American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Journal 1935-1944 by Mihail Sebastian; Patrick Camiller Review by: Denise Roman The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Spring, 2002), pp. 201-203 Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3086262 . Accessed: 11/01/2013 05:45
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Leskov's stories bring to the fore the religious allegiance of acculturated Jews. He employs biblical prototypes of Jewish converts in order to distinguish a genuine baptism with a message to the Russians "about the Christianity of the Orthodox Russians whom the Jews presumably imitate" (146). For Chekhov, disturbed by the processes of the capitalist modernization of Russia, "rewritten Jews" had much in common with Russians in their share of a commoditydriven world involving the trade of anything including morality. Thus infidelity and betrayal are presented as experiences of the Russians as well as the Jews notwithstanding rhetoric about trade being the latter's specialty. A distinctive contribution by Safran lies in providing both a comprehensive and profound picture of the diverse character of Jewish identity constructions, where the emphasis is on the writers' creation of new, "hybrid" Jewish literary types. Rewriting the Jew displays how these writers, through particular tales on Jewish acculturation, approach fundamental concerns over the reformability of human nature in general. It also discusses the role of art in the process of "self-rewriting" if we follow the guiding lines of an ideologically charged narrative. Rewriting the Jew concludes that the authors "cannot say whether our identities are multiple or singular, whether a reformed, rewritten self will always be plagued by the residues of former selves, or whether any of our loyalties will last" (195). The result is a provoking study for debate. A historian might argue that one must be well aware of the balance in using narratives of Jewish assimilation to exemplify larger imperial identity narratives insofar as the Jews were not major Others in the Empire. In contrast Slavic identity constructions were compared on a larger scale, as European Others enjoyed much higher regard in this respect. A literary scholar can support this view by saying that the relative rarity of Jewish characters in classical Russian literature of the nineteenth century (to which Chekhov and Leskov belong) illustrates the point. But then, returning to the painting with the Russian general, the Jewish Arnoldi, the unanswerable question of how to measure the Other "within" ourselves as much as a Jewish Other "within" a Russian imperial Self remains open. Elena Katz, University of Southampton

Mihail Sebastian. Journal 1935-1944. Trans. Patrick Camiller. Intro. Radu loanid. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000. Published in Association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Index. xxviii + 641 pp., $36.00 (cloth). Born in 1907, in the Danube city-port of Braila, Mihail Sebastian wrote novels and plays that belong to the elegant yet tormented times of the 1930s and early 1940s, when various ideologies - liberalism, conservatism, fascism, and communism - were blending their ideas. A sensitive writer fighting against time and the increasing intolerance of anti-Semitism, Mihail Sebastian, whose work is being rediscovered in present-day Romania and in the West, has left us with a two-fold legacy: one that is both literary and, through the publication of this Journal, political. Sebastian has written novels such as De doua mii de ani (For Two Thousand Years), Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan), and Accidentul (The Accident) as well as plays that were staged in Bucharest, such as Orasul cu salcami (The Acacias Town), Jocul de-a vacanta (Playing Holidays), or Steaua fara nume (Nameless Star). He enjoyed increasing fame in Bucharest's interwar years, when, filled with demimondaines, love affairs, cafes, restaurants, small-talk politics, royalty, and a buoyant literary scene, the city was called "the little Paris." Of Jewish origin, Sebastian (pen name for losef Hechter) gravitated around a distinguished

