Vivid portrait of 1930s Romania

CYNTHIA RAMSAY

It is hard to say which is the more intriguing, Mihail Sebastian’s novel, The Accident, or the author himself. Fortunately, the sixth publication in Biblioasis’ International Translation Series includes both stories.

Skilfully translated from the Romanian by author and University of Guelph teacher Stephen Henighan, the Translator’s Afterword introduces readers to Sebastian (1907-1945), although many will know him already from his Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years, which was published in seven countries between 1996 and 2007. As well, his novels and plays are available in translation throughout Europe and, The Accident’s promotional material notes, “also have been published in Chinese, Hindi, Bengali and Hebrew.” The Accident is Sebastian’s first work of fiction to appear in English.

For those who, like this writer, hadn’t heard of Sebastian before, he was born Iosif Hechter on Oct. 18, 1907, in the southeastern Romanian town of Braila. His prose style caught the attention of Nae Ionescu (1890-1940), “whose political views, promoting an anti-democratic, Orthodox Christian exaltation of the motherland, shaped a generation of incipiently fascist Romanian intellectuals,” writes Henighan. Adopting his new name, Sebastian started contributing to Ionescu’s Cuvântal (The Word).

In 1930, Sebastian went to Paris to continue his legal studies, which he had started in Romania. When he returned, he settled in Bucharest, where he published a collection of short stories in 1932, followed by his first novel, Femei (Women), in 1933.

Sebastian was a practising lawyer, in addition to writing as a journalist, novelist and playwright and being “part of an engrossing literary society that saw Bucharest surpass Iasi to become Romania’s literary heartland. Here, established older writers mingled with the new wave, the ‘Generation of 1927,’ to which Sebastian belonged,” writes Henighan.

It all was going extremely well for Sebastian until, in 1934, he published his second novel, De doua mii de ani (It’s Been Two Thousand Years), about being a Romanian with Jewish ancestry. At Sebastian’s request, his mentor, Ionescu, wrote a preface for the book. In it, Ionescu argued against Sebastian’s premise that Jews’ allegiance was first to their Romanian identity, writing that such thinking was “an assimilationist illusion” and questioning, “Are you, Iosif Hechter, a human being from Braila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Braila on the Danube.” Sebastian published his book with the antisemitic preface nonetheless, raising controversy in the Jewish and non-Jewish communities: in the former, for being “a fascist lapdog”; in the latter, for being a “Zionist agent.”

Even as the situation for Sebastian and the Jews of Romania worsened, Sebastian wrote prolifically. In addition to several theatre articles, books, columns and other journalistic pieces, he published in 1935 Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan), a collection of “his ripostes to the attacks against him,” and Orasul cu Salcâmi (The Town of Acacias), a “coming-of-age novel that explores the traditional Romanian theme of the differences between life in the provinces and life in the capital ... [that] remains arguably Sebastian’s most popular novel with Romanian readers,” according to Henighan. In 1938, his first play, Jocul de-a vacanta (The Vacation Game), was produced. In 1939, he published a study of the correspondence of Marcel Proust and, in 1940, Accidentul (The Accident) appeared, after which Sebastian published more plays, but no other books.

By 1940, Romania was at war. Already, in January 1938, all Jewish lawyers were banned from the bar association. This was followed by other antisemitic laws that prohibited Jews from various professions, as well residency laws that inflated Jews’ rents and other tariffs that were levied against Jews. Moving into a slum with his mother and one of his brothers, Sebastian “had to borrow money from friends, who now pretended not to know him when he passed them on the street.”

Sebastian somehow managed to survive the Holocaust. Writes Henighan, “The war aged and impoverished Sebastian. He ate poorly and rarely went out. Unlike Bukovina and Bessarabia, where the majority of Romania’s nearly 500,000 Holocaust victims were murdered, in Bucharest, antisemitic oppression took the form of daily humiliations and sporadic, unpredictable pogroms against Jewish neighborhoods, rather than mass slaughter.” Unable to publish, Sebastian kept himself busy with, among other tasks, the diary he had started to keep in 1935, teaching himself English, writing parts of a novel that was never finished and completing several plays, as well as doing anonymous translations of such works as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets.

