A roman à clef set between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, For Two Thousand Years recounts the struggles of an unnamed Jewish university student grappling with his own sense of identity and with growing antisemitism in Romania. This is a deeply queasy book to read in the current moment. There are things which Mihail Sebastian writes—about populism, about war, about Zionism, about antisemitism, about self-loathing—which would seem on the nose if they'd been written by someone post-1945. That this was published in 1934 makes Sebastian seem bleakly prescient.

For Two Thousand Years isn't an easy book to read, both because of the subject matter and because of Sebastian's writing style. While the unnamed character does grow and change a little over time (thankfully, because he's initially every annoying undergrad philosophy major you've ever met), this is far more a novel of ideas than it is of characters. Even though the characters are apparently based on real people whom Sebastian knew, they're mostly there to be mouthpieces for particular sets of ideas. How much this novel works for you will depend to a certain extent on your tolerance for reading dialogues where characters lob paragraph-length bits of ideology at one another. ( )

How does one make sense of a world to which he does not belong? This brilliant narrative tells of the coming descent of European politics from the very personal view of a young man trying to make sense of this strange world and his own stranger self. ( )

Even in these days of a resurgent anti-Semitism, I doubt whether there is anyone of my post-war generation, brought up in England, who has experienced it in the very unsubtle and very physical way that the author describes in this semi-autobiographical novel. As a student in Bucharest in 1923, the writer experiences daily anti-Semitism at the university, where Jews are obstructed from attending classes and beaten up by violent fellow students. "I received two punches during today's lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches." Mihail Sebastian, who survived the Shoah but was subsequently knocked down and killed by a car, was a Romanian Jew born and brought up in Braila, a port on the Danube. This, his most well known work, was first published in 1934, but an English translation only appeared for the first time in 2016. It is written as a first-person journal, covering periods of the writer's life between 1923 and 1931. 1923 was a tumultuous year in Romania, when - accompanied by much violent political activity - a new constitution was established, granting citizenship to all the many ethnic minorities of the country - including Jews.

Although the need for protection and group action force Sebastian's protagonist into a physical solidarity with his fellow Jewish students, he resists identifying with any of them; the Marxist who sees everything from a class-conscious point of view, the Revisionist Zionist who believes that Jews need to take the responsibility for creating a country into their own hands, the seller of Yiddish books who tries to impress on him the authenticity and beauty of Yiddish culture. He feels isolated, and blames this on his Jewishness: " if I could overcome two thousand years of Talmudism and melancholy and recover - supposing one of my race has ever had it - the clear joy of life." There is indeed some justification for the criticism leveled at Sebastian, when this book was published, that he was an anti-Semitic Jew. "I regret that, in this internal conflict, I retain some sympathy for myself. I'd like to hate myself without excuses or forgiveness."

He is advised by an academic mentor to switch from studying law to architecture, on the grounds that this more practical down-to-earth subject will relieve him of his existential anxiety. This advice is apparently well founded; several years later, working as an architect, he reflects on his student years:" it was a moment of crisis... I reduced everything to the drama of being a Jew, not such an overwhelming reality that it should cancel or even supersede strictly personal dramas and comedies." He muses on the fact that a colleague, who had been a cudgel-wielding anti-Semite in their student days, was now a good friend. He dismisses the self-professed anti-Semitism of another colleague as "the marking out of an intellectual position, not an antagonism", and expresses his confidence in being able to overcome it, as if it were just one of the common barriers to establishing any personal relationship.

In the end, the persistent anti-Semitism of people whom he considered friends or whom he had respected for professional reasons, brings him face to face with its enduring and universal nature. Anti-Semitism is not based on religion, economics or politics; it precedes and underlies all of these excuses and rationales. "If tomorrow's social structure centres on bee-keeping, the Jew will be detested from the point of view of keeping bees", he argues to a colleague who tells him (just as today's anti-Semites clothe their prejudice in opposition to Israel) that he is “only” concerned with the threat that the large Jewish population of Romania represents to the country. Although there are echoes of the same self-hatred that characterized his student days - "the Jew has a metaphysical obligation to be detested" - he ends with the more optimistic reflection, that his identification with the land of his birth is as real and as permanent as the fact of his being a Jew, and that no prejudice or discrimination can alter those facts.

Uncomfortable as the idea may be, the author’s acceptance of anti-Jewish prejudice as inevitable, may not be wrong; being a “light unto the nations” probably means casting some shadows too. What his protagonist – and perhaps the author too – rejects, is any of the many unique and positive ways of living as a Jew, which more than compensate for any negative baggage it carries with it. ( )

For two thousand years is a journal kept intermittently by a Romanian jew during the late 1920s - early 1930s, divided into six sections. Each section sees Sebastian at a different phase in his life, whenever he feels the need for regular journal-keeping. The first section deals with his experiences as a first-year undergrad, dodging punches in the aula and anti-semitic trouble-seekers in the hallways. Later sections see him striking up a friendship with a revolutionary-spirited professor, as an ordinary architect in a factory serving as American-led modernization propaganda, and hanging out in Roaring Twenties Paris.

There’s no real structure to this journal: life just happens to uncoil plotlessly. Sebastian uses his journal to keep track of what happens, what he feels about that, and what his friends think -- fellow jews, revolutionaries, students, mentors, hard-working colleagues, mistresses. He’s more the hanger-on type, writing almost wistfully about his idealized friends, wishing he could sometimes be bothered to want to be more like them. One recurring worry is the individual’s inability to change a (sub)culture, when that group considers his undesirableness to lie in what he is, not what he does. Another is the lament that adulting is hard, but dogged persistence in aiming for lower-hanging fruit is one way of getting somewhere.

A Romanian friend of mine described Sebastian as “a shitty philosopher”, and I can see that: many of his musings can come across as underdeveloped, and, dare I say it, as coming from a first-year undergrad. Also, as Sebastian grows up and his concerns turn to his job and his easy living, assorted practicalities dominate -- there is less time for Pure Thought. That is true. But the philosophical themes surrounding man-versus-society and man-versus-himself and man-versus-subculture are pretty universal and essentially without definitive answer, and I’m not faulting Sebastian for using his diary of musings to only cover well-trodden philosophical ground. Every individual mind will have to deal with the beginnings of philosophy, however fumbling. Even the ones who wrote pre-Adorno and pre-Levinas. ( )

Written in 1934, this largely autobiographical fiction features a young Jewish Romanian university student. This young man and his friends ponder the plight of Jews across the globe, for the eons of persecution. They also give thought to the on-going question of the Palestinians. Given that this was written prior to WWII, the Holocaust, and the creation of Israel as a nation, there is much that is thought provoking, and also terribly sad. Most of this book is written as a kind of constant stream of the young man's thoughts as he goes about his days.
I received an audio edition of this book through LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. ( )