebastian, would also move for a season to Paris. After the completion of two years o reading law at the University of Bucharest, he leaves the Romanian capital in 1930, with the purpose of beginning a PhD in the capital of France. Between 1930 and 1931 the young author continues to flourish in his journalistic career sending numerous articles from Paris, Geneva, or Vienna to the Romanian press.80 In the same period, Eugen Lovinescu, the Romanian modernist, literary historian, academic, and philosopher, with whom Sebastian had already had some interaction, is also in Paris. The two literary critics reconnect in Paris, as is confirmed by Lovinescu's correspondence with Camil Baltazar.81 Sebastian dreams of a literary future. He writes of his desire to "return to Paris," later on, "in order to observe where lies my literary career… As regards my novel," meaning For Two Thousand Years, Sebastian confesses to Baltazar, "my ancient novel has suffered deep changes, alterations that actually please me… It will be a clear, lucid, and symmetrical book… sometimes I like it, at others I don't."82 When asked by his Jewish friend and colleague regarding further feuilletons, he insinuates, that having assumed the responsibilities of a novelist, the task as a "feuilleton-ist," of writing mere supplements, is not as challenging. By now he had almost completed three novels including The City of Acacia Trees, a work heavily influenced by Marcel Proust and Jules Rendard. Sebastian promises Baltazar to try to work on a non-fictional study connected to the 'Lovinescu-case': "Still while being in Paris, this September, I shall write a study on the aesthetics of Lovinescu, which I will send in various parts to the Cuvântul newspaper. I have a feeling I have been too abrupt in my anti-Lovinescu attitude. I

79 Frederic Spotts. The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 2. 80 Diana Georgescu. "Excursions into National Specificity and European Identity: Mihail Sebastian‟s Interwar Travel Reportage", in: Alex Drace-Francis and Wendy Bracewell. (editors). Under Eastern Eyes: A Comparative Introduction to East European Travel Writing on Europe (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008), p. 293. 81 Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian: Publicist şi romancier. Op. cit., p. 10. 82 Ibid., p. 11. 27

shall be more precise in this upcoming critique."83 Sebastian's growing modernism and aspiration for Western values in cosmopolitan Paris is recalled by his provincial Bucharest provenance, when for a month and a half he is left with no money at all due to a lack of interest in the articles he had published from abroad in local Romanian intellectual outlets. The French years leave a deep mark on the aspiring novelist, whose intellectual and cultural reference points are predominantly francophone: Marcel Proust and his modernist style of novels, and André Gide with his symbolism and autobiographical honesty. Of his sojourn in France, he writes, “Paris est une fête”. It is in this celebration of intellect that he writes about his “promenades parisiennes”84, leaving behind a true taste of ambitious aesthetics. One might understand Sebastian‟s continuous French allusions much better after reading these notes, but also his devastation and breakdown with the fall of France in 1940, as described at the time in his journal. Yet, his état d’esprit will have to face an ever growing disappointment as he definitively returns back to his Romanian intellectual climate, in 1932. Before leaving Paris, he writes once again to his friend Camil Baltazar: "I am thinking of my coming return to Romania with a certain excitement, yet not without regret. It will not be final, however. I will have to come back to complete my doctoral dissertation here, yet, meanwhile my preparations for departure have reached an eventful scale."85 Sebastian never finishes his dissertation, once he is entrenched again in a much more problematic economic and political Bucharest scene. In his homeland, having returned to the Cuvântul news-enterprise – which will be closed down just a year later, due to the fascist conversion of its director Nae Ionescu and his incitement in favor of a culture of death, a transformation that precedes the murder of Romania's Prime Minister I. G. Duca – Sebastian is caught up with the previously mentioned struggle between literature and journalism, culture and politics. One such typical phenomenon of corruption and politicization of intellectual life in interwar Bucharest life can be seen towards the end of the Criterion group's activity. The Criterion association, a two-year consecutive gathering of intellectual

83 Ibid. 84 At the time of his writing, Mihail Sebastian, very self conscious and self-critical, chooses to write in Romanian, although his knowledge of French is very proficient. Promenades parisiennes was eventually translated in 2007 by Alain Paruit and published by Éditions de l‟Herne. 85 Dinescu. Mihail Sebastian: Publicist şi romancier. Op. cit., p. 14. 28

symposia on a variety of subjects such as the arts, philosophy, literature etc., occurs while Sebastian is working on his novel. He, as part of the "young generation" at the time, is equally involved in this intellectual society, whose great debacle he witnesses towards the end of the series of conferences from October 1932 to December 1933. The symposia end in a dramatic outburst of legionary "intervention" into the cultural sphere. This group, representative of the "new generation" of thinkers, eventually reflects what Jeffrey Herf has called the "paradox of reactionary modernism."86 In June 1932, Sebastian wrote in Cuvântul, that Criterion "is an intellectual association born some three months ago out of the imagination and practical spirit of two writers converted to Americanism, and it has succeeded, in a short interval, in specifying its aims and future potential… Criterion intends to give a practical framework for young writers, artists, painters, sculptors, musicians… who wish to create their own body of action."87 When summing up the association, philosopher Marta Petreu states: "Up to 1932-1933, the generation manifested itself in a strictly cultural environment, namely that of the debate. The numerous young intellectuals' associations that preceded Criterion – "The Intellectual Group", "The Forum", etc. – were apolitical and cultural. Even the founding of the Criterion… had a purely intellectual purpose and character. As proof from their detachment from politics, there were discussions about Lenin, Mussolini, Garbo, Gide, Chaplin Ghandi, Krishnamurti, etc."88 However, in her previously published philosophical essay „Diavolul și ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebastian‟89 (The Devil and his Disciple: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebastian), she contradicts this statement, since at least Sebastian among this group of avant-garde intellectuals, not to speak of his mentor, "the devil," as she demonizes him, is

86 Similar to the phenomenon of the rise of Nazism and fascism in Western Europe under the umbrella of "avant-garde," scientific and technological advances, Kultur and Zivilisation recognized with usurped political liberalism, and with reactionary anti-rationalism, we find that, in Romania, as well, it is especially among the intellectual elite that such "reactionary modernism" becomes a cerebral attraction. Compare: Jeffrey Herf. Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in the Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1-18. 87 Zigu Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties: The Romanian Extreme Right. Op. cit., p. 136. In this quotation, I have made a few editorial changes due to grammatical errors in the English translation. I have translated the quote straight from the Romanian edition of Ornea's book. See: Z. Ornea. Anii treizeci. Extrema dreaptă românească (Bucureşti: Editura fundaţiei culturale române, 1996), p. 152. 88 Marta Petreu. "The Generation of '27, Between the Holocaust and the Gulag", in: Plural. Identity and Destiny: Ideas and Ideology in Interwar Romania 29 (January, 2007), p. 76. This article is an excerpt from her study on Romanian culture starting with the end of the 19th century until the Legionary Movement. See: Marta Petreu. De la junimea la Noica. Studii de cultură românească (București: Polirom, 2011), pp. 251-342. 89 Marta Petreu. Diavolul şi ucenicul său: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebastian (Bucureşti: Polirom, 2010). 29

portrayed as highly political, anti-liberal, anti-democratic and totalitarian. Both were majorly involved in the Criterion circle. The truth of the matter is that around the time of the association's second year of intellectual activities, politics start to play a major role in the lives of many of its members. When Criterion's first symposium of lectures takes place in Bucharest, the first major personality to be discussed is that of Lenin, and the lecturers are extremists of both left and right: Belu Silber, Marxist economist and publicist of Jewish descent, involved in clandestine and illegal communist activity,90 Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu, Silber's closest associate, linked as well to the Soviet Comintern (and first Minister of Justice in post WWII Communist Romania), Mircea Vulcănescu and Mihail Polihroniade, two writers who had by then already joined the ranks of the legionary movement. Despite the fact that one cannot always separate political attitudes from the 1927 generation, from its very inception, the "binding and formative factor" of this entire group, the much admired professor of metaphysics and logics, and the key figure in this intellectual scene – Nae Ionescu – moves only towards the end of 1933 from his mystical monarchism to a belief in fascism and "total mobilization".91 Mihail Sebastian, a protégé of Ionescu and a complex yet lucid figure in this group, had already created a name for himself in the Bucharest intelligentsia and its circles of writers, through regular articles in the Cuvântul, Tiparniţa literară, Azi, and the Reporter publications. He writes well, he exhibits security, he expresses himself as an expert on French literature in particular, and as a connoisseur of cultural trends in general, and his categorical judgments, often perceived as polemical, an Romanian Holocaust history, politics of the period, as well as cultural identity discourse d uncomfortable, are peremptory in their judicial flair. Sebastian's published work therefore always goes beyond mere literary critique. Sebastian undergoes no "radicalization" in terms of his political views. His spiritual hunger for "orientation" fits right into the labyrinth of right and left intellectuals of the Criterion group. Furthermore, he stands out as a Jew within this generation. When his turn comes to speak about Charlie Chaplin, at one of the Criterion's symposiums, and he attempts to begin his lecture, his speech is violently interrupted with the shouts of breaking in and

90 See Stelian Tănase. "Belu Zilber," in: Revista 22 (August 11, 2003), retrieved from: http://www.revista22.ro/belu-zilber-i-560.html 91 Mihai Sebe. Nae Ionescu – de la mistica monarhiei la mobilizarea totalitară. Op. cit. 30

vandalizing "cuzist"92 students: "A Jew about another Jew." Sebastian, disturbed, tears up his paper with its guidelines, and says out loud, "well, then, I shall speak as a Jew about the Jew Chaplin."93 At the symposium on Gide, a similar crowd of "cuzist" students had broken in the auditorium, assaulting the entire conference and its participants, and causing damage, because they thought 'Gide' to be a Jew – judging by the way the French writer's name was pronounced. Therefore, the vandalism was accompanied then, as well, with the shout "down with the Jew!"94 Ornea quotes a synchronous legionnaire magazine describing the conferences in the following words: "In Bucharest, a few crazy people who call themselves "intellectuals" were trying to put under chloroform the ingénues who had gathered in the Fundaţia Carol auditorium and were woozily listening to a pacifist mass. The "intellectuals" were consecrating a new "ideal", preaching Marxism, though in their hours of meditation they are busy practicing the… Turkish customs that are probably dear to our young scholars… Ralea, Cioculescu, Vulcănescu and the other "pacifists" with or without goatees, were able to sneak out under the protection of the abusive bayonets carried by soldiers whose uniforms they have so often soiled with the mud of insults."95 Even though perceived as infamous in the tumult, a good portion of the association's lecturers have overtly opted for Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's paramilitary Iron Guard movement, which had started in 1927 as the "Legion of the Archangel Michael." Before the Criterion's dissolving in 1934 the political fervor is added by a pseudo-moral "foul press scandal", a public accusation of homosexuality among some of the Criterionists. The staunchly orthodox publication called Credinţa taking over the polemics on homosexuality created now a stage for preaching of morality and

92 By cuzist students are meant the followers of A.C. Cuza, whose entire raison d‟être was anti- Semitism. As a professor for Political Economy and Finance at the University of Iași, he had managed to assure himself a political career of outstanding longevity and consistency. He had managed to create for himself an attractive political platform for entire student movement. Joining forces first with the historian A.D. Xenopol, then with the Romanian historian, politician, literary critic, memoirist, poet, playwright and for a short period Prime Minister, Nicolae Iorga, an anti-Semite himself, later cooperating with his good friend Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the founder of the Iron Guard, or with N.C. Paulescu, and last but not least the anti-Semitic poet and politician Octavian Goga, A.C. Cuza slowly but surely stood out as one of the main figures to help create a full blown fascist political movement in Romania. A. C. Cuza is also one of the specific examples responsible for the racial type of anti- Semitism. For more on A.C. Cuza, see Friling, Ioanid, Ionescu. (editors). Final Report. Op. cit., pp. 33- 35. See also the segment on “ideological anti-Semitism: Alexandru C. Cuza and Nicolae Paulescu” in: Leon Volovici. Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism. Op. cit., pp. 22-30. 93 Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties. Op. cit., p. 135. 94 Ibid. 95 "Asaltul", November 30, 1932, quoted in: Ibid., p. 137. 31

anti-modernism. Sandu Tudor, religious poet and trained theologian known in church records as "Brother Agathon", used the opportunity to criticize the avant-garde "new generation" of intellectuals: "Now they have finally exposed the entire foul bareness of their hearts of unfulfilled, masturbation addicts and perverts. I shout into the ears of this entire generation of youngsters, all of them in their thirties: Stay away you swindlers, barren and vicious to the very marrow of your bones, mediocre and neuropathological… Your Criterion puts a dancing homosexual on a pedestal."96 Credinţa, the same guardist newspaper, is also the one that would publish a "journalistic trial" against Sebastian in 1935, and in 1936 call for his dismissal from the publishing job at the Royal Foundation because of his Jewish descent.97 However, the Criterion modernist company which had a reactionary faction in itself from its very start, did not end because of "gossip around sexual preferences" and incompatibility between the more traditional and the more progressive orthodox, as Mircea Eliade would have us believe, for Ornea quotes Eliade's memoires when giving the reasons for the end of Criterion. Today there is no doubt that the dissolution of Criterion was due to its right wing explosions, external as much as the internal political radicalization of lecturers. The second decisive factor to its ending was the dictatorial tendency of King Carol II, who had reason to fear counterproductive streams in these symposia.98 The case of Criterion reminds us of a common Romanian pattern of various right-wing elements suppressing one another, phenomena witnessed later on even by Goebbels himself, who would write bewilderedly in his diary, "in Romania nothing is clear yet. The Legionnaires are continuing their revolt, and Antonescu has issued orders to shoot them…"99 It is around this time that Mihail Sebastian understands what the major subjects are that fascinate Romania's intelligentsia the most. "When the novel For Two Thousand Years had made its first appearance," he writes, "there were two ideas which preoccupied the Romanian intellectual: anti-Semitism and dictatorship.

96 Ibid., p. 139 97 See "Wednesday, 27 November, 1935," and "Friday, 16 October, 1936," in: Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 29. 83. 98 See especially Cristina Adriana Bejan. The Criterion Association: Friendship, Culture and Fascism in Interwar Bucharest. Ph.D. Dissortation (Oxford: Oxford University, 2010). See also: Roland Prüger. Im Zeichen der Stadt: Avantgarde in Rumänien, 1920-1938 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), pp. 43, 203; and also chapter 7 in: Keith Hitchins. Romania 1886-1947 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 292-334. 99 Joseph Goebbles' Tagebücher quoted in: Friling, Ioanid, Ionescu. (editors). Final Report. Op. cit., pp. 62-63. 32

Generically speaking, Romanian anti-Semitism is an ever present fact. Only once in a while does it become an idea. … Since the urgent questions of conscience in Bucharest circles were dictatorship and anti-Semitism, it was to these questions and no others that this inopportune novel tried to address itself."100 These two major phenomena I shall address now as witnessed and contextualized by the publication of Mihail Sebastian's novel.

1.4 For Two Thousand Years and dictatorship Before we have a look at the spread of anti-Semitism as an ever present context for the novel, we must understand the general socio-political background, in which the passion for totalitarianism, or dictatorship, as Sebastian calls it, so easily thrives. It is during a heightened state of self-awareness, inspired by his modern French experience, that the young Jewish man writes the novel which will inadvertently be pulled into the flaming polemics surrounding these two most common topics under discussion in Bucharest. Mihail Sebastian‟s acquired "imperatives of modernity" are increasingly facing Romanian realities, the ambiance of the growing deterioration of the 1930s and an „apocalyptic fever‟ to use Matei Călinescu‟s expression. By 1934, after four years of writing101 and after the publishing of For Two Thousand Years, Romania has come out of a three year depression, leaving the attempts at industrial modernization barely achieved.102 Political instability is on the rise. Democracy, during this period of Romanian political life, "means schismocracy and politics become politicianism".103 This is the season of a weak, fledgling economy, an impoverished proletariat, and many unemployed intellectuals. Zeev Barbu calls interbellic Romania a “backward nation making its first steps to modernization,” with “feeble and spasmodic impulses toward industrialization,” with an “economy… overwhelmingly agricultural, with over 80 per cent of the population exclusively employed, or rather under-employed, in

100 Mihail Sebastian, Cum am devenit huligan: texte, fapte, oameni (Bucureşti : Editura "Cultura Natională, 1935), pp. 7,11. 101 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan, p. 6. 102 See second chapter in: Leon Volovici. Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. Op. cit. 103 Zeev Barbu. "Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Iron Guard, the Fascist Movement of Romania”, in: Larsen Stein Ugelvik, Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust. (editors). Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), p. 383. 33

this sector.”104 The so-called middle class in this period consisted of small professional and commercial groups mainly of foreign origin like Greek, Turkish and Jewish (in the South and East), or Hungarian and German (in the North and West). These of course encountered an ever increasing xenophobic antagonism in an administrative system pervaded by corruption and the real lack of a democratic tradition. These tense and unstable social structures lacked appropriate means for modernization. “Thus, economically speaking,” explains Barbu, “Romania entered and remained throughout the modern era a semi-colonial country, its condition being similar to that of present-day Latin American countries, and one which sheds direct light on Romania‟s perennial social problem; an over-exploited and increasingly disoriented peasantry.”105 In For Two Thousand Years, Mihail Sebastian's main character changes the direction of his studies, because Professor Ghiţă Blidaru advises him that architecture would be a better fit for him due to its "nearness" to the soil. As we have seen, even when the professor justifies his refusal to intervene when the young Jewish student is being beaten, he makes allusion to the earth, the ground, the soil: "The earth doesn‟t like it to be shown too delicate an attention. Step on it and crush as much as you please… grind your teeth a little and move on." Later on, after his newly acquired profession, the main character works for a western oil company belonging to an American called Ralph T Rice, under the management of an engineer called Mircea Vieru, a modernist, and "a Cartesian lost in Bucharest,"106 with anti-Semitic tendencies which he argues "rationally". Alongside him works Marin Dronţu, "a theologian who got somehow lost in architecture,"107 "a haiduc by vocation."108 These two figures accompany the main and Jewish character in the discourse on Romania‟s perennial social problem, as Zeev Barbu called it, "the over-exploited and increasingly disoriented peasantry." Dronţu's attitude is not far from that of the intellectual Ghiţă Blidaru, who, throughout the novel, preaches his message of autochthonism, traditionalism, ţărănism– a preponderantly village- and peasant- oriented cultural and social philosophy resisting reforms, capitalism and foreign

104 Ibid., p. 380. 105 Ibid. 106 Sebastian. De doua mii de ani. Op. cit, p. 115 107 Ibid. 108 Ibid., p. 151. 34

investment.109 When Sebastian calls Marin Dronţu a "peasant," a "haiduc", "alike to man from a theological seminary," "one who arouses an old displeasure for domestic social climbers (ciocoi),"110 he brings old nationalistic anti-Greek attitudes from the time of the Phanariot Greek landowners to the forefront. Yet, this is the vile and corrupt type of nationalism, the type that provided for the "haiduc" movement: a "completely Orientalized way of life and a corrupt concept of justice… an instrument of self-preservation [that] became an object of veneration."111 This Orientalized, anti- Western, anti-Capitalist, sense of justice adds now a violent aspect, and both of Sebastian's created characters, Dronţu and Blidaru, endorse it joyfully when it comes to the clash between the peasant village of Uioara aggressively revolting against the building of refineries, warehouses, offices, and villas. The revolt of oil-derricks versus the revolt of viticulture. At the "Central" – a unanimous outcry. On Calea Victoriei, rumors of war. It's coming! It's coming! It's coming! Who is coming? Revolution evidently. Ştefan Pârlea seemed transfigured this morning, while talking to me… "I feel our time has come. I feel we are leaving mediocrity. By the means of blood, by means of flames, we are going out."… The refinery has been set on fire by the viticulturists, that the oil tanks have been emptied flooding the inner liner, that they have barricaded the Americans in their offices, that they have stoned the gendarmes, that there has been shooting. 60 dead… An hour of spasm! As if I am hearing S. T. Haim's all over again … Vieru's depressed. He believed in the sustainability of things at Uioara, and is now disoriented by the outbreak of unexpected disaster. So many years of work – all gone in one night… Ghiţă Blidaru will triumph without pride. -Did you win? Vieru asked him, trying to laugh. -Unfortunately not yet. You cannot create a revolution just with one single fire. What is happening now at Uioara is certainly the natural order of things. For ten long years, oil- derricks have spoken, now it is time for the plums and the vineyards to speak. Their voice comes from much further, and that is why, it was necessary to make itself heard. But we must not deceive ourselves. This is insufficient for now. We have to burn an entire history, not just three oil derricks. There are so many things left behind that must be destroyed, so that Uioara is not finishing anything. It is only the beginning.112

Ştefan Pârlea, transfigured by his excitement over violent revolution, is reminiscent of one of the thinkers within the 1927 new generation, namely E.M. Cioran. Even though Cioran's book Romania's Transfiguration is published also in 1934, his vision for violent revolution, and mystical-national "transfiguration" – a term borrowed from the New Testament, nationalized and manipulated – was known to Sebastian before its publication.113 If Pârlea is indeed modeled after Cioran, or not, is beyond the point.