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group of Romanian intellectuals, the Criterion Generation, including the mythologist Mircea Eliade, the philosophers Emil Cioran and Constantin Noica, and his mentor Nae Ionescu, who was also the ideologue of the Romanian fascist movement, the Iron Guard. The journal is lyrical and can roughly be divided into two periods: the interwar years (19351940) which focus on writing, friendship, love, and leading a beautiful life in Bucharest, the Carpathian mountains, and the Romanian-Bulgarian border resort, Balcic; and World War II (1940-1944) when the diary becomes both a living testimony of war - speaking of intolerance, anti-Semitism, and pogroms - and a place of refuge for an anguished writer whose profession, talent, and affirmation are denied in a world losing its humanity. The first part of the journal presents Sebastian's Bucharest as a small place, where he lives through his circle of friends, all of whom belong to a sophisticated literary-artistic milieu. Romanians and Romanian scholars will no doubt recognize many famous names appearing in these pages: writers, journalists, actors and actresses, princes and princesses, and politicians. Sebastian recalls his Proustian love for the actress Leni Caler, as well as his many less serious flirtations. He also conveys clear impressions of nature, weather, and classical music. Life as it unfolds in the Journal has an exciting rhythm: Sebastian travels to Sinaia, Brasov and Breaza; he skis in the Carpathian mountains, and storms Bucharestian restaurants, coffee-shops, and theaters. But he also has an intense, intellectually creative life and would occasionally meditate in anguish on the difficulty of writing. His overall approach to life, events, people, and art is stylish and erudite. As the years advance into the late 1930s, Sebastian's Journal also presents his friends' gradual transformation into legionaries, culminating in their anti-Semitism, intolerance and -as the French-Romanian playwright Eugen lonescu has coined it - "rhinocerization." But Sebastian is still willing to forgive and forget what he thinks is his friends' passing alienation. Discrimination, anti-Semitic legislation, and pogroms start to unfold as WWII develops. Now, the diary's atmosphere becomes depressing and even unbearably stifling. Many antiSemitic measures are explicated in the journal's narrative: aryanization of properties, exclusion from liberal professions, rationing of bread, even such petty rules as confiscation of skis, interruption of telephone lines, and banning Jews from keeping maids. He describes the pogroms, with the gothic slaughter of the Jews during the January 1941 legionary rebellion in Bucharest, when ". . . the Jews butchered at Straulesti abattoir were hanged by the neck on hooks normally used for beef carcasses. A sheet of paper was stuck to each corpse: 'Kosher Meat"' (316). The journal also describes the Iasi pogrom, deportations, camps, ghettos, and deaths in Transnistria. It can be said that, due to this detailed account of the way the antiSemitic apparatus unfolded, Sebastian's journal provides one of the most powerful testimonies of the Jewish plight in interwar and WWII Romania. Although banned from having a civic, let alone professional, existence, Sebastian survives the war intellectually through his writing, translations, reading, and listening to classical music, and uses his journal as a space for psychological refuge. After the liberation, happy that he has regained his freedom as a human being, Sebastian would die in Bucharest, in 1945, hit by a truck. Sebastian's Journal was first published in Romania in 1996, at the Humanitas Publishing House in Bucharest, with Leon Volovici from the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) as editor. Then, the volume was translated into French by Alan Paruit and published in Paris in 1998 by Stock, with a preface by Edgar Reichmann. The publication of Sebastian's journal in Romania has stirred passionate debates, triggering a new wave of intellectual anti-Semitism in the context of a distorted and, in most scholarly circles, plainly unaccepted history of Romanian Jewry's Holocaust. Now, the publication of Sebastian's journal in this excellent English translation of Patrick Camiller brings the Anglo-American readership together, after sixty years, with one of the most dramatic and powerful testimonies from that time. Radu loanid, author of the Introduction and Notes is also to be commended, together with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, for offering the English-reading world one of the most dramatic proofs of

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life and death. Lively, historical, intellectual, aesthetic, sad, and intense, the journal can be fruitfully read and referred to in many fields, from history and literature, to political science, Holocaust and East European Studies. Denise Roman, York University, Canada

Jacques Baynac. The Story of Tatiana. Trans. Ruth Nybakken and Lorraine Perlman. Detroit: Black & Red, 1994. 255 pp., $6.00 (paper). Jacques Baynac's Story of Tatiana is an original blend of history, historical fiction, and personal diary. The nominal subject is Tatiana Leontieva, a Russian revolutionary who was active around the turn of the twentieth century and who earned her place in history by committing a grisly assassination. This work is first and foremost the author's attempts to understand the murder, which took place on Sept. 1, 1906, before multiple witnesses in the dining room of a hotel in Interlaken, Switzerland. Leontieva, who was 24 years old at the time, was born to an aristocratic family and secretly defied her parents by joining the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (specifically, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party's Combat Organization) in their effort to overthrow the Russian monarchy. After a brief imprisonment and subsequent rejection by the SRs, she allied herself with the Maximalists, a terrorist faction. The culmination of her fanaticism was her plot to kill Russian Interior Minister Petr Nikolaevich Durnovo. Herein lies one of the problems Baynac uncovers: Leontieva murdered not Durnovo, but Charles Muller, an innocent French businessman who had the misfortune of vacationing in a hotel Durnovo frequented. Moreover, unbeknownst to Muller, Durnovo adopted this surname when traveling incognito. How Leontieva could confuse the two men, who reportedly did not resemble each other, is but one of the many unanswered questions Baynac raises. Baynac, an accomplished French historian, takes the reader on his quest to learn about Leontieva and comprehend her "Act." He conjures up her childhood and young adulthood in Petersburg; follows her to Switzerland, where she studied; and details her transformation into a revolutionary, imprisonment in Russia, the murder of Muller, her trial, conviction, incarceration in Switzerland, and eventual confinement to a psychiatric hospital, where she died of tuberculosis in 1922. The material inspiring The Story of Tatiana forms an intriguing narrative in its own right, as it focuses on a colorful character in Russian history. However, this book evokes at least as much interest because of its second level: not only has Baynac written a history, but he has also composed a work about the process of writing a history. Eschewing the conventional role of historian as impartial, authoritative, omniscient documentarian, Baynac adopts the unusual tactic of recounting his journey in the form of a first-person narrative. The topmost layer of Baynac's account is his highly personal relationship with his subject and task, a relationship that many other scholars undoubtedly feel with their own subjects but rarely admit. The story Baynac weaves is so absorbing thanks in part to this personal perspective. He unabashedly exposes his unexplainable obsession, from his account of stumbling across a reference to Leontieva to his dogged efforts to uncover material about her and to retrace her steps. Personal involvement ultimately overtakes scholarly distance, when, finally locating Leontieva's former home in Switzerland, Baynac imagines that he sees Leontieva enter the building but refuses to follow her. This impasse implies that to cross the threshold would invade Leontieva's privacy as well as destroy the mythical image of her that Baynac created. In weaving Leontieva's story, Baynac himself becomes a character with defined motives and feelings. For example, he does not shy from confessing his own vulnerability and sense of ignorance. He declares: "Like the miser Harpagon who piled up money, I found myself piling

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