Mihail Sebastian

Mihail Sebastian (1907–1945) was a Romanian novelist, playwright and journalist whose books are quiet, ironic and exact about people failing to say what they mean. He wrote them through the years in which Romanian fascism made him, as a Jew, a stranger in his own literary circle — friends who admired him signed on to the movement that excluded him. His Journal 1935–1944, published only in 1996, is one of the essential European records of that decade from the inside. He survived the war and was killed months after it, hit by a lorry in Bucharest on his way to give a lecture.