109 Emanuel Turczynski. "The Background of Romanian Fascism," in: Peter F. Sugar. (editor). Native Fascism in the Successor States 1918-1945 (Santa Barbara: Clio Press, 1971), p. 101. 110 Sebastian, De doua mii de ani. Op. cit, p. 115. 111 Emanuel Turczynski. "The Background of Romanian Fascism." Op. cit., p. 102. 112 Sebastian, De doua mii de ani. Op. cit, pp. 200-201. 113 E.M. Cioran. Schimbarea la fată (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1990). First published in 1934 through the Vremea publishing house. 35

Mihail Sebastian's awareness of such "intellectual" views of violent revolution against the West and modernity are a mere description of the proto-fascism that will explode just a few years later. Cioran is one of the first to undergo a fascist conversion, long before Mihail Sebastian has finished writing For Two Thousand Years, and he is also the one whose infamous past114 still arouses stormy controversies in the French and Romanian press, even today. His book is a hysterical appeal to negation and nihilism, an "irrepressible need to rebel,"115 a claim for Orthodox Christianity (or his interpretation thereof) – messianic, nationalistic, anti-Semitic and destructive. His proposal for redemption is a "Romania with the population of China and the destiny of France…, a Romania in delirium"116 his own words a delirious mixture of religion and reactionary revolution: „I would sacrifice half a life, if I could experience at once the intensity lived by […] the last Frenchman,… if I experienced only one moment at their histories' peak. It must have been a magnificent pride, a pride that brightened the pallor of gods. A certain Frenchman who, in the Revolution, poured his entire bestiality into human rage, represented, historically as well as politically, much more than the amorphous collectivity of a small culture. I may also […] understand the psychology of a German soldier in the Great War, with his monumental pride […] to fight as a last soldier against an entire world. This way I can realize that the universal culture gives universal contours to the individual conscience‟.117 The conscience of Cioran is similar to that of Nae Ionescu, whom he mentions in his book as a source of inspiration, and their orthodoxy are not only a violent revolution, but the only one that can save the organic, autochthonous Romanian entity. Dictatorships not democracies, writes Cioran, are those that save nations from their cultural dead-end.118 Yet Cioran's voice is not the only one reverberating in Mihail Sebastian's fictional scene of violent uprising against modernity and its expressions. Mircea Eliade, the pioneer in this young generation of interwar thinkers and himself Sebastian's colleague at Cuvântul wrote in 1927 in one of his many plaidoyers for traditionalism: "We wish to see a triumph of those values that do not

114 See: Marta Petreu. An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005). 115 Norman Manea's introduction to Marta Petreu. Ibid., p XI. 116 Radu Ioanid. "The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard", in: Roger Griffin. (editor). Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 129. 117 Cioran. Schimbarea la fată. Op. cit., p. 27 118 Ibid. p. 118. 36

come from the political, from technology, or from parliamentarianism. The pure, spiritual, indeed absurdly spiritual values are the values of Christianity."119 Even before "the year when the 1927 generation turned en masse toward politics,"120 the intelligentsia's representative such as Nae Ionescu, the model for Ghiţă Blidaru, states: "We […] have asserted that one can only speak of the recreation of […] a "peasant state," that is a state outside the individualist-democratic and capitalist-bourgeois order. Whereas the political world, in general, has considered that the way we have to take is joining European order and solidarity. Hence, we ask to be decoupled from Europe's political and economic structure."121 It is interesting that this Nae Ionescu was then a professor of logic in university; however they were not social or political logics, but philosophical ones.122 In 1933, the Romanian intellectual outcry for violence would suddenly manage to find present modeling and inspiration in the West as well (i.e. in Nazi Germany), and like a domino effect, one intellectual after the other, in this group would fall for the guardist Romanian parallel form of even more radical aggressive revolution. The rest of the traditional, anti-democratic or pro-dictatorial voices that are reflected in parts of the Sebastian novel find their modeling in intellectual voices such as Constantin Noica, Mihail Polihroniade, Nichifor Crainic, Mircea Vulcănescu, and even modernist novelist Camil Petrescu. These are all spokesmen for Orthodoxism, Romanianism, using belletristic metaphysical language and anti-rationalist mysticism in great dispute against democracy, demanding "a new spiritual order, not mere politics evidenced in democratism."123 Some of these intellectuals created the Criterion, others found a voice through another right-wing press publication called Gândirea, and others again became the intellectual advisors to what Mircea Eliade called a "mystical sect and not a political movement."124

119 Mircea Eliade. "Itinerariu spiritual. I. Linii de orientare," in: Cuvântul 3, no. 857 (6 September 1927), quoted in: Marta Petreu. An Infamous Past: E. M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Op. cit., p. 5. 120 Petreu. An Infamous Past. Op. cit., p. 7. 121 Nae Ionescu. "După plecarea experţilor," Cuvântul 8, no. 2060 (16 September 1932), quoted in: Zigu Ornea. The Romanian Extreme Right: The Nineteen Thirties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 31-32. 122 Ibid., p. 32. 123 Ibid., p. 41. 124 Jeroen W. Boekhoven. Genealogies of Shamanism: Struggles for Power, Charisma and Authority (Eelde: Barkhuis Publishing, 2011), p. 136. For the whole section on Eliade's traditionalism, see pp. 135-138. 37

For Two Thousand Years‟ context is one of "modernization and decay."125 Andrew Janos explains that there was a distinct problem following the consequences of the technological and commercial revolution of the age out of which emerged the "pioneering" Western societies:126 the rise of a successful material civilization in a handful of countries, and the response of the rest of the [European] world to this particular and ongoing process.127 "While these differences between East and West were historical, it was only some time toward the end of the eighteenth century that they acquired social meaning", yet backwardness (along with its material and moral impulse to modernize) was noisier than ever in Romania's interwar period. Beaureaucratic polity had been rising for a few decades now, and there were wide ranging political, social and economic consequences. Backwardness was also visible in the fact that the slow disintegration of feudal forms and structures did not accelerate the growth of a Romanian middle class. The bourgeoisie that had played such an important part in the West was rather absent here. The initial revolutionaries of the Romanian principalities had been the Greek Phanariotes and the first really Romanian revolutions were led by boyars.128 "If their immediate object was always to rid the country of foreign domination, it did not take long before their nationalism turned also against foreign exploitation, whose obvious and irritating representatives lived in their midst."129 Romania seemed to sway between terrors, the fear "of permanently being a colony open or disguised, of the foreigners," explained the Romanian Encyclopedia of 1938 when expounding on 'modernization'. "[This calamity] not only keeps the whole national life in a situation of poverty, exploitation and slavery, but brings gradual political serfdom, stifling any attempt to conquer one's rightful place in the world"130. It was this "rightful place in the world" that seemed to be threatened, by the West or by the East. Russia's occupation in the century before Romania's independence had not been forgotten, and communism was equated by the majority with Russian imperialism. Since it appeared that a good number of

125 Andrew C. Janos. "Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective: The Case of Romania," in: Kenneth Jowitt. (editor). Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940 – A Debate of Development in a European Nation (Berkeley: University of California, 1978), pp. 72-116. 126 Ibid., p. 72 127 Ibid., p. 74. 128 The Romanian boyars (boieri) were large landowners, mostly of noble descent, who relied on serfdom in agrarian pre-modernized Romania. 129 Eugen Weber, "Romania" in: Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber. (editors). The European Right – A Historical Profile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), p. 502. 130 Ibid., p. 504. 38

Communist leaders were Jews, communists were equated with Jews, communism with Russian conquest, and hence Jews and „the foreign threat‟,131 provided for further nationalistic paranoia. Thus, when the overwhelmingly urban, commercial and industrial nature of the Jewish communities seemed to leave a mark on the commercial-industrial middle class in the midst of a national society, severe tensions and dilemmas were rising to the surface.

1.5 For Two Thousand Years and anti-Semitism For Two Thousand Years presents not only a representation of dictatorship, or totalitarian thinking, which is the very symptom of the socio-economic and political occurring described above, but also the ever present anti-Semitism in the Romanian public sphere, the second major subject that captivates the Bucharest intelligentsia's interest in the interwar period. Jews were largely viewed as "the principal agents and symbols of alien capitalism; hence they bore primary responsibility for the social ills associated with the decline of the traditional economy".132 In a sense, Jews were symbolizing modernism, which was perceived as a form of colonialism by many Romanian traditionalists. Paradoxically they were just as much regarded as equal to the communist Russian threat. As we have seen in the previous section, anti-Semitism, in the Romanian developing context (from the very beginning of its nation-building process) was almost a "natural" byproduct. Jews continued to be the scapegoat at fault for every social, political or economic evil. Radu Ioanid writes that not only did anti- Semitism lie at the very core of its fascist ideology, but, moreover, it was deeply rooted within Romanian culture and life.133 The 1920s and 30s simply gave anti- Semitism more room for political expression. It was probably the ever increasing and present “quest” for solving the “Jewish problem” in Romanian society of the 1920s and 1930s, evidenced in the increasing anti-Semitism and the politically corrupt games, that eventually moved Mihail

131 Eugen Weber. Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: D. Van Nostrand, 1964), p. 97. 132 Andrew C. Janos. "Modernization and Decay in Historical Perspective: The Case of Romania." Op. cit., p. 91. 133 Radu Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania (New York: University of Columbia Press, 1990), pp. 116-131. For a cultural-anthropological perspective on Romanian anti- Semitism see: Andrei Oișteanu. Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2009). 39

Sebastian to have the “audacity” to write his first “Jewish novel.” In a dialogue with Camil Baltazar, Sebastian confesses his thoughts regarding his controversial novel: “I always knew that one day I would have to write this book. It may be my unique reason for turning into a writer… I had to release some things that were suffocating me from the earliest memories of my childhood and adolescence. I thought that had I expressed them, I would feel more liberated. And here I finally expressed them.”134

1.5.1 The Anti-Semitic Preface to the Novel If it is not the novel itself that gives away much of the anti-Semitic intellectual hubbub of the time, the preface written by Nae Ionescu leaves no doubt whatsoever on one of the most representative of the period intellectual‟s attitude toward the Jews. Interestingly, "the tumultuous spirits were not furious because of Ionescu's anti- Semitic foreword, they were outraged at the author's supposed 'impertinence,'"135 in publishing such a novel. Hardly any criticized Ionescu for the preface. Nevertheless, Sebastian's unintended "transgression" turned out to be very revealing of his mentor's position at the time. His novel's publication became a witnessing tool not only regarding Nae Ionescu - the spiritual "master" of an entire generation,136 but, moreover, regarding common intellectual perceptions of Jews in this group of intellectuals in general.

134 Sebstian's exchange of thoughts with Camil Baltazar quoted in Leon Volovici. "Insula lui Mihail Sebastian: 1938-1944," in: Volovici. Mihail Sebastian. Dilemele identității. Op. cit., p. 220. 135 Roland Prügel. Im Zeichen der Stadt: Avantgarde in Rumänien. Op. cit., p. 168. 136 In his Autobiography, Eliade calls Ionescu a true "master of his" See: Mircea Eliade. Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937, Journey East, Journey West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p.308. Later, Eliade adds: "… Nae Ionescu had been more than my favorite professor; I considered him my 'master,' the guide who had been given to me to fulfill my destiny – that is, in the first place, to be a creator in the realms of culture, the only type of creation which I believed had been allowed us by 'History…. Nae Ionescu's death had affected me profoundly: I had lost my Maestru, my guide; spiritually I had been 'orphaned.' But in a certain sense his death has liberated me from our immediate past: that is, from the ideas, hopes, and decisions of the professor in the last few years, with which, out of devotion, I had made common cause." Mircea Eliade. Autobiography, Volume 2: 1937- 1960. Exile's Odyssey (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988), p. 6. See also: Florin Ţurcanu. "Entre ideologie de la culture et politique – Mircea Eliade et l'étude des religions dans la Roumanie de l'entre-deux-guerres," in: Horst Junginger. (editor). The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 318-322. In 1990, after the end of Communism, and in a period when Cioran, gives a rather apologetic account of Ionescu's role in guiding the young generation: "At the beginning, in terms of importance and influence, Nae Ionescu had been second only to the King. At one point, for reasons to me unknown, he broke with the King, or maybe the King broke with him. From that moment on, he had only one thing in mind: revenge. Consequently he began supporting the Iron Guard. This engagement of his was firstly personal, and only secondly political in nature. What is certain, however, is that he dragged all of us in his personal adventure, and that all his political maneuvering was ultimately motivated by revenge." Taken from an interview in Gabriel Liiceanu, quoted in: Marta Petreu. E.M. Cioran – An Infamous Past (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005), p. 59. 40

That young generation of Romanian intellectuals had perceived Ionescu as a spiritual father, mentor, and guide, as one "who, at the end of the nineteenth century, having [had] the opportunity to study at German and French universities, was mesmerized by theories of race. For this generation, race represented something profoundly a-temporal and trans-individual, capable of shaping culture and civilization of a specific Volk. Moreover, modern theories about race offered a good opportunity to present and legitimize political claims 'scientifically'."137 For Romanian nationalists around the fin-de-siècle period, the general reaction against the Jewish race as a whole, was starting to take new forms: the negative influence of the Jews in corrupting modern man and most importantly, those who had lost their roots, culture and sense of community, were perceived as the greatest threat. The "logic" of this argument was centered on a "life and death struggle" between the nation and the "foreigners" (that is, the Jews). It was another version of Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest." Accordingly, if Semitic modernity were to prosper, the Romanian nation and race would be extinguished; therefore Semites should be annihilated altogether."138 Nae Ionescu, born in 1890, and trained in this fin-de-siècle mentality, would state that "the generation of 1906 realized that the nation is not a political instrument but a cultural one."139 He bore this legacy, called for for a new and different form of politics, not conventional, but modern, racial, scientific and in Ionescu's case, religiously orthodox as well. Mihail Sebastian's modern Jewish novel, For Two Thousand Years – with its integrative approach of Jewish identity – was a threat! Therefore, to Nae Ionescu it was an imperative of conscience, a conscience whose fertile ground for fascist conversion was radically stated in the preface Sebastian had asked of the professor while the latter still distant from such radical terms: Mihail Sebastian made up his mind to discuss the problem in Judaism. And he does it by […] trying to establish a setting of a life of hope, of battle, of suffering for an oblivious Jew, but a Jew nonetheless – one that is an original being, maybe even his own original being, Iosef Hechter... While Mihail Sebastian is attempting to solve the problem… Iosef Hechter lives Judaism's drama in a lucid, undivided manner. The arrival point of Iosef is somewhat surprising: he starts on a rational path – so typical for his Judaism – but why? [...] To try to give the problem of Judaism a general solution with a political order is an operation that has

137 Răzvan Pârâianu. "Culturalist Nationalism and Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-Siecle Romania," in: Paul Weindling and Marius Turda. (editors). "Blood and Homeland": Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe 1900-1940 (New York: Central European University Press, 2006), p. 353. 138 Ibid., p. 356. 139 Ibid. p. 357. 41

no sense at all. […] Therefore, the methodical indication is very precise: if the Jew must suffer, the suffering must have its origin in himself… the Jews, conclusively, must be substantially ill. […] First and foremost we must ask: when is someone a Jew? [...] The quality of Romanian, Jew, Turk, or German is not an issue of belonging, but one of a collective, of community… and belonging to a community is not a mere act of choice… There is such a thing as a Russian Jew and a Romanian Jew, or a German Jew. But this fact is a fact that creates confusion… Anti-Semitism for them is merely a call to order: Remember that you are a Jew! I know, Iosef Hechter will protest. […] And yet […] within the constitutive elements of the human being, there are essential as well as accidental moments – those who go deep and those that are superficial. Are you, Iosef Hechter a man from Danube's Brăila? No. You are a Jew from Brăila at the Danube River. This must be remembered : The two moments of tradition and place in a Jew's being are increasing and decreasing. Whereas the geographical climate [is accidental], the spiritual climate [is organic]... Nationality, thus, is an organic state.140

Almost two dozen pages of similar "logics," by the professor of metaphysics continue to dumbfound the rational modern man. And yet, Ionescu is convinced of his coherency, even pretending to distinguish himself from the "usual anti-Semites." Historical flaws, racist bigotry, sheer hatred, new philosophical versions of the ancient theological arguments of Jews as Christ-killers (for he makes sure to mention that ancient Christian charge as well, borne by the Jew and similar to the mark of Cain), all come down to one bottom line: Judah, i.e. Iosef Hechter, and especially Mihail Sebastian – for as an intellectual he enhances the dramatic dualism – "is simply pathetic".141 According to Ionescu, there is no sense to his novel, just as there is no sense in the questions he raises. "History" answers them, so Ionescu claims. "The organic state of nationality" answers them, as well, according to the professor. He polemicizes with Judaism, Maimonides, the Kabbala, the irrelevance of the Old Testament, and comes to the conclusion that the Jew is inherently ill, with no way out. His arguments are "organic, nationalistic and orthodox." Sebastian vainly tries to use the language of common sense in response to the violent reactions, explaining that "no one accuses Romanians who live in Ohio or Cleveland to be a state within a state… Romanians in America are good Americans, for example, although they have held on, with admirable tenacity, to their language, folklore, familiar traditions and connections with their people… For Zionists," and here he contradicts not only Ionescu, but also the time relevant critics who think that Sebastian comes out against them in his novel, "the Jewish drama ends with the rebuilding of a Jewish state in Palestine. We suffer today because we are in exile. We

140 Preface of Nae Ionescu in: Mihail Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 7-9, 11-12. 141 Ibid., p. 13 42

won't suffer tomorrow, because we will be reintegrated in our own national history. This is an impressive perspective, which answers the most ancient Jewish nostalgic longings."142 The discourse, lead throughout various parts of the novel with Sami Winkler, never leaves a sense of condescending attitude on the side of the author. Just the opposite is the fact. He always writes about the revisionist Zionist with a warm, even affectionate attitude.143 And yet, the author's protagonist, as well as Mihail Sebastian himself, is not interested in Zionism, primarily, but in the predicament of the Jewish Romanian intellectual. How can one integrate into society, and life, when one's cultural ambiance is turning more and more radical, as we have seen in the example of Nae Ionescu, a case that is to become the pattern for the majority of intellectuals in Bucharest's high society of the 1930s. Mihail Sebastian receives a slap in the face by his very own mentor, teacher, professor who raised him to the higher level of a writer's platform. Ionescu, as well as a majority of scholars dealing with the subject historically, misunderstand Sebastian, who clearly states that he is not looking for structural or political solutions for alleviating Jewish suffering. The tragic condition of the intellectual Jew is, in the midst of anti-Semitism – whose banality he does not even intend to address – a reality that defies explanations, claims Sebastian.144 Yet, the author is denied the right to such thinking. He becomes a hooligan-Jew in the eyes of both the larger Jewish community, as well as in the eyes of literary anti-Semites. A few years before Nae Ionescu's anti-Semitic outbreak, things had looked different. In 1931, when Sebastian came back for a period of time from Paris to Bucharest, he approached Ionescu with the plea to write the introductory words to For Two Thousand Years: "When I got back from Paris in 1931, where he [N. Ionescu] had sent me to study, the first thing I had to tell him was this: 'I am about to write a Jewish book.' The message did not surprise him. I had never experienced even the tiniest shadow of ambiguity from him regarding my Jewishness."145 The book Sebastian was writing had no immediate social objectives. "It seemed to me very natural to ask of a man who had guided my early years a direct judgment regarding a book, which meant to clarify at least for my own sake, a number of decisive

142 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 40-41. 143 See: Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 86-87. 144 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp.42-43. 145 Ibid., p. 89. 43

questions. I had awaited many times past, the professor's final word on certain issues I had on my mind, but never had I been so passionate about it, as this time… Today," continues Sebastian, "and even more so in June, 1934, to ask Professor Nae Ionescu to write the preface of a Jewish novel, is not only a completely bizarre idea, but an outright provocation. In 1931, nothing would have been more normal."146 In 1928 Ionescu was holding lectures at a Zionist camp, and between 1926 and 1933, the collection of articles at Cuvântul had numerous evidence of the man's interest, sympathy, and desire for knowledge with regard to the "Jewish phenomenon."147 Even then, Ionescu's Christian-orthodoxy was resounding in warmer terms: "In his faith, then, he was calling for an obligation to love the nation of the Old Testament – to love these Jews, who," in Nae Ionescu's words, "were by no means unbelievers, but delayed believers on their own path of redemption."148 Within a short time not just the Bucharest avant-garde, but all of Europe's had slipped towards the right. The perceptions of "decadence" were common to Vienna, Madrid, Berlin, Bruxelles and Paris, and if 1931 had been a "year lacking anti- Semitism," according to Sebastian, 1934 would become an intensely anti-Semitic and "hooligan year." In November 1933, the anti-liberal Cuvântul had become reactionary. Philosopher Marta Petreu is convinced not only of the reactionary nature of "the devil: Nae Ionescu"149 long before the writing of this preface, but claims that Sebastian too is an imitating reactionary. The problem with such a view lies however much more than just in the metaphorical title of the book, but rather in her a-historical "dibbuk" approach to this people and events. One needs to have a historical understanding of "liberalism" in the interwar period in order to prevent such false judgments. Cuvântul and Nae Ionescu had been anti-liberal, and so was Mihail Sebastian, although, for slightly different reasons, as their later development proved.

146 Ibid., pp. 90-91. 147 Ibid., p. 92. 148 Ibid., p. 93. 149 One problem with Marta Petreu's Diavolul şi ucenicul său. Op. cit., is her time-limited look at Sebastian's work and life, looking mainly at his published work between 1927 until 1935, without giving Sebastian a chance to reply through either Cum am devenit huligan ("How I Became a Hooligan") or his later Journal. On the other hand, she does an excellent job at bravely confronting the recent rehabilitation of Romania's interwar intellectuals of the young generation. For example: Marta Petreu. De la junimea la Noica. Op. cit., and Marta Petreu. An Infamous Past. Op. cit. Nevertheless, in the case of Marta Petreu's The Devil and His Disciple: Nae Ionescu – Mihail Sebstian her depiction of the Jewish writer as a right-wing extremist, not only fails to understand the historical figure in its context and development, but also misses giving Sebastian a chance to reply to her. A careful reading of How I Became a Hooligan and of the author's Journal does just that. 44

The National Liberal Party was increasingly abandoning democratic ways. In general, Romania hardly knew a long democratic tradition. The same National Liberal Party, which for an extended time had remained the most powerful Romanian political party, "advocated and applied a nationalist policy of economic protectionism that contained an element of anti-Semitism."150 When it came to the "Jewish question" all liberal values were disappearing. Almost all traditional liberals proposed that Romania would have "to be totally or partially disburdened or disinfected of Jews. Romanian Jews should be repatriated in Palestine or anywhere else in the world,"151 claimed liberals like government minister Istrate Micescu, or Professor Gheorghe Brătianu, president of the National Liberals. When it comes to Ionescu and his newspaper's pre- 1932 anti-liberalism, it simply meant opposing an old form of nationalism. This circle of intellectuals was then searching for a new, "natural", "organic", form of nationalism, most of its members tending towards traditionalism,152 with only a minority looking to the Western democratic models for orientation. Nae Ionescu was definitely anti-liberal, but after November 1933 when Ion Gheorghe Duca and the National Liberal Party in Romania came to power, the "director of conscience" for this entire young group of intellectuals underwent a complete metamorphosis. Now the professor became a reactionary anti-liberal with legionary commitments. A change of government followed. Then followed right-wing violent outbursts, arrests, and the assassination of prime minister Ion G. Duca. Simultaneously, the Iron Guard's political "Everything for the Fatherland" Party was outlawed and legionnaires were being jailed. At this point "the moment for the revolution had come." Finally Nae Ionescu and his entourage's philosophy found a new and political form of expression. This is the political context through which the preface to Sebastian's book must be considered. Mihail Sebastian sums up his reaction to the foreword: Cuvântul was suppressed. Nae Ionescu closed up. An anti-Semitic wave had caught full ascension… The anti-Semites were anticipating the preface of the professor as a form of political manifesto. The Jews were hoping for a kind of comprehension. Both sides were awaiting the publication with various degrees of anxiety. I had no fears whatsoever. I was convinced that Nae Ionescu would write neither for friends nor for enemies, but simply for the book itself. I was sure that he would write the preface of 1931, as if nothing had changed

150 Leon Volovici. Nationalist Ideology and Antisemitism. Op. cit., p. 52. 151 Ibid., pp. 54-55. 152 See: Keith Hitchins, "Gîndirea: Nationalism in a Spiritual Guide" in: Kenneth Jowitt (editor). Social Change in Romania, 1860-1940. A Debate on Development in a European Nation (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1979), pp. 140-173. 45

since. No matter what had occurred in these past few years, it would not have had the right to modify his thinking about a drama, which is not of today, not of yesterday, but one that seems to be of an eternal nature [Sebastian speaks here of the drama of Jewish suffering]. I knew his thoughts hereupon and every surprise on the subject had been completely excluded. Today I admit I was wrong.153

Even though Mircea Eliade is quoted by several historians (including by himself in his Autobiography154) for having defended Sebastian, at the time of the great scandal, his series of three published articles "in defense" of his friend Ionescu, are truly a polemic exchange of thoughts on Judaism, Christianity, and orthodox beliefs. Quoted almost in its entirety by Hannelore Müller, Eliade's response to Nae Ionescu's preface in the article called "Judaism and anti-Semitism" practically exonerates Ionescu from all anti-Semitism: "If Mr. Professor Ionescu had maintained throughout the entire preface a philosophical approach, then, and only then could this preface have been called anti-Semitic, as we see for example in the attitude of Chamberlain, or in Rosenberg. However, the second part of Mr. Nae Ionescu's foreword introduces a few new elements of soteriology: redemption, sin, the messiah, Israel's non-confession of Israel. These elements are, therefore, of theological nature. They are 'above history.' The history of Israel, according to him, cannot be explained only by means of race, economy or politics; and pay attention… not even by mere religious arguments… We can only explain it, says Mr. Nae Ionescu, if we look at Judah's sin (and that of the entire Jewish people): the rejection of the messiah. This people were chosen for another purpose: so that the messiah would be born. And once, he was born, the nation's pride caused it to reject him, not recognize him, and, hence, its eternal destiny to suffer. Conversion is impossible, says Mr. Nae Ionescu, because Christianity now, is a form of life and spirituality that has been completed, in other words not only organic (as it was in the first centuries) but also bearing a clear structure."155

Eliade's reiteration of Ionescu's words, and interpretation thereof, simply points not only to the total contradiction with actual Christian sources156 and their twisted factual knowledge (even when it comes to mere theology), but also to the writer's politicization of Christianity (as well as to his anti-Semitism). In the eyes of both, Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade, Israel has been rejected, replaced, not only organically, but also structurally. And structure, to both of these nationalistic traditionalist thinkers speaks for nothing else than a political state-structure, which for the Romanian has to be Orthodox, decontaminated from the foreign – that is non-

153 Ibid., pp. 108-109. 154 Mircea Eliade. Autobiography, Volume 1. Op. cit., p. 283. Here, the historian of religion deliberately embellishes his past, and so do some of his biographers. See also: Adriana Berger. "Mircea Eliade: Romanian Fascism and the History of Religions in the United States," in: Nancy A. Harrowitz. Tainted Greatness: Antisemitism and Cultural Heroes (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), pp. 51- 75. On the problems of the Autobiography see especially pp. 69-71. 155 See "iudaism şi antisemitism" by Mircea Eliade, July 22nd, 1934, quoted in the appendix of: Hannelore Müller. Der frühe Mircea Eliade – Sein rumänischer Hintergrund und die Anfänge seiner universalistischen Religionsphilosophie (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2004), p. 34. 156 See the book of Romans chapter 9, 10 and 11 in the New Testament. 46

orthodox elements. Eliade's second article in so-called defense, entitled "Christianity versus Judaism," merely continues a religious polemic led with Nae Ionescu on orthodoxy and doctrine. This one has also nothing to do with a "courageous and laudable act" of justification for Sebastian, as interpreted by historian Andrei Oişteanu.157 Eliade simply questions Nae Ionescu's certitude "on Jewish damnation" (of all Jews), and interprets Origen's formulation extra Ecclesiam nulla salus, to mean that some Jews could still find salvation. "There are certain Jews," Eliade added, who are however "Devil's sons," and for these no intercession nor hope avails at all.158 At the time of the publication of the book and its preface, Nae Ionescu is definitively part of what Eliade would later call the legionary "mystical sect."159 Soon enough, the developing pioneer in the field of anthropology and history of religions, would fully comprehend his "master's" perception of Orthodoxy (and here, Eliade's Autobiography is less successful in concealing the true nature of its hero): Even as far as I was from the conception of Orthodoxy shared by Nae Ionescu, Mircea Vulcănescu, and Paul Sterian, I understood the answer Ionescu gave me when I asked what he thought of the conclusion of "Itinerariu spiritual." [Spiritual Itinerary] He said, "…You say one is born a Catholic or a Protestant, but one becomes Orthodox. I think just the opposite: you can become a Catholic or a Protestant, but if you are Romanian… you are born Orthodox. Orthodoxy is a natural mode of being in the world… However, with you I think it's another matter: you consider Orthodoxy to be like a shore to which you hope to return after a series of adventures on the sea. Yet you won‟t return to the shore of your own free will, but only when you escape from a shipwreck, or when you want to avoid a shipwreck. For me, every existence is equivalent to a shipwreck, so that a longing to return to the shore is virtually inevitable. For you, existence means in the first place a series of spiritual adventures."160

Eliade's journeys to the Far East and his early temptations towards the sacred had laid deep foundations in his curriculum vitae for a potential that would surpass a merely scientific academic call. His spiritual adventures by 1934 had by far transcended the rather limited borders of Romanian orthodoxy, where he had first developed, next to his colleagues (and later Iron Guard comrades) at the Spiru Haret high school, Mihail Polihroniade, Victor Vojen, the Acterian brothers and Constantin Noica. In his young years, he was revolutionized by Giovanni Papini's autobiography Un uomo finito exposing him to futurism, modernism and political religion,161 and seduced by Edouard Schuré's occult literature, theosophy, and esoteric knowledge.

