Oct 18, 2020
Mihail Sebastian’s 113th Birthday
This Doodle’s Key Themes
Today’s Doodle celebrates the 113th birthday of Jewish-Romanian author, playwright, essayist, journalist, and lawyer Mihail Sebastian, widely revered as one of the most significant Romanian writers of the 20th century. Sebastian’s 1934 novel “De două mii de ani” (“For Two Thousand Years”) and his diaries “Journal 1935-1944”–posthumously published in 1996–are today considered seminal chronicles of the rise of anti-Semitism in 20th-century Europe.
Sebastian was born Iosif Mendel Hechter to a Jewish family on this day in 1907 in the Romanian port town of Brăila. He began to study law in 1927, first in Bucharest and later in Paris. He simultaneously embarked upon a prolific career in journalism, taking on literary and socio-cultural topics under the pen name Mihail Sebastian.
Sebastian developed a penchant for prose and had begun his literary rise in 1934 when he published his major work “De două mii de ani,” a semi-autobiographical novel about an unnamed Jewish student navigating Romanian life during the ‘20s. Over the following decade he released numerous novels, while also channeling his own experiences into his now-famous journals, which were clear-eyed yet hopeful accounts of this difficult period in history. Through it all, Sebastian never lost his sense of humor and achieved success with bitterly comedic plays like “Jocul de-a vacanța” (“Holiday Game”, 1938).
For his historic and courageous journals, Sebastian was posthumously awarded Germany’s prestigious Geschwister-Scholl prize in Munich in 2006.
Happy birthday, Mihail Sebastian!
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