For Two Thousand Years

Mihail Sebastian was born Iosef Hechter in Brăila, Romania, and studied in Bucharest and Paris. Sebastian wrote for multiple periodicals on topics ranging from the literary to the social, in addition to being a novelist and a playwright. The novel De două mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years) is his most famous work, dealing with the interwar Jewish European experience. The novel was published in 1934 with a foreword by the philosopher Nae Ionescu (1890–1940), his former mentor, who by that time had become a spokesman for antisemitism, which made the novel controversial. While he had spent his life writing as a Romanian and a Jew, and always in the Romanian language, he was confined to the Jewish cultural sphere under Ion Antonescu’s (1882–1946) regime. Sebastian died in Bucharest within a year of the end of Antonescu’s reign, leaving behind a journal chronicling his experiences from 1935 to 1944.