157 Andrei Oişteanu. "Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade: Chronicle of a Broken Friendship", in: Studia Hebraica 7 (2007), p. 145. 158 Ibid. 159 Boekhoven. Genealogies of Shamanism. Op. cit., p. 136. 160 Eliade. Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937. Op. cit., p. 133. 161 Florin Ţurcanu. Mircea Eliade: Le prisonnier de l'histoire. Préface de Jacques Julliard (Paris: La Découverte, 2003), pp. 35-36 47

Immediately after, he was launched into his next adventure: Hermann Oldenberg's Indology, the studies of Buddha, Krishna and Râma. His literary eclecticism proved a deep intellectual and esoteric hunger. More and more fascinated not only with the Far East but also with the ancient Orient, awakened by everything oriental with an allure for religion,162 Eliade is finally encouraged by Nae Ionescu to do his doctoral thesis on the "Psychology of Indian Meditation," after having spent three years in India. Back in his fervent nationalistic orthodox environment, in 1933, Eliade mixes his ahistorical interpretation of yoga as a "modality of archaic spirituality"163 with Romanian nationalism which practically develops into a full-blown "political theology." At this point, Nae Ionescu's orthodoxy combined with Eliade's theories of Romanianism, theories containing clearly fascist elements, are both witnessed by and revealed through the professor's preface to Sebastian's novel and the contextual articles written by Mircea Eliade, a man who will provide for another "stabbed friendship," as we shall later see. The same Eliade, who for at least half of today's historians of religions embodies the very discipline of the history of religions,164 is consumed by the idea of Romanianism before his fascism embraces political dimensions. Even his rather apologetic biographer Max Linscott Ricketts could not avoid making mention of it: Romanianism was a term that in the mind of the Romanian public was associated with the ultra-right-wing political philosophies and programs. All the parties of the extreme right… invoked it in their propaganda. Ordinarily it signified chauvinism, anti-Semitism, policies for restraint of minorities, anti-communism, and enthusiasm for Italian fascism and German National Socialism. Eliade believed the word, which he found in the writings of nineteenth- century nationalists he admired… had signified originally something 'above' politics, and that it had been debased by political parties in the twentieth century. 165

In Mihail Sebastian's preface, Nae Ionescu chooses to create a platform that goes far beyond "the Jewish problem" and definitely beyond the Jewish novel itself. The preface becomes an early form of Romanian literary fascism, highly anti-Semitic and most ironically presented to the masses as the foreword of a Jewish intellectual who was just becoming famous among a Romanian readership. Well aware of the

162 Ibid., p. 38. 163 Boekhoven: Genealogies of Shamanism. Op. cit., p. 134. 164 Ivan Strenski. Religion in Relation: Method, Application and Moral Location (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), p. 166. 165 Norman Manea. The Fifth Impossibility: Essays on Exile and Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 97-98. See the entire chapter entitled "Happy Guilt" for more of Eliade's fascism. 48

national discourse in Greater Romania166 where orthodoxism / orthodoxy are holding a "key position" in favor of autochthonism versus Europeanization,167 Nae Ionescu followed by Eliade, Crainic, Vulcănescu, and others, knows best how to mix Orthodoxy as an expression of autochthonous spirituality for all Romania, with the ethnic elements, soil, language and blood.168 To such thinkers, there is consequently no room left for the Jew, for "Judah," Iosef Hechter, or a Romanian integrated Jewish intellectual, Mihail Sebastian.

1.5.2 For Two Thousand Years and its Anti-Semitic Milieu An additional few words should be said about the anti-Semitic larger environment in which the novel was published. For Two Thousand Years describes anti-Semitism both in action and idea, throughout the storyline, beginning with beatings of Jewish students, planed anti-Semitic burglaries, or spontaneous attacks against Jews, "pure and simple" anti-Semites, or those that try to rationally argue their anti-Semitism, as found in the protagonist's friend Mircea Vieru, or even Western-cultured and enlightened "psychological reservations" towards the Jew, as manifested by Maurice Buret, a French character in the novel. Following is a more mundane example, so similar to the author's real quotidian life: At the corner of Elizabeth Boulevard was standing a group of young men in uniforms. "Conspiracies of the Kahal. Death to the Jews." I don‟t know why I stopped. Normally, I simply pass by, because such yelling is old, bitter, and familiar. Yet, this one time, I was taken aback. It was as if I understood for the first time the real sense of such syllables. It is bizarre, indeed. These people speak of death. Namely of my own. And I simply pass them by, with my thoughts occupied on other things, half over-hearing. I am wondering why it's so easy to hear on a Romanian street a cry for "death!” without anyone turning his head? To me, it seems that death is quite a serious thing. Even a dog, crushed under the wheels of an automobile is enough for a moment of silence. If someone installed himself in the middle of the road and started demanding, for… I don‟t know what… "Death to all badgers", it would still arouse a degree of astonishment among the passersby. If I think about it, what's more grave is not the

166 After World War I, and the consequences of the international treaties of Trianon and Versailles, a Greater Romania had to face "greater problems" in its socio-political and cultural agenda, owning a much more heterogeneous population. Which ideological, philosophical, religious direction should the great Romanian nation turn to now? Religion had stood in the center of the discourse on "national specificity" ever since the beginning of the nation-building process. Now, the spread of Orthodoxy and Romanianization of the newly required territories were to take a new role, and became eventually perceived as an acute necessity and requirement on the side of the right wing governments and movements during the Interwar period. 167 Alexandru Zub. "Die rumänische Orthodoxie im ideen- und kulturgeschichtlichen Kontext der Zwischenkriegszeit", in: Hans-Christian Maner and Martin Schulze Wessel. (editors). Religion im Nationalstaat zwischen den Weltkriegen 1918-1929. Polen – Tschechoslowakei – Ungarn – Rumänien (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), pp. 179-188. 168 Ibid., p. 186. 49

fact that three young men place themselves at the corner of a road shouting "death to all Jews", but the fact that their shouts go unnoticed, without any resistance, like a tram's bell.169

Without a doubt, Sebastian's "epic moments" have a reality-based inspiration within them. He was well aware of the on-and-off eruptions against the Jewish population in Romania. A few months after Sebastian's move to Bucharest and after being invited and joining Nae Ionescu's newspaper "Cuvântul", where he would be writing his journalistic and literary essays along figures such as Ion Vinea, Camil Petrescu or Mircea Eliade, a unified memorandum was being presented by the Jewish League of Nations to the Commission of the Minorities of the International Union of League of Nations Societies in Brussels, regarding the deplorable situation of the Jewish minority in Romania. In December 1927, thousands of Romanian students, in particular from the universities of Bucharest and Iași had gathered for a Congress in order to hail anti-Semitic character and action. General Moșoiu, former Cabinet Minister in the Government, had applauded the students' initiative, while another dignity, Dr. Titus Mălaiu, "went even so far as to exhort them to recur to violence for the purpose of attaining the goal they were pursuing."170 In an article published on December 13th, 1927, the correspondent of Le Temps in Bucharest writes: The aspect of the devastated districts recall to our mind that of the towns bombarded during the war: Broken shop windows, furniture thrown pell-mell into the streets, and a population ill-treated and mostly ruined. The system adopted by the rioters was everywhere the same. Jews were beaten and molested in the streets, shops and business houses were sacked, windows broken and furniture smashed. Wherever the rioters met with some resistance they were absolutely pitiless. The students were masters of the situation not only in towns but also all along the railway line. They stopped the trains whenever they chose to do so and visiting various localities, committed new outrages and heinous deeds. It was in the synagogues where the students vented their most savage fury. The buildings were sacked and the sacred scrolls of the Law carried off like war-trophies, defiled and burned in the streets. As usually happens in such cases, the scum of the suburbs joined the rioters, the ruffians availing themselves of an excellent opportunity to steal and plunder.171

Ever since the national, modern idea for a nation-state for Romanian people had been born, a "Jewish question" had appeared alongside such national aspirations – as had also happened in other European states. Yet in the Romanian case, even though the 1848 revolution and then the 1866 Constitution discussed a granting of equal rights under the law for its Jews, half a century later, this idea would still remain only

169 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 205. 170 Conseil pour les droits des minorités juives (Comité des délégations juives). La situation de la minorité juive en Roumanie (Paris: Imp. D'art Voltaire, 1928), p. 32. 171 Quoted in the Annex 1 of: Conseil pour les droits des minorités juives. Ibid., p. 39. 50

a vain hope for the Jewish population.172 In a rather disorienting labyrinth of counteracting ideological streams, such as the 1848 ideology called "paşoptism," the political journalism of Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu called "junismism," the "poporanism" and its anti-aristocratic aspirations to fight for peasant power, or the Russian imported "narodism" – all "Romanian currents of reaction"173 – one thing seemed to solidly transcend all argumentative walls and be agreed upon: namely, the Jewish question. Karl Marx's anti-Semitic Zur Judenfrage, and Bruno Bauer's Jewish Question, were finding their own version in the newly Romanian national discourse. As Ornea explains, the Jewish problem had always been an ever present "inflammable matter in dispute following the second half of the 19th century."174 Even though, initially, in the 1866 draft of the Constitution, it was proclaimed that "faith, in Romania, is not an obstacle to naturalization," and that "a special law will settle the gradual naturalization and the granting of citizenship to Israelites who have settled in Romania,"175 the Jewish population did not enjoy political rights until 1923, when the new Constitution finally included the 7th article of the four-years earlier Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Romania's pledge "to recognize as full citizens and without any formalities the Jews living on all its territory and who cannot take advantage of any other citizenship."176 But now, anti-Semitic action, as we have seen in the report to the League of Nations regarding the student revolt gathering against Jews, and as we read about in For Two Thousand Years, really takes a whole new dimension with "Greater Romania's" establishment following World War I. Historian Raphael Vago explains, that after 1919, not only did a significant majority of the new "Romanian Jewry" regard Romania itself "as a 'host state' with which they had little in common… history, language, culture and mentality,"177 but the Romanians themselves, and their new regime, with its greater territorial tenure, viewed the "new Jews… as a peculiar element that compounded the 'Jewish problem' of the Old

172 See "The National Ideal and the Appearance and Development of the 'Jewish Question' in Political and Intellectual Life" in Volovici. Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism. Op.cit., pp. 1-16. 173 On the various ideological streams see, "Democracy and Rationalism under Charge" in: Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties. Op. cit., p. 7 ff. 174 Ibid., p. 365. See entire chapter 6, "The Jewish Problem." 175 Ibid., p. 367. 176 Carol Iancu. Jews in Romania, 1866-1919: From Exclusion to Emancipation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 182. 177 Raphael Vago. "Romanian Jewry during the Interwar Period," in: Randolph L. Braham. (editor). The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 30. 51

Kingdom."178 Of such ambiguity of "national belonging" in the new construct, Sebastian makes witness in an interesting narrative moment in his novel For Two Thousand Years, when he writes about the Hungarian Jewish intellectual Pierre Dogany, whom he meets in the capital of new and 'Greater Romania.' … At the Haussmann Boulevard, I meet sometimes Pierre Dogany. He is working here on his doctorate in public law and economics. He tried as much as he could in Budapest, and when he saw that it didn't work any longer, he left. His intention is to return there immediately after finishing his thesis. He wants to remain Hungarian by any means, at any price. I am even bored by his excess of zeal… He won't forgive me that I remember so well his Magyar disillusions. Such forced devotion seems to me excessive. He invited me last week to the university, to listen to his lecture on Lapradelle's international law. He talked about the legal side of the business optants and, how Lapradelle acted as the advisory attorney to Hungarians in The Hague. The entire session was an indictment of the Romanian thesis. The whole thing made me feel awkward, and even though I was missing technical elements, numbers, data, statistics, I thought there needed to be a response. To my joy, after Dogany had closed his treatise, a Romanian student finally gave that response when, having installed himself upfront at the pulpit, he completed a half an hour discourse, with such flames in his eyes and feverishness in his gestures that this cold classroom may have never seen before. On exit, I approached to meet this one. He was introduced to me and I found out that his name was Saul Berger. I was almost troubled by the facility of the symbol, too obvious not to impose, and yet too melodramatic for me: two Jews fighting one another for two victories, which are nothing but abstractions. Destiny, inevitable destiny.179

Dogany, in Sebastian's novel, came to Bucharest from Satu Mare, in Transylvania, which had ceased to be Hungary in April 1919, and was reminiscent of the "new Romanian Jews." In an ironic way, the main protagonist and as well as the Transylvanian Jew have much in common: both of them have moved, as historian Carol Iancu puts it, 'from exclusion to the emancipation'. However, as the same historian entitles his second major historical volume, this hard won emancipation would soon lead to a marginalization of the worst kind,180 namely the Holocaust. For Two Thousand Years covers a period of intense ups and downs for the Jews in Romania: a period of ebb and flow from 1923, through 1929, all the way to 1933. The fictional beatings of Jewish students, the numerus clausus, the violent anti- Semitic manifestations, as much as the times in-between when "things have calmed down"181 – all of these are mirroring external realities that Mihail Sebastian

178 Ibid. 179 Sebastian, De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 168-169. 180 See: Carol Iancu. Les Juifs en Roumanie (1866-1919): De l'exclusion a l'émancipation (Aix-en- Provence: Edition de l'Université de Provence, 1978); and Carol Iancu. Les Juifs en Roumanie (1919- 1938): De l'émancipation a la marginalisation (Paris et Louvain: E. Peeters, 1996). 181 In the conversation between Sebastian's protagonist and his revisionist Zionist friend, the main hero is asking Sami Winkler, why he gave up his medical studies. Winkler has quit the faculty of medicine and replies that he is occupying himself with the learning of agriculture to help built a colony in Eretz Israel. To the question, why now, "when things have calmed down," the Zionist is more eager than ever to leave for Eretz Israel, he responds that he is "leaving, not running away. I leave not because it is bad 52

introduces into the intellectual discourse of the novel. Beginning with the 1923 Constitution amendment for the naturalization of all Jews, the struggle for emancipation, as Carol Iancu describes in Les Juifs en Roumanie: De l'exclusion à l'émancipation, would be everything else but smooth. Jean Ancel explains that "the government used what Filderman had called 'the tactics […] of the Treaty of Berlin'… Brătianu refused to sign the Treaty of Protection of Minorities… only because it included a clause on emancipation for the Jews. The Romanian leader considered this clause to be an infringement of Romanian sovereignty."182 The Powers gave an ultimatum to Romania, one which the Greater Romania's government eventually was forced into signing. The delegation of the Union of Indigenous Jews (a political organization established in 1910 to combat Romanian persecution and injustice), its appeal before the Minister of Justice, and another meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Take Ionescu, were all attempts to combat the continued intended nullification of Jewish emancipation.183 The new liberal Cabinet from January 22, 1923, chaired by I.C. Brătianu, helped unleash an entire new debate in the Romanian press criticizing the insertion of the recognition of Jewish citizenship into the new Constitution. Prime Minister Brătianu demanded that "emancipation should be accorded in the greatest possible measure, yet based on internal consent and not enforced by the control and pressure of foreign elements."184 Even though, eventually, the obligations for granting Jewish citizenship were codified in the Constitution articles 7 and 8, which "prohibited discrimination based on religion, religious denomination, ethnic origin or language,185 and even though a new law passed in 1924 extended citizenship to former Jewish citizens of the Habsburg and Russian empires who resided in Transylvania, Banat, Crişana and Maramureş, as well as Bessarabia and Bukovina,186 the Romanian establishment never "stopped trying to

here, and good there, but plainly and simply for the reason that I cannot leave anywhere else but there. I am a Zionist not a refugee. You see, in 1923, at the height of anti-Semitic fervor, Zionism was at its peak, today when the world is peaceful and prosperous Zionism is in a crisis. I prefer, however, the Zionism in crisis, because it is a Zionism of resolute people, while the Zionism of 1923 was a Zionism of terrified people". Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., pp. 147-148. 182 Jean Ancel. (editor). Wilhelm Filderman – Memoirs & Diaries: 1900-1940. Volume 1 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), p. 22. 183 Iancu, Evreii din România. Op. cit., p. 83. 184 Ibid., p. 90. 185 Friling, Ioanid, and Ionescu. Final Report. Op. cit., p. 81. 186 Ibid. 53

revoke Jewish emancipation."187 Jean Ancel explains: between 1923 and 1936, five attempts were made to deprive Jews of their Romanian citizenship.188 Therefore, when Mihail Sebastian, the young lawyer and writer, shows an apparent lack of concern regarding the legal position of the Romanian Jew in For Two Thousand Years, he does so out of the individual conviction that "it is exclusively the [Romanians'] own problem." We should remember that Mihail Sebastian had lived half of his life without political privileges, and when it comes to choosing his practical profession, he chooses to be a lawyer. It is his gift for writing that really opens the door before the "great of that generation." Yet, throughout his later life, especially in the late 1930s, when marginalized by his fascist intellectual "friends", Sebastian will manage to do tiny legal jobs to earn a living. "The difficulty has never consisted in the legal recognition of my situation, a minuscule matter, which does not concern me, having neither claims nor rights….,"189 he writes in the novel. Sebastian's For Two Thousand Years is an attitude of the mind, an intellectual quest, a discourse on Jewish values. The fictional stage for the legal Jewish predicament in Romania is a given. It simply places imagined people and events in realistic circumstances. The novel For Two Thousand Years remains a literary work, which gives its reader insights into the anti-Semitic condition of a Jewish Romanian intellectual in the interwar period. It is not, as claimed by Şerban Cioculescu, an autobiographical novel that presents a typology of the Jew in interbellic Romanian society: the Zionist Jew, the Communist Jew, the capitalist Jew, the traditionalist Jew, [or] the assimilated Jew,"190 but a creative individualist outlook at identity, paved with fictional events which are modeled after the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, turbulent and reactionary real- life events of the 1920s and 1930s.

187 Ancel. Wilhelm Filderman – Memoirs & Diaries. Op. cit., p. 23. 188 Ibid. 189 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 224. 190 Băicuşi. Mihail Sebastian, proiecţii pe ecranul culturii europene. Op. cit., p. 132. 54

Chapter 2 "How I Became a Hooligan" and the Hooligan Year (1934-1935) I realize, after an easement of storm, the winds that were blowing on us were the same, and it was the same shipwreck that caused us all to sink. "Hooligans" is a shout that solves many things. Almost as simple as screaming "down with the Jews." Should this have been all in our little drama?191

Writing almost prophetically of things to come, an incident in his novel For Two Thousand Years compared the screams after "hooligans" with those chasing the "jidani," a derogatory form for 'Jews' in the Romanian language. Once his novel was printed, with its preface, the storm would last almost half a year. Despite it all Sebastian would try to keep a clear mind, as little dramatic as possible, carefully weighing every word, so that the reader would never be overwhelmed with aggrandizement, excesses and amplified facts: "For Two Thousand Years had been a risky act of sincerity. Subsequently it remains a home lost, a symbol fallen apart, and a great friendship pierced and bleeding. A little ash, that is all. It is a small cataclysm, which possibly arrived at the appropriate time, because it is not a bad thing every once in a while for a person's standing in this world to be a little shaken up, and to uproot that person repugnantly out of its net of habits. Each one of us is living on a pile of altered truths, which we haven‟t had the time to check upon thoroughly. Friendships, loves, aversions, ideas, and judgments – they all gather up over time, just like newspapers and old documents amounting on someone's desk. It is quite difficult to review a pile of papers and chose to burn the unnecessary ones among them. It is endlessly more difficult to review a stack of old feelings and judgments. We live with them, out of negligence, or fatigue, due to hurry, and we patiently allow them to decompose in our own shade, without even knowing when or without asking why. In one day, with one accident, at some random event, a coincidence snatches them from our own laziness, our own indifference, and then we're left startled, discovering these sentiments and judgments half dead, sterile, utterly foreign…"192

The publishing of the novel had fit right in with the greater uproar and tumultuous changes of Cuvântul outlawed and closed down for its incitement in the political murder of Ion G. Duca by the Iron Guard. The anti-Semitic storm caused by the preface, joined by the even more furious reactions from every corner of political spectrum against this novel, left Mihail Sebastian as a standing "hooligan" among his non- Jewish environment. The very first entry of the journal reminds us, that among his fellow coreligionists Iosef Hechter also bears the "Mark of Cain." Sebastian records, I went to see an eye specialist. He recommended glasses and I have started to wear them. This changes me quite a lot and makes me look ugly. It was funny when I told him my name. He said that his family has much discussed my De două mii de ani [For Two Thousand Years], which he has not read himself. He has heard a lot of people cursing me. I realize that my trial has really been lost. Cum am devenit huligan [How I Became a Hooligan] is not reaching the

191 Sebastian. De doua mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 151. 192 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 149. 55

circles where I am cursed even by "hearsay". On Sunday at Tȋrgovişte, where I had gone for a lecture, Samy Herşcovici told me a story that indicates how the "affair" is seen by the public. The bookseller who was selling tickets for the lecture offered one to a professor at the teacher training college: "Sebastian? Aha! That yid who got himself baptized."193

The curses that Sebastian has to suffer from the widest range of sources, Jewish, non- Jewish, left, right, fascist, or liberal, are by themselves an expression of cultural hooliganism. An extortionist, a flunkey, an anti-Semite, a racist, a yid, a kike, a criminal, pervert, Judas the traitor, a neo-Jewish bourgeois, a nationalist, a sick man, a bone chewing dog who was saved by 'the professor' from its pit and turned against his own race, a hooligan – all these are just a small number of endless descriptive terms and titles Sebastian is endowed with by his literary critics. How I Became a Hooligan is the shortest and most concise of the three works I am focusing on to historically analyze Mihail Sebastian's intellectual journey and world. Between 1930 and 1945 the young Jewish man of letters writes eight novels and four plays. Yet this succinct essay has a very legal nature to it, an intellectual legal file, more intended as a civilized response to the "criminal prosecution of the hooligan," than a self-defense, for Sebastian never reverts to a victim mentality, an emblem, an embodiment of an avenger, or a melancholic certified martyr. Those are the very things he despises, and such mentalities are more typical for the rising Iron Guardists.194 Sebastian refuses to become "dramatic", and there are no epic moments here, nor melancholy, but a calm, with no regrets. "For two thousand years," he says, brought to light aversions that had long lingered in the shade, strikes and attacks stifled underneath residual doubts, shouts and gestures that were waiting confused far from being too old, too lazy, too false, or too common. It shattered amiable ambiguities, it bullied hesitations of sentiment, and it hastened the sincerities and violence in language. I cannot tell exactly what limit it reached, how far and how deep it went. I am not sure how many settlements were disrupted, how many memories,

193 "Tuesday, 12 February 1935," in: Mihail Sebastian. Journal: 1935-1944 – The Fascist Years. With an Introduction and Notes by Radu Ioanid (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), p. 5. 194 For the "martyrdom" complex in common legionnaire's language see: Andrew C. Janos. East Central Europe in the Modern World – The Politics of the Borderlands from pre- to Postcommunism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p.171 ff.; Friling, Ioanid, Ionescu. (editors). Final Report. Op. cit., p. 366. Stanley G. Payne, leading scholar on generic fascism explains that in the Legion of the Archangel Michael, from the very beginning stages of the Iron Guard, martyrdom was virtually required, "accompanied by theological heterodoxy." Stanley G. Payne. A History of Fascism, 1914- 1945 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 279-282. Armin Heinen. Die Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumänien. Soziale Bewegung und politische Organization (München: Oldenbourg, 1986), pp. 171-187. 56

trusts or hopes it broke. It's too hard to count them all, now that I find myself still among its ruins, between rubble and burnt stones. It is a sad reckoning – not a melancholic one."195 A reckoning is a calculation, an observation of facts, and Sebastian takes a period of five months, stepping back and gathering an entire file of accusations and articles, of which very few are actually literary critiques to the novel, most of them amounting to anti-Semitic leaflets. When he finishes the meticulous almost 150-page long elucidation, the scandal of For Two Thousand Years is still in full swing: "In Bucharest, pamphlets and indictments continue to be handed out, proclaimed and witnessed. In the province, symposiums and public trials, in which I am the only accused, are being organized. (I even received invitations from three cities to present myself "in person" before such courts. I am waiting for a warrant.) Since that which I have written here is destined to be published in the very midst of a contest of annoyances, I make myself no illusions about the fate of my specifications. These will be probably awaited by a second series of forgeries, a new avalanche of insults, a new attack of moral revolt…. For me, the case "For two thousand years" irrevocably stops here. I have nothing left to say. I entrust these pages to a young man, who will receive them in good faith and will read them as one that keeps a conversation with oneself. I do not know this young man, nor do I presume where he might be. But I am convinced of his existence. "196

This chapter will try to look at two main legacies of this second work: Sebastian's rejection of "assimilation" as well as politicization, and his analysis of Bucharest's intellectuals – what they are and what they ought to be.