“When the Red Army rolled into Bucharest at the end of August 1944, the collaborators began to greet Sebastian again,” notes Henighan, adding in a later section, “In the rush to dismantle the far-right state apparatus under watchful Soviet eyes, magazines, newspapers and government ministries offered Sebastian opportunities to contribute or work for them, as though his return to public life were perfectly natural, as though these same people had played no part in his oppression.”

While turning down many of these offers, Sebastian did go back to work, accepting a job as a press officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He also agreed to give a lecture series at the Free Workers’ University. Tragically, at age 37, while rushing across the street to make a class, he was hit by a truck and killed.

Several reviewers have pointed out the eerie similarity between the manner in which Sebastian died and the incident that sets off the story in The Accident, a romance set in 1930s Bucharest and the Transylvanian mountains. The novel begins:

“She didn’t know how much time had passed. A few seconds? A few long minutes?

“She felt nothing. Around her she heard voices, footsteps, people calling out, but all muted and grey, like a sort of auditory paste, from which occasionally a tram bell or a shout shook loose with unexpected clarity, only to fade away again into the suffocated commotion.

“They’ll say it’s an accident, she thought very calmly, almost with indifference.

“The thought made her feel neither alarmed nor hurried. She had a very vague impression that she must be stretched out next to the sidewalk with her head in the snow. But she didn’t try to move.

“A stupid, senseless question passed through her mind: What time is it?

“She strained to listen to the tick-tock of her wristwatch, but couldn’t hear it. It must have been smashed. Then, in an effort to concentrate, as though immersed in herself, she observed that in fact she heard nothing of her own being; not her pulse, not her heart, not her breath.

“I’m ..., she reflected. I’m like a clock. And it seemed to her that she was smiling, although she couldn’t feel her lips, for whose outline she searched in vain somewhere in that familiar yet vanished space that was her unfeeling body.

“She remembered suddenly the moment of the fall, so suddenly that she had the impression that she was falling again, and she heard again the brief noise, like that of a shattered spring, that she had heard then.

“She hadn’t dwelt on it at the time, but now it returned with an absurd precision: the dry sound of a tearing ligament, of a snapping bow. In truth, it seemed to her that somewhere in the intimacy of this body that she no longer felt, something had been ripped out of its natural place.

“She tried to review her being, with a brisk inward glance, in order to identify, as though on an X-ray screen, the exact spot of the dislocation.

“The collarbone? The aorta? The kneecap?

“For each word, it seemed to her that she had to find a response in her inert body, which she listened to again, forcing herself to explore it with her hearing down to its most remote fibres.

“All right, something’s broken. But what?”

As Nora lies in the snow, she eventually hears voices, an old man screaming in her defence at the tram driver, calling him a criminal. But it is not either of them that attracts her attention, but rather the voice of an indifferent-sounding man, who quietly comments that she was trying to get off before the stop. She is drawn to this man’s lack of curiosity, for some reason, and, when she is finally helped up, she elicits the support of the young man to take her home. Thus begins her relationship with Paul, who, we find out, is suicidal over the end of his love affair with a famous artist, Ann, which seems to especially burden him as he turns 30.

Admittedly, The Accident is a message-heavy and contrived novel that rambles in parts. However, it is a beautifully written and translated story, which brings vividly to life the intellectually and artistically bustling Romania of the 1930s, both in Bucharest and in the Transylvanian regions. The rich sense of atmosphere that Sebastian evokes will make readers feel as if they are on the street, lying with Nora as she recovers from the shock of the accident, or on the ski hill, as Paul learns the simultaneously scary and exhilarating sport for the first time. And, just as readers begin to get bored, perhaps, with Nora’s almost smothering mothering of Paul or Paul’s seemingly unalterable determination to be depressed, Sebastian has the respective characters express similar sentiments about each other, showing his sensitivity and understanding of human nature.

But Nora doesn’t give up on Paul and he eventually accepts her love. Ultimately, both are redeemed by each other, as well as by the curative powers of the mountains, specifically skiing. It may sound corny, but Sebastian will have you believing it.

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