For Two Thousand Years
The Classic Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
Available in English for the first time, Mihail Sebastian’s classic 1934 novel delves into the mind of a Jewish student in Romania during the fraught years preceding World War II.
This literary masterpiece revives the ideological debates of the interwar period through the journal of a Romanian Jewish student caught between anti-Semitism and Zionism. Although he endures persistent threats just to attend lectures, he feels disconnected from his Jewish peers and questions whether their activism will be worth the cost. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and conversing with revolutionaries, zealots, and libertines, he remains isolated, even from the women he loves. From Bucharest to Paris, he strives to make peace with himself in an increasingly hostile world.
For Two Thousand Years echoes Mihail Sebastian’s struggles as the rise of fascism ended his career and turned his friends and colleagues against him. Born of the violence of relentless anti-Semitism, his searching, self-derisive work captures a defining moment in history and lights the way for generations to come—a prescient, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, resistance and acceptance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The existential predicament of a Jewish Romanian man born into a deeply anti-Semitic society is brought to harrowing life in Sebastian's intelligent, tragic novel, which was first published in Sebastian's native Romania in 1934. The narrator, 20-year-old university student in Bucharest in the interwar years, is harassed and physically assaulted by anti-Semitic classmates. His entire life has been marked by such attacks, and although he passes his exams, this constant onslaught inculcates self-doubt. Under the influence of sympathetic professor Blidaru, he decides to study architecture, hoping to find in this field a "feeling of fulfillment, of calm," while friends turn to Marxism or Zionism for solutions to their impossible situation. But even as the narrator finds professional success, the effects of relentless anti-Semitism prove corrosive: "Being persecuted is not just a physical trial.... The reality of it slowly deforms you and attacks, above all, your sense of proportion." Sebastian documents the melancholy of a man attached to his homeland even it continually rejects him in this bold and brilliant novel.