2.1. Mihail Sebastian's Hooliganism: Neither Right nor Left For the reader of the novel, How I Became a Hooligan clarifies the most common problem, namely that of misquoted citations. It puts the literary novel into proper perspective, something which the writer had considered obvious. The essay is the exact response Sebastian can give to the contemporary scholar and philosopher Marta Petreu, who claims that her indictment of the young "radicalized writer" could only be refuted by Sebastian himself, if by any "unexpected stroke of luck" we might find some new document that contradicts his entire writing career until 1933.197 The Hooligan author answers: With a little bit of verve and vigor, what is there that could not be proven? Everything, absolutely everything! To cite any text is an operation of the highest and most intimate responsibility. In the work of citation, there are no sanctions except for your own conscience,

195 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 149. 196 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 149-151. 197 Petreu. Diavolul şi ucenicul său. Op. cit., pp. 5-6. 57

when God allows it to be existent. And, when the God given conscience is not present at all, liberty is all yours and abuse becomes innocent. You blot out a word, suppress a parenthesis, delete a comma, and behold, the unfortunate page that happened to end up in your words will tell exactly what you wanted to say. This type of game has no limits. Anyone can prove anything, beginning with any text whatsoever. If you like […] I could find within the Aeneid of Virgil a hexameter that lines out the revision of the Versailles treaty, and within Dante's Inferno a sestet about monetary stabilization. It is merely a point of view, and points of view are docile animals that will go no matter where you lead them. A book is an organic entity, in which every little detail is illuminated by its very context. Each page is subject to the book's contents. Each statement is specified by its nuances. Nothing is easier than butchering a book with an axe. The Jewish people are used to be treated with such methods, because all of their books have been butchered in the past for monstrous and distorted purposes. The gravest anti- Semitic weapon has not been a gun nor a rock, but a completely different one: the citation. Wasn't it by citation that blood libels were proven? Wasn't it by citation that the gentlemen Cuza and Codreanu proved that Israel is still feeding itself with Christian blood? Why wouldn't we prove again by means of citation that For Two Thousand Years is a racist novel, and that its writer is an anti-Semite?198

The very fact that Marta Petreu has to make such a radical statement in her study, as to say in her foreword "my book is not a crime,"199 points out to the residue of "cultural hooliganism" even in academic circles. Hooliganism, as we shall see later is quite common in the Romanian literary scene, in general. Yet, Sebastian's hooligan state is forced upon him. It is not a title of honor he chooses for his essay. Neither does his 'hooliganism' have anything in common with the rebellious, the anarchic, or the violent troublemaker. Sebastian writes, and therefore he exists, as he would say in a Cartesian way. His literary criticism is honest, even politically honest, and still the author is no politico. He finds himself in an intellectual camp that becomes increasingly political, moving towards the extreme right, with a few Communists as well. He rejects Marxist values just as much as he refuses to embrace right-wing radicalization. Nevertheless, Marta Petreu tries to create a disciple-mentor relationship, in which Ionescu's worldview supposedly becomes his legacy, too. The scholar, in a sense, deprives the Romanian Jewish thinker of his autonomy. The left, Sebastian replies to the charges, was blurry, corrupted and tainted: Was Cuvântul a right-wing newspaper? This question has little meaning, in my point of view. First of all, because "left" and "right" are, at least here in our country, devoid of all reality. … As deserted concepts, with no corresponding obligations, the Romanian "left" and "right" harbor the most varied compromises, and the wildest contradictions. Their lack of political content is supplemented by a lack of personal sincerity, which leaves all real understanding void. There is a glaring discrepancy between what people say and what they actually do, a total disagreement between what they write and their real life. Democrats are caught with scandalously rich resources, the socialists chase after fashionable careers, the theologians are moody and highly tempered – our society is so overflowing with such specimens, that we don‟t need to bother and believe in their "democracy," "socialism," or "orthodoxy." What value and sense can one find in a "democrat" director of a newspaper, who earns 200,000 lei a

198 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit ., pp. 30-31. 199 Petreu. Diavolul şi ucenicul său. Op. cit., p. 7. 58

month, while the people working in the typography department of his basement are dying from tuberculosis, and other workers are starving? […] Therefore, let's leave aside all the pre- made terminology, global judgments, and those half-truths ratified over a cup of coffee.200

Sebastian belongs to an avant-garde generation, which until 1032-1933 is disenchanted with politics, an eclectic group looking for orientation. Therein lays its greatness but also its possible danger. Before this young generation's focus on aesthetics, metaphysics, new "organic" expressions of life defying decadence, and futuristic mentalities become political (few in the late 1920s and most of them in the 1930s), one can only speak of a potential fruitful ground, where fascism might easily sprout and eventually blossom. Theories of the avant-garde which turned fascist were of no exception all over Europe's interwar period. Not all interwar avant-gardists were fascists. Marshal Berman's All that is Solid Melts into Thin Air: The Experience of Modernity or Peter Osborne's The Politics of Time: Modernity and the Avant-Garde closely observe this phenomenon. Mihail Sebastian is such an example of a modern thinker living in the midst of anti-modern "moderns." Understanding his apolitical position is crucial to the portrayal of him as an intellectual. The degenerating political scene between 1930 and 1938, in the midst of which How I Became a Hooligan comes out, gives further insight into why neither Sebastian as both Jew and intellectual, nor the way he perceives the intellectual's position, can contain any reactionary element to his modernism. The entire period between 1930 and 1938, in Romania is nothing but a swing between fledgling democracy and dictatorship. King Carol II returned to the throne in 1930. Meanwhile, the Legion of the Archangel Michael was spreading its influence as well. By summer 1932 it had taken a foothold in twenty different counties. In January 1933 it had organizations in 45 regional districts. The legionary party was spreading dozens of newspapers in thousands of copies. In December 1933 the Iron Guard had candidates in 66 counties, and at this point its political power was already difficult to supervise, records historian Armin Heinen.201 All of Europe was becoming radicalized and this became most tangible in Romania, as well. The Legion was becoming more and more confident and provoked polarization of public opinion. Captain Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (Căpitanul) was calling for literal "crusades" and "flesh and blood,"

200 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 68-69. 201 Armin Heinen. Die Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumänien. Op. Cit., p. 222. 59

i.e. the patrimony both physical and biological in nature.202 Politics were becoming sacred and religion was being politicized. However, Codreanu's political philosophy was not demanding a "Christian theocracy," even though he constantly used spiritualized principles, symbols and the pretense of commandments. The commander of the Legion believed that "there is on one hand the historical guideline, by which we live, because our life is constrained within time. And then there exists a guideline for the Church, one that is above earthly things. We aspire towards it, but we reach it only minimally."203 The leadership of the Romanian Orthodox Church easily agreed with Codreanu, for as the coming years would show, it would switch allegiance from King Carol II to the Iron Guard, then to General Antonescu and finally to the communist regime.204 After Prime Minister Duca had been murdered by the Iron Guard, even though the Liberals remained in power until 1937, the Legionary movement's grassroots influence and power continued to grow. In the legal procedures following the murder, despite three legionnaires being sentenced to lifelong forced labor, the leaders of the Iron Guard were acquitted. Before the court, politicians such as Alexandru Averescu, the well-known Transylvanian politician Iuliu Maniu and Gheorghe Brătianu, none of whom were Iron Guardists themselves, spoke in favor of Codreanu, and eventually the head of the Iron Guard was discharged. The judgment rehabilitated the Iron Guard.205 Even the King himself hoped to make use of the Iron Guard and make his authoritarian rule popular. The government of Gheorghe Tătărescu was facing one crisis after another, politically as well as socially, while dangling between the manipulations of King Carol II and the "old guard" Liberals.206 By 1937 the political decline of the liberals led the "leading competitor of the Iron Guard" to power, namely the National Christian Party of Octavian Goga and Alexandru C. Cuza. This group was "the principal Romanian recipient of German Nationalist Socialist support."207 This government was followed by a Royal dictatorship and then by the wartime dictator Ion Antonescu (not without mentioning some Legionary interruptions in between). Thus, the reactionary political scene during the 1930s was

202 Radu Ioanid. "Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard." Op. cit., p. 421. 203 Heinen. Die Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumänien. Op. Cit., p. 137. 204 Ioanid. "Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard." Op. cit., p. 420. 205 Heinen. Die Legion Erzengel Michael in Rumänien. Op. Cit., pp. 257-259. 206 Volovici. Nationalist Ideology & Antisemitism. Op. cit., pp. 48-49. 207 Friling, Ioanid, Ionescu. Final Report. Op. cit., p. 31. 60

set, with both National Liberals and National Peasantists seeing Jews as the arch- enemy of the country, fighting them as adversaries of Romania's economy, and blaming them for controlling industry and the banking system.208 One intellectual after another joined at the time How I Became a Hooligan was published. Nichifor Crainic, Nae Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, Mircea Vulcănescu, Constantin Noica, Emil Cioran, Camil Petrescu, Eugen Ionescu (later known as, Eugène Ionesco), and Mihail Sebastian, part of the Bucharest intelligentsia in this very same period, had been looking for the spiritual, prophetic answers. These are the "modern men" of interwar Bucharest, and even though, many of them are at war with Western democratic principles, their education (N. Ionescu, Rădulescu-Motru), tools of research (Eliade), and literary approach (Petrescu, known primarily for the modernist novel), are acquired in the West. Modernism, writes Griffin is "a revolutionary force, but is so in a sense only distantly related to the one made familiar by standard accounts of the political and social revolutions on which modern historians cut their teeth."209 We often tend to look at modernism almost in a romantic way, and forget that the rationalism it brought, when proven to be unsuccessful in the overwhelming new world of structures, called for a new form of re-sacrilization and the re- enchanting of the world. Nae Ionescu and his cohort were trained in Western academic environments, hitting at the same time an eastern retrograde and collapsed society, a "successor" state, as Peter Sugar called the cradle of Eastern native fascisms.210 Roger Griffin claims that just as the Western modernists were looking for a new political aesthetic revolution, "Eastern men" such as Leo Tolstoy in his book My Religion were equally pondering of a "new religion," one that would "strike the modern world and civilization like so many thunderbolts, through revolution, or war, or the bankruptcy of worm-eaten states."211 Griffin's argument is that visionaries for mystical "epiphanic modernisms"212 were living in the West as much as in the East. We find these visionaries especially in the avant-garde and the futurist cultural movements all over Europe during the interwar period. Solutions were being offered

208 Ibid., p. 29-30. 209 Marius Turda. Modernism and Eugenics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. xi. 210 See: Peter F. Sugar. (editor). Native Fascism in the Successor States, 1918-1945 (Santa Barbara: Clio, 1971). 211 Ibid., p. xi. 212 This term is borrowed from Roger Griffin's conceptual framework. 61

through modernist art and literature, as we see strongly in Italy, but also socio- economic theories which joined the aesthetic stream, as we find displayed in France. Yet, "such solutions were to be realized not by a withdrawal from history into the realm of art, but by applying a utopian artistic, mythopoeic, religious, or technocratic consciousness to the task of harnessing the dynamic forces of modernity itself in such spheres as the natural sciences and social engineering in order to establish a new political and biological order."213 This new order suited also the more traditionally minded Romanian intelligentsia. Simply here, religious terminology of the "new man," or "new life" ("viaţă nouă") as Eliade calls his third and last volume of his 1935 avant-garde trilogy The Hooligans, was creating the framework of a "political religion" devoid of Western secularism. "In less than three years," writes Sebastian with disappointment, "the hopes that held the continent together crashed and crumbled, and all reserves and formulas of democracies have fallen to the ground, the points of reference to peace simply disappeared. It was a true slaughter, in which succumbed both the spirit of Lucarno and the disarmament conference as well as the entire League of Nations. Within this rapid disintegration of all illusions and European hypocrisies, the socialist-democratic forces were entering a terrible decline, while fascisms of all kinds were experiencing sudden revival and a most active fever."214 Sebastian's essay witnesses a turn of the intellectual word to Hitlerism, fascism or the Romanian iron-guardism and describes that this metamorphosis "catastrophically crowned the European dissolutions and meltdowns. And… according to the ancient habit, the Jews would have to pay the price for everyone else's delirium, dementia and despair. If 1931 had been an anti- Semitic year, 1934 followed as a hooligan year."215 Eugène Ionesco, the Romanian playwright, who wrote almost exclusively in French, and who reappears as a close friend throughout Sebastian's Journal, is witnessing this metamorphosis as well. As one of the pioneers in the "theatre of the absurd," he would later express the politicization of that period's intellectuals in his play Rhinoceros. Written in 1959, a time in which the author could look back from his French exile, his play tells the story of the inhabitants of the small, provincial town slowly turning one after another into rhinoceroses. Ultimately, the only human who

213 Griffin quoted in the preface of: Marius Turda. Modernism and Eugenics. Op. cit., p. xii. 214 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit, p. 101. 215 Ibid., p. 102. 62

does not succumb to this mass metamorphosis, is the central character called Bérenger. Yet Bérenger's "rebellion" or hooliganism – much like Mihail Sebastian - is that he observes rhinocerization helplessly, and refuses to be likewise transformed:

BÉRENGER: There they go again! There's a boater impaled on a rhinoceros horn. Oh, it's the Logician's hat! It's the Logician's! That's the bloody limit! The Logician's turned into a rhinoceros! DUDARD: That's no reason to be coarse! BÉRENGER: Dear Lord, who can you turn to – who? I ask you! The Logician is a rhinoceros! DUDARD: Where is he? BÉRENGER: There, that one there, you see! DUDARD: He's the only rhinoceros in a boater! That makes you think. You‟re sure it's your Logician? BÉRENGER: The Logician… a rhinoceros!!! DUDARD: He's still retained a vestige of his old individuality.216

Romanian Jewish writer Norman Manea retells in his own words the dialogue between Bérenger and one of his close friends, embracing the sweeping epidemic of becoming rhinoceros: "the frantic Jean sings the blessing of freedom to a bewildered Bérenger, 'Morals! I'm sick of morals! We must go beyond moral standards. Nature has its own laws. Morals are against nature!' From a responsible obedient citizen who ostracizes Bérenger for his senseless rebellion, Jean has become a raving reactionary. He gradually turns green as he denounces the societal structure he so vehemently protected as a human… Bérenger is terrorized. Before him stands the man who always symbolized order."217 Sebastian's two close intellectual companions, Nae Ionescu, the "logician" and Mircea Eliade, the creative scholar who orderly systematizes the anthropology of religions, are two primary characters witnessed by the Romanian Jewish man to turn into "rhinoceroses." Eugen Ionescu first meets Sebastian at the end of the 1920's during the birth of the young generation circles in Bucharest.218 Together with Sebastian and very few others, Ionesco is one of the few not to join the legionary guardist tendency among Bucharest's young thinkers. If one was to try and bestow on them a political orientation, both Eugène Ionesco and Mihail Sebastian remain loyal to a system of social-democracy, claims historian Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine.219 Responding to

216 Eugène Ionesco. Rhinoceros and Other Plays. Translated by Derek Prouse (New York: Grove Press Inc., 1960), p. 86. 217 Norman Manea. The Fifth Impossibility. Op. cit., p. 159. [italics mine]. 218 Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme – Trois intellectuels roumains dans la tourmente du siècle (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), p. 33. 219 Ibid., p. 36. 63

Petreu, Laignel Lavastine explains, that even as far as 1933-1934, one must be cautious in discussing the "young generation‟s discourse," i.e. not to point to a single monolithic ideology at this stage, and she differentiates even between very close friends such as Eliade and Cioran one one side, and Eugène Ionesco and Mihail Sebastian on the other.220 Zigu Ornea writes that "the phenomenon of conversion (turning green) of this splendid generation was not sudden neither did it start on a certain fixed date. It was a process which had started around 1933 and gradually (just like in Ionesco's Rhinoceros) contaminated the whole."221 One can observe a 'boiling point,' however, after Nae Ionescu succumbs to his newfound political religion. Some followed immediately, but the most, only gradually. The only four remaining uncontaminated, according to Ornea are: P. Comarnescu, Eugène Ionesco, Mihail Sebastian and H. H. Stahl. Immediately after the Second World War, we find a letter of Eugène Ionesco sent from Paris to Tudor Vianu. Herein, he writes, The "Criterion" generation, the impressive "young generation" of fifteen or ten years ago, has broken up and vanished. None of us is forty yet and we are worn out. So many others are dead... We have been brainless, unfortunate guys. As far as I am concerned, I cannot reproach myself for having been a fascist. But this can be reproached to nearly all others. Mihail Sebastian kept a lucid mind and an authentic humanism. What a pity he is no longer here with us. Cioran is here, exiled. He admits he had been wrong, in his youth, yet I find it difficult to accept it. Mircea Eliade has come or will come here soon: to him all is lost, since "communism has won the victory." He is a great culprit. But he, like Cioran, like that imbecile Noica, like the fat Vulcănescu and so many others (Haig Acterian, M. Polihroniade) is the victim of the odious late Nae Ionescu. Had it not been for Nae Ionescu (or had he not fallen out with the king) we would have had today a remarkable generation of leaders aged between 35 and 40 years. Because of him, all became reactionaries. The second culprit is Eliade: at one time he was at the point of taking a left wing stand. Fifteen years have passed since then. Haig Acterian, Polihroniade had been communists before that. They died out of their stupidity and stubbornness. Eliade, too, has pulled after him part of his "generation mates" and the whole intellectual youth. Nae Ionescu and Mircea Eliade were reverently followed. What would things be like if those had been good masters?222

Ionesco's letter, even though giving a sharp diagnosis of the radicalization of his fellow Romanian intellectuals – except for himself and Mihail Sebastian, who had managed to keep "a genuine human kindness," was already insinuating an underlying theme, which Parisian intellectuals in the immediate postwar years would take a hold of and passionately run with, especially in the ten years after the liberation of France: namely that the best antidote to fascism was, and would have been, communism.

220 Ibid., p. 69. 221 Z. Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties. Op. cit., p. 165. 222 Letter written by Eugène Ionesco to Tudor Vianu, dated September 19, 1945, quoted in Ornea. Ibid., pp. 167-168. 64

Thus, Ionesco's letter, in part, regrets the fact that the "misfortune" of some – such as Acterian or Polihroniade had been to leave communism at some point, or Eliade's chagrin, to have given it up altogether, under the influence of Nae Ionescu. It would take Eugène Ionesco at least a few decades longer to see that the communist sympathies of post-war French intellectuals were no alternative at all, as historian Raymond Aron had so early perceived in Polémiques, a series of articles directed against intellectual identification with the Soviet world.223 Raymond Aron's published articles would be eventually summed up in The Opium of the Intellectuals. The Romanian fascist intellectual avant-garde (especially in its literary form) bears similarity to the French parallel phenomenon during the Vichy period, whose "dark years" were demystified by Marcel Ophüls' Le chagrin et la pitié of historians' works such as Robert Paxton's Vichy France (1972) or Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite ni gauche: L'idéologie fasciste en France (1983), which exposed a native intellectual French fascism.224 However, in Romanian scholarly work, except for Marta Petreu's philosophical approach, hardly any other (non-exiled) Romanian scholar dared touch the "sanctity" of the brilliant (and sometimes, named "unlucky") interwar generation. Mihail Sebastian, who refuses to join any corrupted political side, neither right nor left, in a culture of extremisms, witnesses, with the "dawn" of the hooligan year, the very beginning of a literary intellectual native-born Romanian fascism among his colleagues and friends: I think there are a few of us who resist the double summons that terrorize the world today and who are seeking beyond "the right" and "the left." Generally speaking, by their very vocation, intellectuals are destined to seek. Because they are loved neither at the right nor at the left. Because both Marxism and fascism looks at them as suspects. We have to admit that such a stand is full of dangers. Not only political dangers which, after all, do not interest us but, especially, ideological dangers. Refusing both right-wing and left-wing solutions might appear as a neutral, timorous, passive stand, lacking initiative and mission. Isn't this refusal a refuge? Isn't it a dismissal, a desertion? Isn't it a too comfortable solution, for all contingencies? I don‟t think so. There are refusals that are worth an action. When the political triumph of the

223 Raymond Aron. The Opium of the Intellectuals (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), p. xvii. 224 For French intellectual fascism, especially in its literary form (reminiscent of the Romanian intellectual fascism), see for example: Alice Yaeger Kaplan. Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Julia Kristeva. Pouvoirs de l’horreur – Essai sur l’abjection (Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1980); David Caroll. French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995); Mary Ann Frese-Witt. The Search for Modern Tragedy: Aesthetic Fascism in Italy and France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Richard J. Golsan. French Writers and the Politics of Complicity: Crises of Democracy in the 1940s and the 1990s (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Mark Antliff. Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France 1909-1939. Op. cit., and Frederic Spotts. The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation. Op. cit. 65

"right wing" – "left wing" formula is asserted, beyond it, especially, there is enough room for constructive, organized, and realistic action which, while starting out from the superior principle of the pre-eminence of the spirit, is not to overlook the political and social objectives.225

When the scandal is long forgotten, and no attention is given any longer to How I Became a Hooligan, Mihail Sebastian writes these thoughts on the intellectual's apolitical imperative. By this time, in 1937, Bucharest's avant-garde elitist intelligentsia has completely turned to the legionnaire extremism (with the exceptions at the communist extreme). The end of How I Became a Hooligan commences the beginning of a long process of Mihail Sebastian‟s ostracization, process best reflected in the years of his Journal around this period. If For Two Thousand Years reflected on the sad condition of the "intellectual," likened to "a tree evicted from the forest," proudly drawing from its roots, and yet terribly lonely, and, if the aggravating circumstances allowed for such an intellectual to happen to be a Jew, just as Sebastian had written, then a double extraction out of the game of existence will take place: first as an intellectual, and second as a Jew.226 With the publishing of How I Became a Hooligan, both these extractions start taking place.

