Mihail Sebastian was a promising young Jewish writer in pre-war Bucharest, a novelish, playwright, poet and journalist who counted among his friends the leading intellectuals and social luminaries of a sophisticated Eastern European culture. Because of Romania's opportunistic treatment of Jews, he survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in a road accident early in 1945. His remarkable diary was published only recently in its original language and is herre translated into English for the first time. Sebastian's journal is compelling reading. The book offers not only a chronicle of the darkest years of European anti-Semitism but a lurid and finely shaped analysis of erotic and social life, a reader's notebook, and a music lover's journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the rhinocerization of the major Romanian intellectuals who were Sebastian's friends, writers and thinkers who were mesmerised by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's reactionary revolution. In poignant and memorable sequences, Sebastian touches on the progression of the machinery of brutalisation and the historical context that lay behind it. One of the most remarkable lit