2.2 The Credo and Testimony of a Romanian Jewish Intellectual From the vast amount of polemic articles written following the publication of Mihail Sebastian's Jewish novel, a limited number addressed the actual book itself. The author mentions only three of them debating a literary critical approach. The rest of writings were indictments, allegations, accusations at best, polemics on Orthodoxy, communism, democracy, Marxist revolution, Jewish assimilation, or curses, and threats at worst. How I Became a Hooligan is in a sense a legal file, a defense facing the charges for the case For Two Thousand Years. Besides dealing with the various problems that the novel created in the public eyes, Sebastian leaves us with much more than an attempt to set things straight and fearlessly writes of the nature of the "Romanian intellectual," at this point in time.

225 Mihail Sebastian. "Nota la un 'manifest personalist'," in Revista Fundaţiilor Regale, IV. No.1. (1937), p. 10; quoted in: Ornea. The Nineteen Thirties. Op. cit., p. 163. 226 See Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit. pp. 84-85. 66

Unlike the French public scene, where the model of a "public intellectual" was started, the word is very loosely used in the Bucharest scene. Sebastian's novel with its subsequent scandal had been mainly intended boldly to raise the subject on the precarious case and nature of a Romanian intellectual himself, who "absurdly" happens to be Jewish and not just Romanian. How I Became a Hooligan lucidly addresses such a condition. It also portrays the Bucharest intellectual realistically in his completely compromised state. The writer boldly answers Jewish as well as anti- Semitic voices claiming that the preposterous proposed combination is nothing but an attempt at assimilation: While for some the novel For Two Thousand Years is simply a "renegade" and "anti-Semitic," for others it is representative of the assimilated Jew." […] I am convinced that pondering the Judaic spirit and the local spirit, simply cannot be an act of assimilation. Indeed, I believe that a writer, in the end-effect, cannot be "assimilated." Such a state would annul his very being. Writing is an act of 'being present' – assimilation, on the other hand, is an act of escape. More grace than a suicide, assimilation is a mutilation. And this is not only the case for Jews, but for everybody else, as well… Assimilation… creates a complex of inferiority, which in itself is a step towards dissolution, sterility, and death. I simply ask of life itself the right to face it with all honesty. This might seem grandiloquent to some or pretentious to others. I don‟t really care. I repeat it and maintain it. This is the reason I write. Therefore I exist.227

Sebastian is "at home" when he writes, and takes a stand that George Steiner described in Our Homeland, the Text as the "literal-spiritual locus of self-recognition and of communal identification for the Jew."228 Steiner's basic thesis is intellectual, philosophical, rather than liturgical or religious. The textuality of the Jewish condition, he claims, from the very destruction of the Temple all the way to the rise of Zionism, has been in a state of survival in the two thousand years of exile, and that survival, writes Steiner "came within a breath of annihilation,"229 indicating the Holocaust. George Steiner, French born American Jew, known for having written extensively on the relationship between language, literature and Holocaust, is taking a "local" approach to Jewish values, very much like Mihail Sebastian. His interpretation of Judaism is Hegelian, dialectic, and even though Sebastian won‟t be able to reach the age and curricula of a Steiner, they both come to a similar conclusion, namely that the Jew's identity is deeply embedded in the text, in the 'letter'. Both of them rigorous literary critics, with a taste for the metaphysical, seeing the textual fabric of the Jew as an almost innate gift. Sebastian does not speak in collective terms at this point in time,

227 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 32-34. 228 George Steiner. "Our Homeland, the Text," in: Salmagundi. No. 66 (Winter – Spring, 1985), p. 4. 229 Ibid., p. 5. 67

but he does, however, speak for the writer who is Jewish and Romanian, at once. One cannot be assimilated as a Jewish writer. Steiner, as well as Heine, Celan, Kafka, or Mihail Sebastian, had all embraced the 'local' – exilic identity alongside their Jewish one, and their Judaism, strong or fledgling as it may be, is fundamental to their writing. Interestingly, the attitude of Steiner towards Zionism ("… is the return to Israel not foreseen, indeed ordained, in the very texts I have cited? Is Zionism not as integral a part of the 'prescribed' mystery and condition of Judaism as were the terrible times of sufferance – Shylock's word – and dispersal?"),230 is pleasantly reminiscent of Mihail Sebastian's in For Two Thousand Years. Unlike the post-Zionist interpretation, both literary critics favorably abstain from strong judgments. "Personally, I have no right to answer," says Steiner. They simply state that their homeland is somewhere else: "Locked materially in a material homeland, the text may, in fact, lose its life-force, and its truth values may be betrayed. But when the text is the homeland, even when it is rooted only in the exact remembrance and seeking of handful wanderers, nomads of the word, it cannot be extinguished. Time is truth's passport and its native ground. What better lodging for a Jew?"231 Mihail Sebastian writes at some point in his confessional "legal file" How I Became a Hooligan, "I owe to this case called For Two Thousand Years a vivid and very complex lesson for my entire life, which has a redemptive effect for the handful of disappointments."232 Even though, along with his contemporary European discourse on 'organic connection to the soil', a discourse that fed both constructive and destructive nationalisms,233 Sebastian's rootedness in Romania – as we have seen

230 Ibid., p. 23. 231 Ibid., p. 25. 232 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 18. 233 Sebastian comparing himself to a tree, at the end of For Two Thousand Years, and a man rooted and grounded in the soil at the Danube river, must be discerned as part of a greater discourse of the first few decade in the twentieth century. The discourse on a "new organic nationalism," a nationalism based on romantic "return to the soil" was very common then. Almost all European nationalisms, including Zionism, as has been pointed out by Boaz Neuman or Gideon Efrat, for example, had been exposed and partially influenced by literary trends on the "return to soil", infatuations with earth, agricultural labor, as promoted by Nobel Prize Literature of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and his Growth of the Soil, in 1920. Gideon Ofrat claims in the introduction of his book Land, Man, Blood: The Myth of the Pioneer and the Rite of the Land in Plays of the Settlements that such ideas were influencing Zionist ideology as well. Even though Jewish nationalism, I.e. Zionism's connection to soil is a unique phenomenon, the scholar attributes significance to the international "soil-connected" literary and philosophical trends : גדעון אפרת. אדמה, אדם, דם: מיתוס החלוץ ופולחן האדמה במחזות ההתיישבות )תל אביב: צ'ריקובר, 1980(, עמ' 19-20: "זהו ז'אנר ישראלי טהור למרות ההשפעה הברורה של ספרות האדמה הבינלאומית של אותן שנים – 'ברכת האדמה' מאת קונט האמסון, 'האדמה החדשה' מאת הארווד , 'המהגרים' של יוהן בויאר, 'האדמה הטובה' של פרל באק, 'האדמה' של אמיל זולה, או 'קרקע בתולה' מאת שולוחוב." 68

in the first chapter – will become less categorical,234 especially with the progression of the fascist years. One can easily see a "gathering of oneself" to the place of community, as Steiner describes in his essay, taking place in Sebastian's case as well. While most intellectuals of the young generation are moving to politics, Sebastian's intellectual life is being crystallized as apolitical, textual, and local in a strangely cosmopolitan way. How I Became a Hooligan, in that sense is truly a moment of self- discovery, of an even greater spiritual break with "half-memories, half-affections, half-truths," and the ideological conditions he was working under. From this period on (a fact that is specially marked given the chronological records of the Journal), we can see an increasing identification with the Jewish people. As Leon Volovici points out, "that prideful and dignified I [or ego] from For Two Thousand Years" is increasingly becoming a „we’,235 as a new and increasingly marginalized status for this Jewish intellectual is marked with the end of How I Became a Hooligan. This of course, will find its culmination during the years 1938-1944, when fascism and anti- Semitism are being legally enforced in Romanian space.

See also Boaz Neumann. Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011). Therefore, what in some countries became an intrinsic romantic element in nationalism, in other countries, especially where the "blood" element was added, it turned to fascism or Nazism. See: Mircea Eliade. Profetism Românesc (Bucureşti: Roza Vânturilor, 1990), p. 253, as an example of reprinted "organic, soil-connected" fascist writing, a compilation of Eliade's articles written between 1927-1938, from various newspapers (but also including some articles between 1952-1953), reprinted in Romania immediately after the fall of communism in 1990, with the subtitle, "a spiritual itinerary – letters to a provincial regarding the destiny of Romanian culture." Zeev Barbu tells in his article on the analytical portrayal of the Iron Guard, that no other fascist movement – in his opinion – was as morbidly dedicated to a "deeper sense of personal… sacrifice. To start with, one of the main elite groups within the Iron Guard was the so-called 'death-team,' consisting of young fanatics ready to kill and be killed. Their status and mission were highly institutionalized, or rather ritualized. It was said that they used to wear around their necks a tiny bag of Romanian soil and that there was nothing in the world that they would not do at the sight of it." Zeev Barbu. "Psycho-Historical and Sociological Perspectives on the Iron Guard, the Fascist Movement of Romania," in: Larsen Stein Ugelvik, Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter Myklebust. (editors). Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of European Fascism (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), p. 388. See also: Ben Kiernan. Blood and Soil – A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). While in the Nazi case, it was Richard Walther Darré who popularized the idea of "blood and soil" in a book called A New Nobility Based on Blood and Soil, anthropologists and political scientists point to the fact that the idea of a nation's return to its soil and of organic nationalism was prevalent from the early enlightenment on. Later, the blood-element would be added. See: Anthony D. Smith. Ethno-Symbolism and Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2009). 234 See for example Sebastian's journal entry on: September 27, 1941. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 416-417. 235 Leon Volovici points to the fact that in the progression of the journal there is an increasing collective identification with the Jewish people, on Sebastian's part. He uses less the word "I", and more "we" as the time approaches more and more what Saul Friedländer has called The Years of Extermination. See: Leon Volovici. "Insula lui Mihail Sebastian: Bucureşti 1939-1944." Op. cit., pp. 219-234. 69

Philip Rieff rightly states that "something went astray with the intellectual(s) in the twentieth century,"236 speaking of the period preceding as well as during WWII. When the idea of public intellectual started in France, for example, the established intellectuals' higher calling was that of "moral watchmen over the modern state."237 Since the French revolution, French intellectuals had played an important role in shaping of European and even global political discourses that centered on democracy and the public debate. However, as Mark Antliff had pointed out in Avant-Garde Fascism: The Mobilization of Myth, Art, and Culture in France 1909-1939 the fascism that we find in the Vichy period was neither born out of vacuum, nor was it imported German Nazism with French adherents. As a cultural historian, Antliff discovers that French fascists – artists, intellectuals, writers – studied and combined modernist theories of aesthetics, cubism, futurism, surrealism, into the French fascist theory of a new man.238 This process occurred especially between 1909 and 1939, contradicting a whole class of French historians who were claiming that "reclassements idéologiques" were a form of "Nazi redistribution" that had its effect on the intellectual life of France.239 Raymond Aron who wrote The Opium of the Intellectuals said that "intellectuals suffer from their inability to alter the course of events. But they underestimate their influence. In a long-term sense, politicians are the disciples of scholars or writers."240 Just as had happened in the French case, the intellectuals in Romania's 1930s were abandoning their position as "moral watchmen" and believed that joining politics would actually have the best influence. The legionary "new intellectuals" were not suffering at all from an inability to alter the course of events. They were participating in a reactionary and revolutionary violent form of changing events. In For Two Thousand Years Sebastian describes the inability of the intellectual, still a moral watchman, as an almost perverse injustice,

236 Philip Rieff. The Feeling Intellect: Selected Writings (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1990), p. 222. 237 Barbara A. Misztal. Intellectuals and the Public Good. Op.cit., p. 2. 238 Mark Antliff. Avant-Garde Fascism. Op. cit., p. 2. 239 Pascal Ory and Jean-François Sirinelli. Les Intellectuels en France, de l'Affaire Dreyfus à nos jours (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986), pp. 115-116. For these French historians, the fascist conversion of French intellectuals was merely a logical preference to give in to Hitler's policy, a form of surrender, cowardly, but nevertheless, a reaction that was crystallized around 1938. Similar to rehabilitating Romanian historians, this French example amongst others, has often purified their intelligentsia from all inherent fascisms and portrayed it as a merely surrendered element in the Nazification process. 240 Raymond Aron. The Opium of the Intellectuals. Op. cit., p. 248. [italics mine]. 70

when in a scene the protagonist is watching an anti-Semitic drama taking place, as a mere helpless bystander: "Yesterday's event, which had caught me by surprise and left me so bewildered, clarified mercilessly the sad condition of those people to whom I belong and whose community is the fellowship of intellectuals. A strange perversion it is: to be watching from the side of a road, and see the entire drama, a drama that is eliminating you because it does not deal with spectators, and then simply express some "clean ideas" out of this fiasco. I'd be too gentle with myself if I called this a conflict between thought and action. It seems that these are two completely different functions, incompatible with one another, and nevertheless both justified."241

Sebastian suffers as an intellectual because he believes in its inherent task as a moral watchman. His action is in the form of writing, cultural criticism, and discourse on values and identity. He firmly believes in the dictum of the intellectual to stay out of politics. His primary objection to the phenomenon of Bucharest's intellectuals is their compatibility: the quick agreeableness and affinity with all extremes, the lack of taking any position, in word or writing, in "intellectual action," in adamantly speaking for the sake of public engagement, defending the weak, human dignity, courage or conviction : There is nothing urgent for Bucharest's intellectual. He never judges based on defined guidelines. His judgments are based on personal, lyrical and confused dispositions. In general, no matter where he left off, he can arrive wherever he feels like it. There is no problem too strict, for him to manage to escape it. He will easily move from a theory of superior mathematics, in straight line, to the change of government. It is typical for our day-to-day culture to be dominated by two or three nerve-haunting ideas, which swirl for a day, a week, or a month through news magazines, coffee or printing shops, until they have worn out or become a matter of boredom.242

How I Became a Hooligan relates one incident which poignantly presents the problem of the intellectuals' compatibilities, as Sebastian calls them. In that same hooligan year, a distinguished intellectual, Jew and Frenchman, Léon Pierre-Quint (Léon Steindecker) well-known editor and literary critique, and a friend of Sebastian, remains flabbergasted in his Romanian visit, after witnessing an intellectual brotherhood-type reunion in Bucharest where some communists and some Cuzists share a friendly evening together. The author recounts the scene: “I overheard him asking for an explanation from a notorious Legionnaire, whom he found in the middle of an affectionate intellectual tenderness with a Marxist, this one just as notorious.243 Pierre-Quint could not grasp how such kinship might be possible between two

241 Ibid., p. 85. 242 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 12. 243 In a footnote to his story Sebastian assures his reader that this is no fable, but the two extremists are actually two very well-known intellectuals of the time, one of the right – Mihail Polihroniade, 71

people who theoretically should be separated by at least ten different worlds. I remember just as well the answer of the two amicable extremists. „See, we are only friends. Thus, we don‟t engage ourselves in anything.‟ This word „only‟ is a breviary of Bucharest psychology. It explains many things, and it condones everything. „Comment ça ne vous engage a rien? Mais un seul geste engage, Monsieur.’ Yet Léon Pierre-Quint was wrong about this. These people do not commit themselves to anything: not to hatred, not to love, life, nor death. Whatever they may do, whatever they may say, remains somewhere, in some corner of consciousness, and a smile that annuls what has been done retracts that which has been said. Rigor, in any form, is outside their competence. They are a free people. Maybe the only free people in the whole of Europe, because their deeds do not bind them, and their ideas do not oblige them.”244

The inflammatory Bucharest intellectuals especially hate one thing: the critical spirit. If philosopher Julia Kristeva, when writing about the French literary fascism, speaks of "abjection" or a "romanticized vision of violent, dark revolts of being,”245 Sebastian sees the new Romanian fascist hommes de lettres as "men in uniform," proclaiming an archetype of human grandeur, mainly occupied with the nationalist mobilization of the masses:246 "[…] the primacy of the collective at the expense of the individual […] a pathetic idea yet with great success. It seems an especially just idea. Collectivism surpasses individualism. The accent moves from 'a human being' to the 'masses.' Yet this global truth contains innumerable dangers and a terrifying artificiality. From one reality we easily arrive at an abstraction: the death of the individual. They announce it enthusiastically."247

journalist, member of the Criterion literary society as well as of the Iron Guard, and the second of the left – Belu Silber, a Jew and a Marxist activist involved in underground communist activity. 244 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 20-21. 245 Julia Kristeva. Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Op. cit., pp. 157-162. 246 Historian George L. Mosse uses this descriptive form to define the Nazi phenomenon. George L. Mosse. Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1980), pp. 159-196. 247 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., pp. 54-55. 72

Chapter 3 The Journal and the Fascist Years: 1935-1944 Later, much later, a study may be written about a strange phenomenon of these times: namely, the fact that words are losing their meaning, becoming weightless and devoid of content. Their speakers do not believe them, while their hearers do not understand them. If you analyzed word by word, grammatically, syntactically, and semantically, the declarations to be found almost daily in the newspapers, and if you opposed these with the facts to which they refer, you would see there is an absolute split between word and reality. This is not the first time that such thoughts (written here badly) have occurred to me, but the occasion today was a sentence in a speech that the General [Antonescu] made yesterday: "Those who, in their relations with defenseless people, have revived in today's world the terror and barbaric savagery of the past will themselves be branded by contemporaries and punished by history as they deserve."248

After having set an intellectual context for Romanian fascism in the 1930's, by means of both Sebastian's Jewish novel For Two Thousand Years and his essay in response to the subsequent scandal, How I Became a Hooligan, two works that give detailed information on both Sebastian's identity and intellectual world, we can now delve into what has become since 1996, the testimony "that turned on the light in Romanian post-communist society and called those hundreds of thousands of Jewish souls murdered by Romanian soldiers and civilians, in a Romanian administrated Holocaust, back to life."249 Mihail Sebastian was known on the Romanian literary and cultural scene primarily for his novels Femei (Women, 1933), Oraşul cu salcâmi (The Town with Acacia Trees, 1935) and Accidentul (The Accident, 1940), but also for plays such as Jocul de-a vacanţa (Holiday Games, written in 1936 and staged in 1938), The Star Without a Name (Steaua fără nume, written in 1943, produced and staged under a fictitious name because of the anti-Semitic Romanian legislation in the Holocaust period), Ultima oră (Breaking news, finished in 1944 and staged after the writer's death, in 1946), or Insula (The Island, unfinished at the time of Sebastian's premature death was staged in 1947 after a closing scene was added by his friend Mircea Ştefănescu). Now, with the final publication of his journal, Sebastian was witnessing to his audience with a Jewish voice, one that had been stifled, denied, or prohibited by law. The communist years had viewed Sebastian's two Jewish works, De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years) and Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a

248 Wednesday, 26 March, 1941. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 334-335. 249 Ungureanu. "Facing History: Romania and the Holocaust." Op. cit. 73

Hooligan), as redundant. Apart from these two works, the great literary historian of the communist period, George Călinescu would decree, "Mihail Sebastian, at core a Cartesian thinker, keeping things 'clear and distinct'… in erotic material, a Stendhalian,… abstract in his Accident,… remains limited by a small tragic experience, namely that of his Judaic condition."250 Călinescu explains that For Two Thousand Years was a polemic essay with a dramatic exaggeration, and was followed by an essay that simply misunderstood Nae Ionescu's sophistication.251 Mihail Sebastian, "the star without a name" remained until 1996 a star unknown for his 'Jewish' witness especially in his diary, for the manuscripts that made up his journal were smuggled out of Romania into France in 1961. This last document turned out to be a significant hidden evidential record for both fascist as well as communist years. Being not only a plaidoyer for individual freedom, intellectual integrity, democratic values, humanism, but also a witness of the horrendous Antonescu regime, the extremism of the right and the left, the indictment of an entire intellectual generation sold out to legionnaire ideology, as well the local Holocaust and destruction of Romania's Jewry, the journal would not have been received at all during the communist years of negationism. With the 1989 upheavals, and the entire domino- effect fall of the Eastern European communism, hopes for a historical démarche as well as for cultural and academic honesty to face Romania's darkened past, rose up. However, soon after the 1989 Revolution, it became clear that distortions and concealment of a local Holocaust simply continued in a different form. Between 1945 and 1989/1990 there had been a simplistic ideological binary of communist-fascist confrontation while the Romanians themselves remained totally oblivious to the suffering of Romanian Jews and the thoroughly enacted genocide against them.252 The only serious work that had been printed in communist Romania had been Matatias Carp's three elaborate volumes entitled Cartea neagră (The Black Book), published only between 1946 and 1948. Working as secretary-general of the Union of Romanian Jews, Carp obviously had not only the archival access,

250 George Călinescu. Istoria literaturii române – compendiu (Bucureşti: editura pentru literatură, 1968), p. 393. 251 Ibid., p. 394. 252 See more on this in: Liviu Rotman. "Memory of the Holocaust in Communist Romania: From Minimization to Oblivion," in Mihail E. Ionescu and Liviu Rotman. (editors). The Holocaust and Romania: History and Contemporary Significance (Bucharest: "Goldstein Goren" Center for Hebrew Studies of Bucharest University, 2003), pp. 205-216. 74

connections and know-how that the immense work of an immediate 'historian' required, but also a sense of responsibility in the face of the tremendous sufferings that befell the Jewish community, and therefore, Carp started gathering material evidence of the terrors already carried out in June 1941, as an exclusively personal initiative. Aided by his wife alone, he began to systematize the great numbers of declarations, witnesses, official communications, official orders, pictures, reports of murder, theft, and other legionary activities against Jews in the spring of 1943.253 After 1948, however, the communist authorities made sure of no further dissemination of this essential study, withdrawing the book from all bookshops.254 The historiography throughout this period was influenced by the Stalinist method's mechanical interpretations: a flat, highly selective description of the dictatorship of Carol II, the legionary movement, and the fascist dictatorship of General Antonescu were lumped together in a characterization without nuances or distinctions.255 Although a series of studies had been devoted to a communist characterization of interwar Romanian fascism, even amongst their ambiguous conclusions, facts regarding the pogroms against Jews, deportations to Transnistria, or anti-Jewish measures, were either completely denied, minimized, or simply faked. The "rehabilitating" tradition of Romanian historians, becoming a trend during this period, was generally adopting the idea that Romania, unlike Germany and the other states, had not practiced an anti-Semitism that considered genocide as the solution for the 'Jewish Question.'256 Fascism had been portrayed as an embodiment of "monopoly capital" and the main sufferers had not been primarily Jewish, but also communists and democracy loving citizens. Even prominent Jewish historians were being faithful to the Communist Party and aiding the distortion of facts.257

253 Matatias Carp. Cartea neagră: Fapte şi documente. Suferinţele evreilor din România 1940-1944. Vol 1 (Bucureşti: Socec & Co., 1946), pp. 13-14. Carp's pioneering research and gathering of evidence provided for a remarkable resource for later classic works such as Jean Ancel's History of the Holocaust: Romania, published in Hebrew, in 2002. Therein, he gives Carp also the credit for fighting alongside Wilhelm Filderman in a joint effort to hinder the deportation of the Jews in the Regat and in southern Transylvania. See: ז'אן אנצ'ל. תולדות השואה: רומניה. כרך שני )ירושלים: יד ושם, תשס"ב(, עמ' 1264-1268. 254 Michael Shafir. "Distortion, Negationism, and Minimalization of the Holocaust in Postwar Romania," in: Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, Mihail E. Ionescu. (editors). Final Report / International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania; President of the Commission: Elie Wiesel (Iași: Polirom, 2004), pp. 336-337. 255 Radu Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel. Op. cit., p. 2. 256 Ibid., pp. 6-7 257 See: Alexandru Florian. "Treatment o the Holocaust in Romanian Textbooks," in: Randolph L. Branham. (editor). The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 75

Once the Iron Curtain had fallen from Eastern Europe, the expectation for change in Romanian historiography remained short-lived. The post-communist public discourse, in a country with very little democratic tradition, could have been predicted. Political support for the Greater Romania Party was increasing, Holocaust denials were being diffused, and when it came to historical figures such as Marshal Ion Antonescu, it was surprising to see that left and right-wing parties would surrender their differences when reference was made to the "great patriot who fought for his country until death."258 Reminiscent of Mihail Sebastian's analysis of Romanian intellectual 'compatibilities', the public quickly praised and rehabilitated past war criminals. Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran or Nae Ionescu's interwar literary creation with its nationalistic tones was back in print. In 1991 the Romanian Parliament observed a minute of silence to commemorate forty five years since the execution of Antonescu.259 He, according to, public opinion, had not killed Jews, like Hitler, Mussolini or Horthy, but had saved them, according to the daily Bucharest newspaper Ziua, which launched a 1995 campaign to name one of the capital's boulevards after the convicted war criminal who had enforced policies responsible for the deaths of as many as almost 400,000 people, most of them Romanian Jews, as well as Romas and Ukrainian Jews.260 It was within this nebulous cultural reading of Romania's past that a group of intellectuals interested in Mihail Sebastian's legacy had contacted Michele Hechter, daughter of Poldy, Sebastian's older brother. Both he and Benu Hechter, the younger brother of Mihail Sebastian, had kept the nine diary notebooks that had been

237-286; Victor Eskenazy. "The Holocaust and Romanian Historiography: Communist and Neo- Communist Revisionism," in: Branham. The Tragedy of Romanian Jewry. Op. cit., pp. 173-232; see also the first chapter in the previously mentioned book by Radu Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel. Op. cit, pp. 1-23. 258 This had been the description in a submitted draft resolution to the upper house of the Romanian Parliament by Senator Ioan Moisin. 259 Michael Shafir. "Distortion, Negationism, and Minimalization of the Holocaust in Postwar Romania." Op. cit., p. 349. 260 The number of Jewish casualties at the end of WWII in Romania varies amongst the main historians who have written in-depth works on the Romanian Holocaust. I shall make mention here only of Raul Hilberg, Jean Ancel and Radu Ioanid. While Hilberg estimates a loss of 370,000 Jews out of 800,000 by the end of 1945, Ancel speaks of the murder of 420,000 Jews amongst whom 180,000 were of Ukrainian origin (the figure in Ancel's documentation comes from an estimated census of 800,000 Romanian Jews in 1940), and Ioanid, states that out of 756,930 Jews (the last Romanian census prior to WWII, taken in 1930) about 375,000 had survived. Radu Ioanid. The Holocaust in Romania (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), pp. 289-290. See also pages 170-175 on more statistics. See also: Raul Hilberg. The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967), pp. 485-508, 670; and: אנצ'ל. תולדות השואה: רומניה. כרך שני. שם, עמ' 1402-1403. 76

smuggled into France, secretly, in 1961.261 When Benu left for France he took the manuscripts with him, and shared them there with Poldy Hechter who had been in Paris already, before the outbreak of the Second World War. Mihail Sebastian "had written his diary, without any intention of seeing it published, during the early years of Nazism as well as throughout the war that followed… The diary was to be strictly personal and my uncle Béno, who was in Bucharest with Mihail during those years, was adamant that it should remain so."262 The two brothers, older and younger, both survivors of the Holocaust, one having gone through the Drancy camps and the other witnessing the Romanian fascist regime, had argued many times about the publication of the document, Poldy upholding the view that the journal must become known, especially given the fact that Sebastian's play A Star Without a Name was already being staged and was known in Paris. Poldy was well aware of the journal's historical value, and also being a good friend of Eugène Ionesco, by now a famous Romanian French playwright, he had access to literary circles and various publications. They all advised him to give up the idea on grounds that the book would "allegedly interest no one in France: too alien and too parochial! Of course, that was far from being the real reason! In fact, the diary revealed the political involvement of a few Romanian celebrities in France, such as Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran who had entanglements with the Iron Guard. Nobody wishes to bring their dark past back to light."263 Eventually the two brothers gave up the publishing idea, they also passed away, and only after the change in the Romanian political map, was Sebastian's niece Michele Hechter approached by a number of Romanian intellectuals such as the Israeli historian Leon Volovici. "A friend of Mr. Volovici, a truly unique and extraordinary man, came all the way from New York in order to see us and ask if we would accept publishing the diary in Bucharest. He found the words to convince us and said that many, many people, in New York, in Tel Aviv, Bucharest and Paris attached great importance to these memories. We agreed on terms. We, the new generation, were

261 See introductory notes to the Romanian edition of the journal by Gabriela Omăt in: Mihail Sebastian. Jurnal 1935-1944. Text ȋngrijit de Gabriela Omăt. Prefaţă şi note de Leon Volovici (Bucureşti: Humanitas, 1996), p. 13 ff. 262 Quoted from the speech given by Michele Hechter at the ceremony of the Literary-Prize initiation in Munich, 20.11.2006. Retrieved from the Geschwister-Scholl Association's website: www.geschwister- scholl-preis.de/preistraeger_2000-2009/2006/hechter.php 263 Ibid. 77

eager to reveal what had been said about that little known page of history."264 Within six months the project was finalized and when it reached the bookstores, not only did it quickly become a best-seller, but it also stirred a tremendously heated controversy over Romania's responsibility in the crimes of the Second World War. After its Romanian edition, the diary was translated into French, English, Hebrew, German, Spanish, and Polish. Volovici states in the Romanian preface that is very unlikely that Sebastian, a literary aesthete, "would have published his journal, with no literary transfiguration… it is to be assumed that he would have used it as material for a new novel, of the confessional type, or rather, as a testimonial-evidence type of essay."265 The journal can be read on many levels, explains the same intellectual historian in his preface:266 the level of an intimate journal, describing the writer's interior moods, states of mind, family relationships, sporadic love affairs and emotional attachments, his transparent dream world, literally recording a number of dreams and the author's ponderings on them; then there is the creative level, in which we discover a writer's thoughts and processes, battles, failures, ups and downs in the art of literary creation; then there is the Jewish aspect of the journal allowing us insight into the individualistic journey of an intellectual Jew, his amiable relationships in the greater Jewish community, or unique individuals within it – such as the Zionist and ideologue A. L. Zissu, the communist Belu Silber, or the writers Felix Aderca and Camil Baltazar, his increasing identification with the plight and suffering of his co- religionists, a vivid, realistic and intensified follow-up, almost, to the novel For Two Thousand Years; and the witnessing level of the journal, which Volovici calls the "intellectual-political" realm of the diary, an aspect which for the historical reader of this period may be the most strident part of the journal. It is this last part that occupies the greatest space, relating the encounters with his closest entourage: Mircea Eliade, Camil Petrescu, Nae Ionescu, Eugène Ionesco (who at the time of the journal's writing is still Eugen Ionescu), Antoine Bibescu, Al. Rosetti, E. M. Cioran, Radu Cioculescu, C. Vişoianu, and others. Following the journal's publication, an entire file called Dosar: Mihail Sebastian was put together by Iordan Chimet, an essayist, poet and film critic, calling for many literary and intellectual Romanian voices to comment on Sebastian's journal.

264 Ibid. 265 Sebastian. Jurnal. Op. cit., p. 5. 266 Ibid., p. 6. 78

The belletristic file is not historical research but an anthology of short essays: an antithesis to the hateful articles following his Jewish novel in 1934/1935. Chimet's file allows primarily for an intellectual contextualization of the journal in post-communist Romanian discourse, the editor being well aware of still lingering extremisms just like in the hooligan year: I must say that there have not been missing enough inadmissible excesses, simplifications, unbridled information, and unjust sentences. I will not name names: I hoped that between today's young readers, the commentators of the Journal and the historical world to which Sebastian made reference there would be no intermediary nor any other instance, which would own the truths that are being discussed... In a situation, quite similar to that in which we are living today – an emerging society in which fanaticism easily finds its new adepts – Thomas Mann, one of the most authentic representatives of European humanism, under whose imprint Mihail Sebastian also asserted himself, as did those friends that remained loyal to him, defined cultural identity in the mid-1930s as follows: "I was born for the purpose of giving testimony in a climate of serenity, rather than in a climate of martyrdom, to bring the world a message of peace, rather than to feed hostilities and hatred."267

This last chapter shall look at three aspects of the diary's use in the historian's workshop. Firstly, I will look at the Jewish witness aspect of the journal, a journal of identity facing the Holocaust; secondly, I will inquire how this journal might serve the student of the Holocaust period and discern its value as a historical document; and thirdly, I will look at the journal as a witness element for the intellectual world.

3.1. A Jewish Journal When looking at the Journal as a witnessing tool regarding the Romanian Holocaust, we automatically have to look at Mihail Sebastian as a Jew, and examine an identity filled diary. Many have pointed out that Mihail Sebastian may have well been estranged from deep involvement in Jewish cultural life, reminiscent of the position of Jewish Eastern European intellectuals such as: the Polish figure of Maurycy Gottlieb, the Polish Jewish realist painter,268 or the Transylvanian Hungarian Jewish writer, Ernö Ligeti,269 the intellectual figures in Guy Miron's Hungarian

267 Iordan Chimet. "Sugestii pentru o nouă lectură a Jurnalului," in: Iordan Chimet. (editor). Dosar: Mihail Sebastian (Bucureşti: Editura Universal Dalsi, 2001), pp. v-vi. 268 Leon Volovici draws this comparison, although, I personally find it problematic given the time difference between the two. Sebastian started to write half a century after Gottlieb's death. The assimilation and emancipation processes had increased exponentially in that period, especially for a writer or intellectual type as was Sebastian. See: Leon Volovici. "Mihail Sebastian: A Jewish Writer and His (Antisemitic) Master," in: Richard L. Cohen, Jonathan Frankel and Stefani Hoffman. (editors). Insiders and Outsiders: Dilemmas of East European Jewry (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2010), pp. 58-69. 269 Zvi Hartman's comparison of Sebastian with Ernö Ligeti, is more a judgment than a historical study. The author accuses that both intellectual "did not digest the mentality changes in the nations around 79

Jewish intellectuals in the midst of a "waning emancipation,"270 the bivalent (rather than ambivalent) road taken by people such as Gustav Landauer, the "Hebrew Humanist" as Martin Buber called him,271 or Jakob Wasserman and his book Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (My Path as German and Jew), the last of whom Sebastian himself uses as a comparison to his standing.272 Nevertheless, Sebastian states in one way or the other, in all three of his works dealt with here, "I will never cease to be Jewish."273 He does not try to hide his Jewish identity. Neither is he accepting that "every Jew is a king,"274 as tradition has it, but takes his 'Jewishness' as a mere fact. "Either you are or you aren't."275 He is no renegade Jew. He is not a Zionist Jew, nor is he anti-Zionist. He does not share Walter Benjamin‟s views on historical materialism, nor does he believe in communism and radical activism, as does his contemporary Eliezer Greenboim, self-converted into Leon Berger, who ends up a Kapo at Auschwitz.276 Mihail Sebastian refuses all radicalism. Historians have often tried to placate accusations of ambivalence in the writer, yet unlike the common view, after having written For Two Thousand Years, and the lessons learned and described in How I Became a Hooligan, Sebastian is no less ambivalent figure than that of a post-emancipationist Jewish intellectual within the modern world. Even though he may be the "most Romanian amongst the Jewish

them… they consciously kept their eyes shut. They believed that assimilated Jews would have a chance to be part of the Gentile society and wanted to persuade first and foremost themselves, but also the Gentiles, that intellectual Jews like themselves should be part or parcel of the society in which they were living. This was their credo… They were trapped in their misconception of a liberal society. These two writers represented the views of a large part of the assimilated Jews and a thin stratum of both Romanian and Hungarian intellectuals in Romania who believed in a liberal and democratic society." Zvi Hartman. "A Short Comparatice Study of the Failure of Jewish Assimilation in the Interwar Era: Ernö Ligeti (Cluj) and Mihail Sebastian (Bucharest)," in: Anca Ciuciu and Camelia Crăciun. (editors) Istorie şi memorie evreiască. Volum omagial dedicate doamnei Dr. Lya Benjamin (Bucureşti: Editura Hasefer, 2011), p. 108. Each of Hartman's statements on Sebastian are inaccurate and mistaken. 270 See Guy Miron's book on the Jewish intellectual crisis, published in Hebrew: גיא מריון ואנה סלאי. )עורכים(. יהודים על פרשת דרכים: שיח הזהות היהודית בהונגריה בין משבר להתחדשות 1908-1926 )תל אביב: אוניברסיטת בר-אילן, 2008(. 271 See chapter 3, "On the Bivalent Way," in: Paul Mendes-Flohr. Divided Passions. Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1991), pp. 194 ff. 272 Jakob Wassermann. Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Frankfurt a.M.: Jüdischer Verlag, 2005). The book had been first printed in 1921. See also Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 35. 273 Sebastian. De două mii de ani. Op. cit., p. 224. 274 Ibid., p. 30. 275 Ibid., p. 224. 276 Petreu in her above mentioned work Diavolul şi ucenicul său attempted to "radicalize" Sebastian, to the right, however. For a genuine left-wing radicalization historical record see Tuvia Friling's historical work on Leon Berger: טוביה פרילינג. מי אתה ליאון ברז'ה? סיפורו של קאפו באושוויץ. היסטוריה, פוליטיקה וזיכרון )תך אביב: רסלינג, .)2009 80

writers of his generation: (Beniamin Fundoianu, later known as French poet and Philosopher Bejamine Fondane, Felix Aderca, Max Blecher, Ilarie Voronca, Isac Peltz, and Ion Călugăru)",277 we find that the literary novel, the follow-up essay and Sebastian's journal discussed here, are definitely works of Jewish identity. The first three years of the Journal contain few "Jewish elements" for those who look for "assimilation" charges against the writer. Sebastian starts his diary in the form we have it today278 with comments on his two previous "Jewish" works: For Two Thousand Years and How I Became a Hooligan. The years 1935, 1936 and 1937 are filled with the records of numerus clausus, anti-Semitic manifestations, the rise of Hitlerism, and legionairism, the sporadic pogroms, and more than anything the increasing anti-Semitism amongst his friends who are growing more distant to him. We find many notes relating to Jewish friends and acquaintances, regarding his family, his mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, as well as regarding Jewish writers or figures such as Zissu, Alcalay, or the writer Max Blecher. The journal's pages in these first years also expose a Jewish "subconscious": memories from his childhood as a Jewish boy in 7th grade, in Brăila, dreams which the author writes out and reflects upon, dreams that are "visited" by Jews or Jewish personalities such as the chief Rabbi of Romania, Jacob Itzhak Niemirower. It is a sure fact that a primary concern of the diarist, besides intimate personal stories, cultural events, literary notes and relational encounters, is the subject of anti- Semitism and the increasing marginalization of the Jews, to the point of legal oppression. On numerous occasions from the beginning of the journal until 1941, Sebastian writes about his novel For Two Thousand Years. On May, 1936 he comments, "I should be very happy to have that book published some day without Nae's (Ionescu) preface and without any explanation on my part. There is no doubt that of everything I have written, it is the book that will live on."279 The diary notices how Jewish men and women of culture are losing their jobs or are being discriminated against. The journal helps us understand, that with time Sebastian is more and more

277 Volovici. "Mihail Sebastian: A Jewish Writer and His (Antisemitic) Master." Op. cit., p. 59. 278 Zigu Ornea as well as Joanne Roberts are of the opinion that Sebastian "started his new diary in response to the public reaction to his novel. While this could be the case, we have no evidence for it. On the contrary, we know that bits and pieces of the journal got lost while others were edited and even published in an adapted literary form. See for example, Lumea românească. An II. Nr. 566 (December 25, 1938). 279 Wednesday, 27 May, 1936. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p.52. 81

numbered amongst 'his own': "In the last issue of Cuget clar [Clear Thinking], Iorga translates with approval a short article of mine for Independenţa (the one with Petre Bellu) – doubtless without realizing that it was I who wrote it, because it was signed 'Flaminius.' So there I am, translated by Nicolae Iorga.280 Quite a tricky situation. In the same issue, the very next item, a regular correspondent lays into Sergiu Dan, Camil Baltazar, and Mihail Sebastian, as those 'corruptors of the mind'."281 As emancipation keeps waning away, and the slaps in the face of those who had believed in modernity's humane side, are escalating, we find that the theatre world is also turning against its Jews. Paul Prodan, the director of the Romanian National Theatre is quoted saying, "So what do you want? That I should resign and pack my bags? That Mr. Mihail Sebastian should be appointed in my place? Well that's not going to happen. It can't happen, because he's a Jew."282 At this point Sebastian is still amused by sudden anti-Semitic remarks in cultural high society, yet soon, with the mounting Nazification of Europe, a phenomenon he follows as much as he pays attention to the Jews' predicament accompanying it, alarmed concern starts to take over his mood. By the end of December 1937, when the great success of the Iron Guard has completely dampened his spirit, Sebastian takes note, desperately: "…they're talking of thirty to thirty-five deputies. In any case, hundreds of thousands of votes, whole districts swung over to them. It is Germany's 'September 1930' all over again…. To what extent, I ask, can all this change one letter, one comma even, in a destiny that is not mine but all of ours?"283 From 1938 on, the Jew Mihail Sebastian is writing in mostly from a Jewish collective point of view. His anxieties are indeed concerned with a "destiny that is ours." We read about Jewish holidays such as Rosh Ha'shana, or Yom Kippur, and find that he even goes to the synagogue sometimes, as a questioning intellectual, and maybe as an outsider, but nevertheless, his identification with the Jewish collective is rising. Even his frequent indulgence in every possible expression of classical music reminds him of his Jewishness:

280 Nicolae Iorga is considered one of the greatest of Romania's historians, who was always a politician, a literary critic, memoirist, playwright, co-founder of the Democratic Nationalist Party, and last but not least, quite an anti-Semite as well. 281 Thursday, 25 February, 1937. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 113. 282 Thursday, 26 November, 1936. Ibid., p. 93. 283 Tuesday, 21 December, 1937. Ibid., pp. 134-135. 82

On Tuesday, as I listened to the St. Matthew Passion, I couldn't get the Evangelist's words out of my mind: "Now, on the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him: 'Where wilt Thou that we prepare for Thee to eat the Passover?'… It was the feast that we too have been celebrating since yesterday evening, the unleavened bread we eat, the wine we drink… I suddenly remembered that Jesus was a Jew – something of which I am never sufficiently aware, and which forces me to think again about our terrible destiny. In the same way I stopped last autumn at Chartres Cathedral to look at the Circumcision of Jesus. It was just like an extraordinary bris: an old man, holding the ritual knife in one hand and the child's "willy" in the other, looked like the "Moishe shoikhet" in Brăila. I have been reading Nietzsche's Daybreak since yesterday evening. Somewhere it talks of the "Jewish ballast" in Christianity. How terribly ironic is that ballast, but somehow also a kind of consolation for us.284

From 1940 on, Mihail Sebastian adds to his reading list of Balzac, Shaw, Ruskin, Shelley, Shakespeare, and Tolstoi, suddenly books on Jewish history, such as Dubnow's History of the Jews, a book on Shabtai Zvi, or Die Vertreibung der Juden aus Spanien by Valeriu Marcu. With the expansion of the war, the journal's atmosphere becomes heavier, the colors, darker, the tone sober, and the writer becomes more and more fixed on Jewish suffering, survival, pain and recording an unfolding and horrendous Holocaust. On September 25, 1939, Sebastian writes: I cannot judge this drama politically. I am horrified as a human being. I know that all these people, whether collectively or separately, would have calmly witnessed Legionary terror and killed us with the utmost indifference. I also know that their blindness went beyond all limits. And yet, and yet, I feel sad, troubled, overwhelmed by a bitter taste in my mouth. I stayed home alone, both yesterday evening and this evening, and the first thing I did back in my room was listen again to Mozart's andante, which serves me as a refuge. Then I read some of Dubnow's History of the Jews: the pages about Venice, Padua, Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt in the sixteenth century. As I read I felt that I was moving away in time. It is good to know you are part of a people that has seen many things through the ages – some even more terrible than what is happening today.285

Little does Sebastian know at this point regarding the most terrible events that are yet to befall his own people. Sebastian writing is now less that of an ambitious aesthete and has become serious, analytical, pondering the most difficult of human conditions. After the fall of France in 1940 he is so disgusted and overwhelmed by a sense of futility that he gives up journaling for several months. By the time he starts taking notes again in 1941, the anti-Semitic laws have banned him from practicing his legal profession, the job from the government publication office has been cancelled and he has been appointed to army-supervised forced labor. Beyond all this, he has to leave his apartment because of new renting restrictions ordained for Jews.

284 Saturday, 16 April, 1938. Ibid., p. 156. 285 Monday, 25 September, 1939. Ibid., p. 242. 83

Sebastian has witnessed by now the pogroms in Bucharest, the Legionnaires' revolt, has written about the slaughtering of Jews, the murders in the Jilava forest, the Jewish corpses hanged by the neck in the Străuleşti abattoir… "then shot and thrown on top of one another. I haven‟t found anything more terrible in Dubnow."286 Three months later, the horrors have not ceased, there is only a change of government. Sebastian states, "How ridiculous was my attempt in De două mii de ani [For two Thousand years] to chronicle dramas that were still only beginning! Can youth be a valid excuse? Will life allow me to have my revenge sometime later?"287 Life for him ends however in a premature death through a car accident at the very end of the war. The only thing that history will "revenge" is allowing this manuscript to give witness and perpetuate the legacy of Sebastian's person and ideas.

3.2. A Historian's Journal When it comes to writing the history of the Romanian fascist years and the Holocaust, one immediately has to raise methodological questions regarding the journal's place and significance as well as its problematic standing. In understanding the Holocaust as well as the Romanian fascist years, the survival of key witnesses has tremendous value. Journals such Mihail Sebastian's, or Raymond Raoul Lambert's Diary of a Witness 1940-1943: The ordeal of the Jews of France during the Holocaust, the Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lόdź Ghetto, Hélène Beer's Journal, or Victor Klemperer's I Shall Bear Witness offer powerful and useful accounts into the day to day life of the Jewish victims during the Holocaust. They may give insight to various specific country studies, accounts of theft, plunder, and murder. They are eye-witness testimonies whose authors chose to write rather than remain silent. For these diarists the realities they encountered were so atrocious that writing was often a refuge, a comfort, an escape, and even language itself was often insufficient to convey their quotidian experience. Sebastian's Cartesian trained mind, that of a literary man and writer used to creating abstract fiction, plays and keeping his own subjectivity in place while doing the work of a meticulous aesthete who "sees through," "understands," "recognizes," and gives form to inner and outer reality, succeeded probably more than the typical

286 Tuesday, 4 February, 1941. Ibid., p. 316. 287 Tuesday, 29 July, 1941. Ibid., p. 387. 84

diarist of this period in maintaining a "language of fact." 288 This may be one reason why Saul Friedländer chooses Sebastian's journal as a historical representation of Romania's Holocaust in his classic, The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945.289 Here, the diary of the Romanian Jewish writer becomes a vehicle for historical narrative. Friedländer does so, knowing that Sebastian's honest, sincere style of a classic author, not even written with a primary intent "to witness," fulfills exactly the role of the historical observer who allows a better "grasp" of the Shoah in Romania. While the Journal's narrator appears dozens of times in Friedländer's work, Jean Ancel mentions Sebastian only twice, the first note being a quote out of the novel For Two Thousand Years, and the second a short sentence from Sebastian's diary insertion on September 22, 1942 regarding the deportation of some Jewish families from Bucharest.290 Yet without the Romanian Securitate's archived secret reports, dug out by Ancel, we would have had a difficult time contextualizing Sebastian's observations regarding the expulsion of approximately 160 Jews from Bucharest to Transnistria.291 A detailed reconstruction of the Romanian Holocaust by means of archived material – a lot of which was accessible only after the fall of communism – can be be aided only a little by Sebastian's narrative journal, as we see in Ancel's study of the Holocaust, the most thorough ever written. The journal is not to be confused with systematically purposed documentation such as the before mentioned work of Matatias Carp. On the other hand, Sebastian's gripping, compelling and unembellished text relates the outbreak of fascist and anti-Semitic ideology, state imposed legislation, the legionary revolt, pogroms, terror, and deportations of Jews or their expulsion from apartments to camps or Transnistria. It records hunger, isolation, massacres, tortures, and a Holocaust, all viewed from Bucharest, becoming an irreplaceable tool in the historian's workshop. Moreover, the effect of the well-known playwright and novelist's Journal on the Romanian larger public has greater impact than all the historical studies published abroad about Romania's direct participation in the destruction of its Jewry. It actually helps pave the way for studies such as Jean

288 Regarding the "language of fact" in the witness of diaries, see: Ernestine Schlant. The Language of Silence: West German Literature and the Holocaust (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 6. 289 Saul Friedländer. The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2007). 290 Tuesday, 22 September, 1942. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 507. 291 Ancel. History of the Holocaust. Romania. Vol. 2. Op. cit., p. 1222. [Hebrew] 85

Ancel's 12 volume Documents Concerning the Fate of Romanian Jewry during the Holocaust to confront Romania's academic world.292 Mihail Sebastian, having already possessed the accredited position of a writer by 1996, is given the status of a door- opener to honest historical démarche. In some cases, says Prof. David Engel, diaries do not provide a comprehensive picture of how people assessed their situation during the Holocaust.293 Philipp Friedman, adds that, while Jewish testimonies and diaries written after the war should be related to with great caution, materials contemporary with the Holocaust, such as diaries, are historical documents of the first order.294 Rather than coming to Holocaust diaries and memoirs for indisputable factual testimony, recommends James E. Young, the critical reader might turn to the manner in which these facts were understood, experienced and reconstructed in the diarist's narrative.295 Tony Kushner, when writing about the problem of testimony, notes that it had taken many decades after 1945 "for the testimony of Holocaust victims to be taken seriously.". In Holocaust historiography he points, again, to Saul Friedländer's use of testimony, which "charts the shift from the marginalization of survivors and the lack of interest in their accounts immediately after the war to more recent developments, whereby they have gained belated recognition and huge efforts have been made to record their experiences."296 Mihail Sebastian's testimony however, which plays a major role in the Holocaust representation in Friedländer's book, was not marginalized because of lack of interest, but because of a new post WWII totalitarian system. Sebastian's is a classic case of "individualizing the Holocaust," in other words, the individual voice is given priority, beyond its testimonial power: "The victim's voice, suddenly arising in the course of the narration of these events, can, by its eloquence or its clumsiness, by the immediacy of the cry of terror, or by naivety of unfounded hope, tear through the fabric of the "detached" and "objective" historical rendition. Such a disruptive

292 For a succinct description of Jean Ancel's contribution to the academic and public world see for example: יוסף גוברין. "ז'אן אנצ'ל: יאסי 1940 –ירושלים 2008," בתוך: יד ושם קובץ מחקרים ל"ו )תשס"ח(, עמ' 27-32. 293 Robert Rozett. "First-Hand Accounts and Awareness of the Fate of the Jews under the Nazis: The Case of Hungarian Labor Service Men," in David Bankier and Dan Mikhman. (editors). Holocaust Historiography in Context: Emergence, Challenges, Polemics & Achievements (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2008), p. 461. 294 Roni Stauber. "Philip Friedman and the Beginning of Holocaust Studies," in: ibid., p. 94. 295 James E. Young. "Interpreting Literary Testimony." Op. cit., p. 406. 296 Christian Wiese and Paul Betts. (editors). Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies (New York: Continuum Books, 2008), p. 13. 86

function is … essential to the representation of extreme historical events such as the Holocaust, which ordinary historiography necessarily domesticates. The individual cries and whispers of the victims introduce into the most precise historical narrative a primary and essential sense of disbelief",297 or I should rather say, dismay. Sebastian awakens Romanian readership's historical awareness in the post-communist era regarding a local Holocaust, about which some knew a little and stayed silent and many knew nothing but typical distortive indoctrination. Observations such as Sebastian's note from September 5, 1941, were about to change the public's perception of the past: A pitiful sight in the courtyard of the Great Synagogue, where they are collecting beds, mattresses, bedclothes, and pillows. Crestfallen people keep arriving with things on their backs – resigned, mournful, not rebellious, almost surprised. Not one is surprised any more at anything. The people in charge are unhappy that the work advances so slowly, without enthusiasm. Old things are brought in. They have been told that if we do not carry out the instructions by tomorrow, the army will do the requisition itself. And another ultimatum arrived this morning, demanding five thousand suits, hats and boots. Finally, also this morning, the Community was informed that beginning Wednesday we will have to wear a piece of material with the "six-cornered star" stitched to the top left of our coats. I returned home feeling poisoned. More patience is needed than I have, a more stubborn will to endure anything. I feel like dropping everything and saying: shoot, kill us, put an end to it. But of course it is not with that kind of despair, and anyways not with that kind of surrender, that the Jews have survived down the ages.298

The appropriation of Jewish property into state property as Ion Antonescu stated loud and clearly three months later,299 was one of the "milder" things Sebastian's testimonial language conveyed now, in 1996, to the public, about that period in Romania's history. This was the primary effect after the Journal of Mihail Sebastian had been published: disbelief and dismay in a society which had been lulled to sleep by techniques of historical distortion, manipulation and negation. While many historians explore the question of finding the proper "language" to write about the Holocaust, Friedländer's choice of Mihail Sebastian as a persecuted Jew – even though Sebastian's personal Jewish identity (an intellectual living between worlds) might again breach the limits of representation, some would charge – is brilliant, given the diarist's position on the Romanian literary scene. Moreover, the unique

297 Saul Friedländer. "An Integrated History of the Holocaust: Some Methodological Changes," in: Dan Stone. (editor). The Holocaust and Historical Methodology (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), p. 184. 298 Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 405-406. 299 Jean Ancel has published an entire study on the systematic plunder of Jewish assets during Romania's fascist period, as witnessed here shortly by Mihail Sebastian. See: Jean Ancel. The Economic Destruction of Romanian Jewry (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2007). 87

position that Sebastian holds gives both – unlike Michael Wildt's critical view of Friedländer's work300 – a Jewish perception, but also the perception of the perpetrators, thanks to his capacity "to stay in touch with men and women who should have been his enemies."301

3.3 A Public Intellectual's Journal The exceptional nature of the Journal's witness when it comes to the perpetrators‟ side, is that the testimonial it leaves for the reader is not primarily that regarding the Iron Guard, Nicole Roşu, Vasile Marin, or Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the movers and shakers of the legionary movement, nor the Goga-Cuza government or the Royal Dictatorship with their anti-Semitic legislation, their incitement and involvement in the growing terrors, and not even the Nazi-allied Antonescu regime with its personal administration of the Holocaust – although it mentions all of these to various degrees. Its primordial testimony is that of the Romanian intellectual as perpetrator, of those who turned to a blood and soil intellectuality, Nae Ionescu, Mircea Eliade, E. M. Cioran and the rest of them. It is to this testimonial effect that we shall now turn. Sebastian had witnessed by now a "treason of the intellectuals," as defined by Julien Benda, who spoke of the intellectual abandonment of universal humanism and radicalization to the right.302 The epithet "intellectual" was used a lot more loosely by his Romanian colleagues, especially since abstention from political extremes, or upholding of universal values or morals, had nothing to do with their foundational thinking. The intellectuals surrounding Sebastian in this period are in a sense a perversion of the 303the Dreyfusard intellectuals (the Dreyfus affair being the period when the social status of the "intellectual" first came to existence) who "believed that it was by virtue of their immersion in the world of ideas that they had the right, nay moral duty, to uphold universal ideals against even the state." Romanian interbellic intellectuals such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran or Constantin Noica, who during and

300 See Michael Wildt. "Raul Hilberg and Saul Friedländer – Two Perspectives on the Holocaust," in: Wiese and Betts. (editors). Years of Persecution, Years of Extermination: Saul Friedländer and the Future of Holocaust Studies. Op. cit., pp. 101-114. 301 Alice Kaplan. "Endangered by All His Friends," in: The New York Times Review of Books (November 5, 2000), retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/05/reviews/001105.05kaplant.html 302 Julien Benda. The Treason of the Intellectuals (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1981). 303 Misztal. Intellectuals and the Public Good. Op. cit., p. 13. 88

after the war (and for many Romanians, until this very day), remained Romania's "human and cultural absolute models and sustaining pillars in the battle against communism,"304 defined their status as intellectuals as a reactionary imperative, disconnected completely from any intention of "serving the interests of mankind by being committed to universal ideas, while at the same time staying detached from the political passions of the masses and not taking sides in politics."305 The 1929 generation of intellectuals was permeated by reactionary modernism such as those found in Oswald Spengler‟s bourgeois antinomies and his "anticivilizational mood of cultural criticism" found in the Weimar republic.306 Similar to Jeffrey Herf's explanation of Spengler's reconciliation of Kultur and Nationalismus, the intellectual world witnessed by Sebastian's journal increasingly encouraged its readership and sphere of influence to turn to politics with a language and symbolism adaptable to mass mobilization. Already in 1936 Sebastian writes: Tonight from Stuttgart, the Sinfonia Concertante by Mozart and then – a big surprise! – his Kleine Nachtmusik. I was glad to hear it again, because it was so closely bound up with my play. Unfortunately, my radio is on its last legs. I could pick up enough passages, though, and this has brought me back to the play after the few days during which I dropped it. I really ought to go away for at least three days, to pick up the thread that has been momentarily lost. I am reading Oswald Spengler's Années decisives: I don‟t know why it is only now that I do it, because it has been on my bookshelf for ages. A surprise to find whole sentences, formulations, ideas and paradoxes from Nae's course. The whole of last year's course (domestic and foreign policy, peace, war, the definition of the nation), all his "bold strokes" (Singapore, France in its death throes, Russia as an Asiatic power, Britain in liquidation): it is all there in Spengler, with an astounding similarity of vocabulary. And I haven‟t yet finished it… The day before yesterday I was in Braşov, at the trial of some Iron Guard student. Nae made a statement (which I read in the papers) that religion does not forbid all murder, and that students therefore naturally feel solidarity with Duca's killers. I don‟t think I shall attend his course any more – not to "punish" him, but because, quite frankly, Nae Ionescu is beginning to interest me no longer. The way he sees things is too simple. 307

Sentences, formulations, ideas and paradoxes condoning murder, sanctified by religion, are the language of the intellectuals. The journal desanctifies the sacred. It records unashamedly the new attitudes of Nae Ionescu, and following in his footsteps, those of Eliade, Cioran, Noica and others who were becoming experts of politicizing religion, and endorsing the murder of a Prime Minister as a form of pseudo-religious act of devotion for the greater good of the nation. That same year, just a few days

304 Leon Volovici. "Jurnalul lui Sebastian şi 'teroarea istoriei'," in: Chimet. (editor). Dosar: Mihail Sebastian. Op. cit., p. 49. 305 Misztal. Intellectuals and the Public Good. Op. cit., p. 17. 306 Jeffrey Herf. Reactionary Modernism. Op cit., p. 49. 307 Thursday, 14 May, 1936. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 49-50. 89

earlier, Sebastian mentions in his journal a conversation he had overheard in the park between two secondary school students, "one in the uniform of the military school, the other with socks, short trousers, jacket, and tie, dressed in the French style as if, with his fair hair and complexion, he was a little boy in the Jardin Luxembourg."308 The "soldier" like student explained to the second that they were wearing swastikas in school, a symbol the second did not know, and as the conversation moved on to the subject of religion and state, the boy dressed in the French style claimed that there had been a long separation between them, and that "state and religion have nothing in common." His exact words. Otherwise, it would not even interest me to note it here. A society of policemen, like the Romanian society, cannot create anything other than whole generations of policemen – that is, people with the mind of a policeman, when they cannot actually be one by trade. I'd like to know what family that fair-haired boy comes from, that doesn‟t know what a swastika is. I'd like to meet that boy's father and shake his hand. It reminds me of what Corneliu Moldovanu said a couple of weeks ago when, after some premiere or other, some gypsy kids were waiting outside with a special edition about the sentence passed on Constantinescu-Iaşi. [a university professor who was condemned for pro- Communist activities]. "They were right to do it. But it's too little." And he is a writer!309

This incident was instantaneously associated by Sebastian with the comments of Moldovanu, a militarized writer, an "intellectual in uniform," as he had put it two years earlier in How I Became a Hooligan, the period when writers, artists, historians, journalists, were one after the other, putting on the 'new outfit.' Then, he elaborates on the Romanian intellectuals: "…they make out of their 'spirit of barracks' an axis of political action. Moreover, it is a moral justification. The 'man in uniform' is a type of human grandee, whose extreme right or left- wing experiences he is trying to impose upon our time. The black, brown, blue or green shirts violently simplify the ideas, attitudes and sentiments, reducing them to a color, a symbol, or a shout."310

Then, at the time of the literary and polemic scandal, Sebastian was not for the first time standing in the midst of ideological gun-fire from all extreme sides. The Journal recounts numerous such incidents which Radu Ioanid describes as elements of Romanian fascism, namely the cult of authoritarianism and violence.311 If the scholar of Romanian literary avant-garde, Ion Pop, calls Sebastian: "a man without a uniform," we can assuredly state that Sebastian is an intellectual without uniform, while the uniform-dressed Mircea Eliade and Cioran, Noica "are subjected today to a

308 Tuesday, 14 April, 1936. Ibid., p. 43. 309 Ibid., p. 44. [italics mine]. 310 Sebastian. Cum am devenit huligan. Op. cit., p. 55. 311 Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel. Op. cit., pp. 22, 132-139. 90

true interrogative siege, finally perceived with critical and uninhibited conscience."312 The phenomenon which takes up the most space in Sebastian's journal is that of "intellectuals in uniform," or "intellectual-policemen." Beginning with Nae Ionescu, the diarist introduces us to one protagonist after the next, to one writer after the next, as they each decline into 'rhinoceroses.' Ionescu is not a devil in Sebastian's writing, but a man towards whom Sebastian always tries to remain honorably loyal, and who even after his death, reappears in Sebastian's subconscious dream world, as we see for example in December 1943, when, in a dream, before leaving for Berlin, Ionescu turns to his student telling him that he speaks with a strong Jewish accent.313 From 1935 onward, and until the last few recorded observations on Ionescu, we find evidence of a withering intellectual becoming increasingly more nationalistic, legionary, and religiously fascist. Nae's inaugural lecture… this year is … a course on "political logic." His introduction was a little testament of the Iron Guard faith. He flattered the students with an electioneer's persistence, praising the "political generation" as being in the right against the "bookish generations," whose great sin, in his eyes, is that they are bookish. Politics means action, life, reality, contact with existence. Books are abstract…At the end… I reminded him of his article from May 1928, "What Young People Think," in which he asserted in discussion with Petrovici that the orientation of the younger generation should be sought not in the street – where the agitators and window-breakers are – but in libraries and the representative values they contain. "Yes, that's how it was then," he replied imperturbably. "Now it's completely different. Then it was the hour of intellect – now it is the hour of politics." Poor Nae! How rapid is his descent….314

Mircea Eliade, Sebastian's close friend, and maybe second protagonist in the intellectual row appearing in the journal, has his great debut as an "intellectual in uniform" around the year of 1935-1936. Historian Andrei Oişteanu speaks of the "chronicle of a broken friendship,"315 when it comes to the relationship between these two literary prodigies in the Romanian interwar scene. Iordan Chimet, in his introductory notes to the File, states that the entire Journal could be read as a lamento relived, over and over, by the soloist, over the insupportable trauma of betrayed friendships,"316 among which Eliade's stands out strikingly. On Friday September 25, 1936, in a period when "the father of the history of religions," as he will become later known in the United States, is still somewhat accessible to his Romanian-Jewish friend, Sebastian marks down:

312 Ion Pop. "Un om fără uniformă," in: Chimet. (editor). Dosar: Mihail Sebastian. Op. cit., p. 185. 313 Wednesday, 29 December, 1943. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 584. 314 Wednesday, 27 November, 1935. Ibid., pp. 28-29. 315 Andrei Oişteanu. "Mihail Sebastian and Mircea Eliade: Chronicle of a Broken Friendship." Op. cit. 316 Chimet. "Sugestii pentru o nouă lectură a Jurnalului." Op. cit., p. xxxii. 91

Yesterday evening Mircea flared up in the middle of a fairly calm conversation about foreign policy and Titulescu [pro-Western minister of foreign affairs, target of an intense Iron Guard press campaign], suddenly raised his voice with that terrible violence that sometimes surprises me: "Titulescu? He should be executed. Put in front of a machine gun firing squad. Riddled with bullets. Strung by the tongue." "Why, Mircea? I asked in surprise. "Because he's committed treason, high treason. He's concluded a secret treaty with the Russians so that they can occupy Bukovina and Maramureș in the event of war." "How do you know that?" "General Condiescu told me that." "And is that enough? Don't you think it's a biased source? Don't you think it's based on fantasy?" He stared at me in stupefaction, unable to grasp that anyone could doubt such a "truth". Then I heard him whisper to Nina: "I wish I hadn't told him that." He'd like to have added: "because he's too blind to understand it." The whole incident depressed me. As I write it down, I notice that I no longer have the nervous tension that I felt yesterday, the sense of irreparable discord. He's a man of the right, with everything that implies. In Abyssinia he was on the side of Italy. In Spain on the side of Franco. Here he is for Codreanu. He just makes an effort – how awkwardly? – to cover this up, at least when he is with me. But sometimes he can't stop himself, and then he starts shouting as he did yesterday.317

A year earlier, Eliade and Sebastian could still hold pleasant conversations, but only in private. When in public, the famous writer, scholar, and thinker, second in line to Nae Ionescu, becomes extreme, aggressive, putting on his "uniform." At this point Sebastian wonders about the sustainability of this amity: "I should like to eliminate any political reference from our discussion. But is that possible? Street life impinges on us whether we like it or not, and in the most trivial reflection I feel the breach widening between us. Will I lose Mircea for no more reason than that? […] I keep becoming more and more disillusioned, not least because he is able to work with the anti-Semitic Vremea, as if there was nothing untoward about it. Nevertheless, I shall do everything possible to keep him."318 The good qualities that the diarist tries so hard to hold on to, are vanishing away as the "new man" ideology is embraced by his intellectual friend. Eliade's words call for a "nationalist Romania, frenzied, and chauvinistic, armed and vigorous, pitiless and vengeful,"319 in November 1936, and later on, Eliade's anti-Semitism and xenophobia demand the purification of Romania's ground "bloodied and intoxicated" from foreigners such as the "Hungarians… the most imbecilic people that ever existed in history after the Bulgarians," whose "element in Dobrogea," he regretted, "had not been cruelly destroyed."320 In the same

317 Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 78. [italics mine]. 318 Ibid., p. 79. 319 Quoted in Ioanid. "Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard." Op. cit., p. 423. 320 Two articles from Vremea, in May and September, 1937, quoted as well by Ioanid. Ibid. 92

year, making this declaration, Eliade's "militaristic" characteristic of intellectualism is added to by a second feature of Romanian fascism underlined by historian Radu Ioanid, namely that of "the myth of the state, the cult of the hierarchical authority of one's own elites."321 A long political discussion with Mircea at his home. Impossible to summarize. He was lyrical, nebulous, full of exclamations, interjections, and rude remarks… I'll take from all that just his (frank) declaration that he is passionate about the Iron Guard, that he has high hopes for it and expects it to be victorious. Ioan Vodă the Cruel, Mihai Viteazu, Stefan the Great, Bălcescu, Eminescu, Hajdeu322 – all these are supposed to have been Iron Guardists in their day. Mircea refers to them as all of a piece! At the same time I can't deny that it was entertaining. In his opinion, the students who carved up Traian Bratu323 last night in Iași were not Iron Guardists but either … Communists or National Peasant supporters. Literally. As regards Gogu Rădulescu (Mr. Gogu, as Mircea ironically calls him), 324 the liberal student who was beaten with wet ropes at the Iron Guard headquarters, that was all well and good. It's what should be done to traitors. He, Mircea Eliade, would not have been content with that; he'd have pulled his eyes out as well. All who are not Iron Guardists, all who engage in any other kind of politics, are national traitors and deserve the same fate. One day I may reread these lines and feel unable to believe that they summarize [Mircea's words]. So it is well if I say again that I have done no more than record his very words – so that they aren't somehow forgotten. Perhaps one day things will have calmed down enough for me to read this page to Mircea and to see him blush with shame. Nor should I forget his explanation for joining the Guard with such passion: "I have always believed in the primacy of the spirit." He's neither a charlatan nor a madman. He's just naïve. But there are such catastrophic forms of naiveté!325

There is great chemistry between Eliade's beliefs in the "primacy of the spirit" and his passion for the Iron Guard. He admires the legionary movement and its "Captain," Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, whom Eliade, Haig Acterian, the ex-communist, and now ardent fascist, and Marietta Sadova, a famous actress at the National Theatre (Sebastian calls her "a good candidate for the Romanian version of Leni Riefenstahl in a state run by Zelea Codreanu"326) had had the great honor to "venerate" at an intimate tea-party at Mihail Polihroniade's house, (Polihroniade an intellectual of the Criterion association and now a devout member of the Guard).327 Eliade is charmed by the political religion of the movement, but they were also inspired by him. The author of Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine, even though writing an excellent book on radicalism in the

321 Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel. Op. cit., p. 132. 322 Ioan Vodă the Cruel, Mihai Viteazu, Stefan the Great were medieval rulers. Nicolae Bălcescu is a historian and leader of the 1948 revolution. Mihai Eminescu was a nineteenth-century peot, considered the creator of the modern Romanian language, a profound anti-Semite. Bogdan Petriceiu Hajdeu was a nineteenth-century writer, anti-Semitic. 323 The president of Iași University who was stabbed by a group of Iron Guard students. 324 Gogu Rădulescu was in fact a Communist sympathizer. 325 Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., pp. 113-114. 326 Wednesday, 16 December, 1936. Ibid., p. 96. 327 See: "Thursday, 22 October, 1936," ibid., pp. 84-85. 93

writings of Eliade and Cioran as opposed to Eugène Ionesco, a liberal at heart, draws one somewhat apologetic conclusion regarding this historian of religion and anthropologist (Eliade): "If Eliade and Cioran had become self-declared sympathizers of the legionary movement and had contributed to 'coaching' newcomers in this murderous adventure… one should raise the question, however, to what degree those new legionnaires had become adepts of Eliade and Cioran."328 She continues with a rather ill-fitting comparison: "Likewise, we should take a deliberate look at the terms of an issue raised sometimes regarding Heidegger. If Heidegger had been a Nazi, can one also conclude that Nazis had been adepts of Heidegger's philosophy?"329 The problem that Laignel-Lavastine raises here is beside the point. At stake here is an phenomenon existing in the 1930s and 1940s called intellectual fascism and witnessed by Sebastian. This phenomenon was found in every fascist European country as much as in Nazi Germany. Heidegger easily fits the requirements for belonging to such category, and as Robert Gibbs poignantly observes, "if one reads Heidegger as though there were no question of politics and philosophy, one has not yet begun the return, and indeed one has tolerated the deceit that covers up – without uncovering – the place of politics in Heidegger's thought."330 Radu Ioanid exemplifies Eliade's belief in the mystical power of the legionary movement as well as his impact on the masses, as that too of the politico Corneliu Zelea Codreanu himself: Praising the "legionary spirituality," which he claimed was separate from the terrestrial world of politics, Eliade thought that, "he who does not doubt the destiny of our nation cannot doubt the victory of the legionary movement either" and hence believed in the triumph of the legionary movement: "I believe in the victory of the legionary movement because I believe in freedom, in the force of the soul as opposed to biological and economic determinism."Eliade was impressed by the idea of Codreanu's desire to mediate between Romania and God: "A political leader of youth said that the goal of this movement was 'to reconcile Romania with God.' Here was a messianic formula that did not appeal to class struggle, nor to political interests, nor to economic interests, nor to the bestial instincts of men." This interview with Eliade did not go unnoticed by the top men in the Legion. During his trail, Codreanu mentioned it as eloquent proof of the specific nature of the legionary movement, stressing the exemplary fashion in which Eliade had distinguished between the legionary movement, founded on "the Grace of God," Italian fascism, and national socialism. Codreanu also focused on "the New legionary Man," whom Eliade loaded with praise.331

328 Laignel-Lavastine. Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L'oubli du fascisme. Op. cit., pp. 93-94. 329 Ibid. 330 Robert Gibbs. "Reading Heidegger: Destruction, Thinking, Return," in: Harrowitz. Tainted Greatness. Op. cit., p. 159. 331 Ioanid. The Sword of the Archangel. Op. cit., p. 147. 94

The very origins of several later books of Mircea Eliade are found in this period of the scholar's mystical love-affair with the legionary movement, autochthonism and Romanianism. Florin Ţurcanu explains that the core of Eliade's later mythical thinking, of his theory of the "terror of history," of his relation between Christianity and the pre-Christian religious substrate, lay in his attempt "to articulate Romanian cultural identity" during the interwar period.332 This is mildly put compared to a previous assistant's assessment of the professor of religion: It is shocking to discover that the 'father of religion' in the United States wrote viciously anti- Semitic propaganda articles in war-torn Romania and furthered theories of the racial and paganized Christian origins of the Romanian people; that he was an acknowledged member of the Romanian Fascist Movement and was reported by British Intelligence (MI5, Naval Intelligence, the Foreign Office, etc.) to be working for the Nazis; that he served as the press and propaganda attaché of the pro-Nazi Romanian governments in Portugal from 1941 to 1945, while according to the CIA he engaged in spying for the Nazis; and that even in Paris in the 1950s, he continued his activities on behalf of the Iron Guard. Further, Eliade's intellectual ideology clearly reflected his politics. His later, widely accepted theories on the nature of religious 'history'," which many scholars have disputed on grounds of being ahistorical,333 "containing the essential content of his thought are but camouflaged theories, which originated in the era of Romanian fascism."334 Mircea Eliade's anti-Semitism surfaces along with the other characteristics of intellectual fascism seen so far: militarism, the cult of "the uniform," violence, Romanianism, xenophobia, autochthonism, and religious mysticism. In 1938 Eliade expresses his anger that "Jews have invaded the villages of Maramureş, Bukovina and Bessarabia," and affirms: "I do not get angry when I hear the Jews cry, 'antisemitism,' fascism,' Hitlerism'… It would be absurd to expect the Jews to resign themselves to being a minority with certain rights and many obligations, after having tasted the honey of power and having won the positions of command to such extent."335 Sebastian witnesses how Eliade is slowly but surely "revolted by the Jewish spirit,"

332 Florin Ţurcanu. "Entre idéologie et politique: Mircea Eliade et l'étude des religions dans la Roumanie de l'entre-deux-guerres." Op. cit., p. 315. 333 On Eliade's problematic, esoteric and ahistorical research see: Jeroen W. Boekhoven. Genealogies of Shamanism. Op. cit., pp. 129-135. Daniel Dubuisson has callS him an impostor: Daniel Dubuisson. Impostures et pseudo-science: l'oevre de Mircea Eliade (Villeneuve-d'Asq: Septentrion – Presses universitaires du Septentrion, 2005), or Daniel Dubuisson. Twentieth Century Mythologies: Dumézil, Lévi-Strauss, Eliade (London: Equinox, 2006). For Eliade's occult involvement see: Steven M. Wasserstrom. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). For the politicization of religion in Eliade's thought and work see: "Mircea Eliade and Nostalgia for the Sacred" in: Robert S. Ellwood. The Politics of Myth: A Study of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Cambell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), pp. 79-126. And last but not least, a thorough exposé of fascism in Eliade's legacy in: István Keul. "Politische Myopie, mystische Revolution, glückliche (Un)Schuld? Mircea Eliade und die legionäre Bewegung: rezentere rumänische Perspektive," in Horst Junginger. (editor). The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 397-418. 334 Berger. "Mircea Eliade: Romanian Fascism and the History of Religions in the United States." Op. cit., pp. 51-52. 335 Ioanid. "Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard." Op. cit., p. 426. 95

that is present in Romania's theatre and ballet world.336 On December 17, 1937, a few months later, Sebastian makes another entry, short and without comments: In yesterday's Buna vestire [Good news]: "Why I Believe in the Victory of the Legionary Movement," by Mircea Eliade. "Can the Romanian people end its days… wasted by poverty and syphilis, invaded by Jews and torn apart by foreigners…? "… the Legionary revolution has the people's salvation as its supreme goal… as the Captain has said. "… I believe in liberty, in personality, and in love. That is why I believe in the victory of the Legionary movement."337

Earlier, Sebastian had said of Eliade, "he's neither a charlatan nor a madman. He's just naïve. But there are such catastrophic forms of naiveté." Yet, a closer look at the ideology of the "unfortunate generation" proves that there was no naiveté involved in Eliade's intellectual ideology, rather a clear reflection of his politics. Adriana Berger points out to the reciprocity of politics and religious beliefs specifically in Eliade. The naiveté is found rather in Sebastian's humanism – the innocent side of modernity – which keeps hoping against all hope, at least when it comes to those friends he treasured so much. The same naiveté may also be found in the Israeli professor Gershom Scholem's letter from June 6, 1972 written to his colleague in the studies of myth and religion. Therein he asked Eliade: “Ever since I met you, I have had no reason to believe that you were an anti-Semite, all the less a leader of anti- Semitism. I consider you a sincere and just man, for whom I have great respect, and that is why I find it natural to ask you to tell me the truth. If there is anything to be said about this, let it be said, and let the atmosphere be cleared of general or specific accusations.”338 For a scholar of such caliber as Scholem, who must have read Eliade‟s works thoroughly and who had spent numerous hours with him at the Eranos esoteric enterprise339 – the spiritual banquet of intellectuals founded in the 1930s by the English-Dutch spiritualist Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn which allowed intellectuals such as Scholem, Eliade, Henry Corbinand many others to enter occult experience "without sacrificing historical criticism or philosophical thought" – such a high estimation of the Romanian fascist ideologue is definitely naïve.

336 Thursday, 25 March, 1937. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 119. 337 Ibid., p. 133. 338 Andrei Oişteanu. "Friendship: The Brain (Of a Fascist) & The Heart (Of a Jew): Mircea Eliade & Mihail Sebastian", in: Exquisite Corpse - Journal of Letters and Life (January 11, 2008). Retrieved from: http://www.corpse.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=246&Itemid=34 appeared first in Romanian language in: Revista 22, 49 (926), XVIII, December (2007). 339 For a study of the Eranos spiritual nucleus one should start with: Steven M. Wasserstrom. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). The meetings at Eranos are another product of modernity where scholars come to mingle esoterics, spiritualism and science, at once. 96

More surprising however – given the historical perspective of time – appears to be Moshe Idel's „relativization‟ or downplay of Eliade's notorious political and ideological stance, when he describes in the epilogue to the Hebrew edition of Le Mythe de l’éternel retour – Archétypes et répétition that Eliade became more moderate in the political Romanian sphere after 1939.340 The actual and historical Mircea Eliade, no moderate at all, as we read in Mihail Sebastian's journal, perfectly matched the company of Kurt Waldheim, Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man, and Herbert von Karajan.341 In mid-1938, within the measures taken against the Iron Guard, Mircea Eliade along with Nae Ionescu, and a few other "intellectuals" were jailed for a short period of time. The entries on Eliade become increasingly rare. Months later, with Eliade‟s release from imprisonment, there were new moments and attempts of reconnection, but the ideological wall continued to keep them at a distance. Sebastian had foreseen this earlier: "It's all over between us, and we are both perfectly aware of the fact. The rest – explanations, excuses, reproaches – does not lead anywhere."342 Eliade's case is so significant in Sebastian's Journal because, as an intellectual (but unlike Sebastian) he represents almost an entire generation gone astray: among the likes of Emil Cioran, Constantin (Dinu) Noica, Mircea Vulcănescu, Polihroniade, Victor Vojen, Haig Acterian or Ţuţea. Like his master Ionescu, Eliade not only combines the political and the spiritual realm, subordinating the former to the latter, but, more importantly, the messianic element of his new spiritual age demands political action: "it does not permit the refusal of action, howsoever this may appear."343 He also mixes the elements of anti-communism and anti-Semitism, often interchangeable to the common Romanian fascist, as reiterated several times by Eliade and Sebastian's common friend and writer Camil Petrescu: Camil Petrescu, whom I met this morning at the Capșa, was angry at my suggestion that the trial of the Craiova anti-fascists was out of control. "Those people shouldn't even have a trial; they should be sent off to prison for ten years, or twenty years. Don't give them the chance to make Communist propaganda in court, with witnesses and lawyers." When we left the Capșa we went a few steps down the street and he repeated what he thought of the latest anti-Semitic attacks. "It‟s regrettable, old man. But all Jews have a responsibility for it." "How's that, Camil?"

340 See Moshe Idel's afterword in: מירצ'ה אליאדה. המיתוס של השיבה הנצחית. תרגום מצרפתית: יותם ראובני )ירושלים: כרמל, 2000(, עמ' 138. 341 Berger. "Mircea Eliade: Romanian Fascism and the History of Religion in the United States." Op. cit., p. 51. 342 Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 146. 343 Florin Ţurcanu. Mircea Eliade. Le prisonnier de l'histoire. Op. cit., p. 242. 97

"Because there are too many of them." "But aren't there even more Hungarians?" "Maybe, but at least they're all in one place, in the same region." (I didn't understand the argument, but I didn't want to insist. What was the point of repeating the long conversation I had with him in January 1934? I am clear about him – and all he can do is depress me, never surprise me.) He went on to say: "My dear man, the Jews provoke things: they have a dubious attitude and get mixed up in things that don't concern them. They are too nationalistic." "You should make up your mind, Camil. Are they nationalists or are they Communists?" "Wow, you're really something, you know? Here we are alone and you can still ask questions like that. What else is communism but the imperialism of the Jews?" This is Camil Petrescu speaking. Camil Petrescu is one of the finest minds in Romania. Camil Petrescu is one of the most sensitive creatures in Romania. How could Romania ever go through a revolution?344

Camil Petrescu, one of Romania's greatest cultural figures, a playwright, novelist, thinker and poet, director of the National Theatre in Bucharest and member of the Romanian Academy, like Eliade he is also a disciple of Nae Ionescu, and again like Eliade, who preferred a "little Romania, with some of its provinces lost but with its bourgeoisie and elite saved, rather than a proletarian Greater Romania,"345 joins the mantra of anti-communist fascism. All these intellectuals suffer in various degrees from megalomaniac self-perception, which fits a further characteristic of Romanian fascism. Romania's greatest interwar writers are reaching the limits of insanity: I wonder whether Nae is not losing control of himself completely. Is it an attack of megalomania, a case of pride accentuated by defeats, or quite simply a phase of acute mysticism? On such occasions in the past I used to find him quite colorful. Now he's beginning to worry me. For the whole of the hour I spent there, he spoke of nothing but foreign policy. "So, do you like the way the Serbs have been plotting against us?" Those were his opening words. "When I shouted for three years that we should come to a direct understanding with the Bulgarians, no one wanted to listen. Now we have the Serbs reaching an agreement with them and we're left high and dry. I told the King so many times, but he wouldn‟t take the point. If we had a revolutionary court, he would be put straight up against a wall. How many wasted opportunities! A year ago the Germans made some extraordinary suggestions to me that we should deal with the Bulgarians; we'd have been off to Adrianople and making an empire for ourselves. Two years ago I brought the King the Polish crown on a plate, but he wouldn‟t listen. Now we will be forced to give ourselves to the Germans for nothing. I used to talk to them one way. And now they talk to us quite differently. We'll fall into their hands for nothing." "But what about France?" I asked timidly. "France will also go along with Germany. I told the Germans: you guys have got to do a deal with the French – otherwise it won‟t work. And then Schacht [economics minister in Nazi Germany, 1934-1937] went to Paris. Look, I'll tell you something that will really amaze you. But be careful: nothing must leave these four walls. I negotiated for the French with the Germans; I had a mandate to do so. And do you know who gave it to me? Léon Blum. Only things are not going so well with Léon Blum. But when a Daladier government is formed, it'll all be settled straightaway. Look, I've got a letter here from Daladier. When he becomes prime minister, I'll be off to Paris."346

344 Thursday, 25 June, 1936. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p.60.. 345 Friday, 6 November, 1936. Ibid., p. 87. 346 Saturday, 2 January, 1937. Ibid., pp. 103-104. 98

While Mihail Sebastian, the Romanian Jew facing the Holocaust and the most horrendous measures against himself and his people, manages to keep a sound mind, observing the metamorphoses in his surroundings, his fellow intellectual writers are haunted by mystical paranoia and grandeur, consumed by anti-Semitism and hatred of communists, driven by Romanianism and autochthonism, and given to the murderous political religion of the Iron Legion. While the glowing reactionary philosopher Emil Cioran disappears from the journal's pages with his appointment as cultural attaché in Paris and finds his way out of the Eastern fiasco into a French exile that will later reward his "intellectual aptitudes," and, similarly, Eliade, who writes of himself " I don‟t believe I have encountered before a genius of such complexity; […] my intellectual horizons are vaster than those of Goethe,"347 also leaves fascist Romania behind, starting a new life in exile, their plays and works continue to be an inspiration in Romania, as we see in the premiere of Eliade's Iphigenia, mentioned by Sebastian's journal in February, 1941: "Of course, I didn‟t go. It would be impossible for me to show myself at any premiere, let alone one which (because of the author, the actors, the theme, and the audience) was bound to be kind of a Legionary reunion. I'd have felt as if I was at a meeting in their 'den'." Iphigenia or the Legionary Sacrifice, acknowledges Sebastian, after five months of being at the helm and three days of revolt, killing, arson, and pillage, "you can't say it is not relevant."348

The Journal of Mihail Sebastian succeeds in highlighting, maybe more than anything else, the relevance of the withering intellectual phenomenon of fascism, its literary production, theatre, philosophical exposés, anti-Semitism and its potential to radicalize minds, a phenomenon that has often been underestimated in the history of ideas.

347 See introduction written by Jacques Julliard in Ţurcanu's biography: Ţurcanu. Mircea Eliade. Le prisonnier de l'histoire. Op. cit., p. vii. 348 Wednesday, 14 February. Sebastian. Journal. Op. cit., p. 323. 99

Conclusion

For Two Thousand Years with its following polemic scandal was a risky attempt at utter and complete honesty, a written creation of both Proustian and Gidean influence, one which Sebastian was convinced would live on. In a figurative sense the author was right, because the existential tragedy of the doubly aggravating game to be played by a Romanian man, who is both an intellectual and a Jew, was a predicament that would play itself out to the end during the fascist years and the Romanian Holocaust. The tragic drama of Sebastian's marginalization in the Romania of the 1930s and 1940s continues to live on, and had neither the possibility of integrating identities, as he wrote, nor a happy ending. The Jewish novel, a literary work whose historical context gives insight into the interwar cultural politics of identity, also allows its critical reader to face the questions with which the intellectual protagonist battles, namely that of integrating both Romanian and Jewish identity in a terribly anti-Semitic society. The book that remains to be printed without its notorious anti- Semitic foreword, has, in its original form and context, provided a venue for research into a historical portrayal of its author, Iosef Hechter, also known as Mihail Sebastian. How I Became a Hooligan even though primarily answering a multitude of charges, accusations and curses following the novel's scandal, ends up being an essay that lays out a sketch for the definition, role and authority of one who holds the status of an intellectual, as well as a presentation of the Romanian intellectual in interwar Bucharest. Even though the concept of 'public intellectual' is not used by Sebastian, his convicting and courageous statements furnish him with the status of a dissident - one who is peaceful, not rebellious, one who is producing ideas seeking for reason, justice, truth; one who remains a guardian of morality, when many of his friends, including his mentor and closest intellectual companions have betrayed the critical free-spirited world of discourse and are searching for a radicalized, political, mystical, and aggressive course of action. The Jewish intellectual, deemed a hooligan, while refusing to feel victimized or playing "martyr" is juxtaposed with Mircea Eliade's hooligans, a novel published under that name in the same year as Sebastian's essay. Historical research as I hope to have shown here, clearly shows that the perceptions of hooliganism are completely opposed: The humanist and intellectual Jew Sebastian is a hooligan for simply existing, while Eliade's hooligans call for a 'language of death, 100

and a place of negativity,' for "perfectly and evenly aligned regiments intoxicated by a collective myth,"349 for martyrdom for a political cause, and are "totally indifferent toward moral life."350 When turning to the Journal, the writer's identity, the politics of his close environment and the evidence for a phenomenon that the previous essay just began to realize, meet on a day-to-day basis for almost a decade: 1935-1944. As Zeev Sternhell has rightly stated before, fascist ideology is more than “empty and contradictory rhetoric.” The Romanian phenomenon of literary and intellectual fascism is witnessed by a Jewish writer, whose loyalty and capacity to remain in touch with men and women who should have been his enemies during the fascist years of Romania and its Holocaust make him an incomparable diarist. The records of his diary help characterize this uniquely Romanian phenomenon of the literary fascists, some of whom will flee into exile, prosper, and if not as rhinoceroses, than certainly under a new skin and form, without great regret and public apologies, yet sometimes even with a "happy guilt."351

349 Ksenia Polouektova. "'Is There a Place Like Home?' Jewish Narratives of Exile and Homecoming in Late Twentieth-Century East-Central Europe," in: John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török. (editors). The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), p. 457. 350 Mircea Eliade. Autobiography, Volume 1: 1907-1937. Op. cit., p. 261. 351 In 1991 Norman Manea, another Romanian Jewish intellectual, who walked in the footsteps of Mihail Sebastian's legacy, and whose autobiographical memoirs he dedicated to the memory of this paper's protagonist, The Hooligan's Return, published a bold article about Eliade's legionary involvement, entitled "Felix Culpa" or Happy Guilt. This was a term Manea took out of Eliade's diary, O felix mea culpa, quae talen ac tantum meruit habere Redemptorem (O happy guilt, which has served such a great Redeemer), and expounded upon by means of unveiling the 'father of the history of religion'. Less straightforward than Adriana Berger, yet more sophisticated in its philosophical conclusions, the article stirred not only a tremendous controversy in Romania's post-communist era and rehabilitating period for the right-wing interwar writers, but also coincided with a "mysterious" or unresolved murder of one of Eliade's students, a professor and writer teaching at the same University of Chicago with the great master, Ioan Petre Culianu. The heated hooliganism was once again unleashed, and new forms of aggression were surfacing at this point. After the publishing of Mihail Sebastian's Journal, Manea became greatly involved in promoting and publishing it in various countries. He wrote an introduction to the Spanish version, and numerous articles referring to Mihail Sebastian's legacy and impact on his life, in German, English and Romanian. For more on this subject see: Norman Manea. The Hooligan's Return. A Memoir (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003); and "Felix Culpa" in: Norman Manea. On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist. Essays (New York: Grove Press, 1992), pp. 91-124. 101

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תוכן עניינים

מבוא מסע אל עולמו של האינטלקטואל היהודי-רומני מיכאיל סבסטאין: 1 כתבים, עדות, זהות

פרק א' "מזה אלפיים שנה" והתקופה הראשונה 1907-1934 7

א. 1 הקדמה ספרותית וקונטקסט 7 א. 2 הרומן וההיסטוריונים 19 א. 3 ההיסטוריה של המחבר 22 א. 4 "מזה אלפיים שנה" ודיקטטורה 33

א. 5 "מזה אלפיים שנה" ואנטישמיות 39

א.1.5 'פתח הדבר' של נאה יונסקו 40 א.2.5 רומן יהודי בסביבה עוינת 49

פרק ב'. "איך הפכתי לחוליגן" והשנת החוליגניזם 1934-1935 55

ב. 1 המעשה החוליגני של סבסטיאן: לא ימין ולא שמאל 57 ב. 2 עדותו וזהותו של האינטלקטואל היהודי-רומני 66 --

פרק ג'. "יומן: 1935-1944" – שנות הפשיזם 73

ג.1 יומן יהודי 79 ג.2 יומן היסטורי 84

ג.3 יומן אינטלקטואלי 88

סיכום 100

ביבליוגרפיה 102

תקציר

הן ההיסטוריה והן ההיסטוריוגרפיה של השואה לא היו יכולות להיבדק בבדיקה מעמיקה וללא 'הפרעה' אלא לאחר נפילת שלטון הקומוניזם. החל מהעשור האחרון של המאה הקודמת, עם הצטברות של אוסף תעודות, ופתיחת הארכיונים של שנות ה- 90. מסמכים רומנים חשפו משטר שהיה לו תפקיד מהותי בהשמדת היהודים לצד המשטר הנאצי . כוונת התיזה שלי היא ליצור תמונה ממוקדת בתוך ההיסטוריוגרפיה של הפשיזם הרומני ובחקר השואה ברומניה, דרך הפריזמה של דמותו ההיסטורית של מיכיאל סבסטיאן )שם העט של יהודי-רומני בשם יוסף הכטר( אשר הפכה לאחד הזרזים העיקריים למודעות לשואה בתרבות ובחברה של רומניה הפוסט-קומוניסטית. מיכאיל סבסטיאן כתב שלושה כתבים שונים שתרמו להבנת התקופה הנידונה מאספקטים שונים: יצירה ספרותית -הרומן "מזה אלפיים שנה" ) 1934(, מאמר אפולוגטי שנכתב כתגובה לשערורייה שהתחוללה עם פרסומו של הרומן "מזה אלפיים שנה", "איך הפכתי לחוליגן" )1935(, ויומנו שנכתב בין 1935-1944 אשר לא היה מיועד לפרסום כלל על ידי המחבר. מחקר זה ידון באירועים ותופעות אינטלקטואליות שקדמו והובילו לשואה ברומניה. פרקי העבודה מאורגנים בהתאמה לסדר הכרונולוגי בו הופיעו יצירותיו של סבסטיאן, החל עם המקור הראשוני של החיבור הספרותי - שכונה לעתים קרובות, כנגד רצון המחבר, רומן אוטוביוגרפי. חלק זה יתחיל בדיון ספרותי קצר ולאחר מכן יוקדש לדיון ביוגרפי בדמותו של האינטלקטואל הרומני-יהודי מיכאיל סבסטיאן. הפרק השני יתמקד במאמר פובליציסטי-הגנתי. הפרק השלישי יעסוק בהרחבה ביומן 'אינטימי' שמיכאל סבסטיאן כתב. כל אחד מהפרקים יעסוק בנקודות ההשקה והחיתוך שבין היסטוריה אינטלקטואלית, פוליטיקה וזהות כפי שהן עולות מתוך העדות והמסע של הסופר הצעיר, המחזאי, העורך דין, העיתונאי והאינטלקטואל מיכאיל סבסטיאן. העיסוק במקורות הללו יעלה שאלות בנוגע לתרומתו ועדותו של סבסטיאן להבנת ההיסטוריה הפוליטית, האינטלקטואלית והתרבותית של שנות ה- 30 של המאה ה20- ועד לסוף המלחמה. אלו שאלות שנוגעות במסע האישי של הפרוטגוניסט ושאלות הנוגעות לזהותו כיהודי. כמו כן אעסוק במעמדו כאינטלקטואל בתוך חברה שהולכת ו"מתקרנפת" בלשונו של הסופר רומני-צרפתי אז'ן יונסקו. התקרנפות שבאה לידי ביטוי בהתעצמותו של שיח פשיסטי ותפיסות אנטישמיות בתקופה שקדמה למלחמת העולם השנייה ברומניה ובעת המלחמה עצמה.

אוניברסיטת בן-גוריון בנגב הפקולטה למדעי הרוח והחברה המחלקה להיסטוריה של עם ישראל

מסע אל עולמו של האינטלקטואל הרומני-יהודי מיכאיל סבסטיאן: כתבים, עדות, זהות

חיבור זה מהווה חלק מהדרישות לקבלת התואר "מוסמך למדעי הרוח והחברה" ).M. A(

מאת יהושפט כריסטיאן פופ

בהנחיית פרופ' טוביה פרילניג

כסלו תשע"ד נובמבר 3102