Bucharest in the mid — 1930s was both the best and the worst place imaginable for Sebastian to develop as a writer. This was the era when the Romanian capital was praised as “the Paris of the East,” a title that was partly a comment on the Francophilia of the city’s educated classes. (Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy, though problematic in other aspects of its depiction of Romanian society, conveys a vivid sense of this culture.) The Great Depression had filled the streets of Bucharest with destitute peasants, but the city’s cultural life was energetic and cosmopolitan. The theatres were packed, numerous newspapers and literary journals competed for the attention of the literate public, there was a cultivated classical music scene and the middle classes, when not in the mountains or at the Black Sea beaches, travelled to Paris, Vienna, Munich and Berlin. Never before or after would Romania be home to such a talented group of writers confronted in such acute form by the question of the nation’s identity.
In 1920 the Treaty of Trianon had ceded Transylvania to Romania. This culturally rich region of mountains and hilltop towns, inhabited by a Romanian majority and large Hungarian and German minorities, had been governed by Austria-Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s destruction in the First World War. The addition of Transylvania, in the northwest, to Wallachia and Moldavia, the two regions whose union in 1859 had created modern Romania, was matched in the south by the acquisition of the former Bulgarian territory of northern Dobrogea, and in the east by the recovery of largely Romanian-speaking Bessarabia and Bukovina from the defunct Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires respectively. These gains resulted in a Romania that had more than twice the territory and population of the pre-1914 nation. Between 1920 and 1939, for the first — and, as it would turn out, only — time in their history, nearly all Romanians lived together in one country. This unexpected good fortune created a cultural ebullience that inspired a vigorous search for national self-definition. At the same time, 28 % of the expanded nation consisted of ethnic minorities, as opposed to 10 % before the First World War. The 1923 Constitution, which had guaranteed equal rights for these minorities, came under ferocious attack from the far right. Sebastian’s intellectual and creative growth is inseparable from the debates stirred up by this atmosphere, even though in the end they would destroy him.
In Bucharest, Sebastian studied and practised law and frequented restaurants, night clubs and literary and theatrical events. His status as a well-regarded journalist earned him a government pass that granted him free travel on the nation’s railways, enabling him to retreat to mountain cabins to write. He became sufficiently prosperous to rent a small but well-appointed apartment in the city centre. He had various romantic relationships with women, but did not marry. He began to write for the theatre, and became part of an engrossing literary society that saw Bucharest surpass Iaşi to become Romania’s literary heartland. Here established older writers mingled with the new wave, the “Generation of 1927,” to which Sebastian belonged. The patriarch of Romanian literature, the prolific Moldavian historical novelist Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961), moved to Bucharest in the mid-1930s, although he soon left after becoming embroiled in a scandal. The Transylvanian Liviu Rebreanu (1885–1944), author of the internationally published novels Ion (1920) and The Forest of the Hanged (1922), had also relocated to the capital, where he served two terms as the artistic director of the National Theatre, edited a literary magazine and worked as a high-ranking civil servant in the Ministry of Education. Among the younger writers of the Generation of 1927 was the talented novelist Camil Petrescu (1894–1957). A fellow Proust enthusiast, Petrescu became one of Sebastian’s closest friends. Sebastian’s confidantes and intellectual sparring partners included young writers such as the essayist and philosopher Emil Cioran (1911–1995), who would become famous in Paris, the novelist and later professor of religious studies Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who also contributed articles to Nae Ionescu’s Cuvântul (and was introduced to his first wife by Sebastian), and the absurdist playwright Eugen Ionescu (1909–1994) (who was not related to Nae Ionescu, and, in fact, was partly of Jewish origin).
Governed by a series of inept, semi-democratic governments that coexisted with a fumbling monarchy while besieged by radicals of the far right who sometimes took to the streets to demonstrate their muscle, interwar Romania was never peaceful. But it was an exciting environment for a talented young writer like Sebastian — until his literary world began to unravel. In 1934, having completed his second novel, De două mii de ani (It’s Been Two Thousand Years), about the condition of being a Romanian of Jewish ancestry, Sebastian asked his mentor to write a preface to his new work. Nae Ionescu agreed, but loaded his essay with refutations of the novel’s claim that Jews’ first allegiance was to their Romanian identity. “It is an assimilationist illusion, it is the illusion of so many Jews who sincerely believe that they are Romanian […] Are you Iosef Hechter, a human being from Brăila on the Danube? No, you are a Jew from Brăila on the Danube.”
On receiving this preface, Sebastian decided that the only honest course of action was to publish it. The publication of a novel on the theme of Jewish integration into Romanian life would have been controversial under any circumstances; the addition of Ionescu’s preface made the book incendiary. De două mii de ani caused possibly the most violent scandal in Romanian literary history. The right accused Sebastian of being a Zionist agent, while Jews spurned him as a fascist lapdog. Many of his closest friends abandoned him. Sebastian refused to yield, insisting on his right to regard himself first and foremost as a Romanian: “As for anyone who tells me that I’m not a Romanian… go talk to the trees, and tell them they’re not trees.” In a letter to a fellow writer in 1936, while the scandal was still raging, Sebastian wrote: “My maternal great-grandfather was a banker in Bucharest in 1802. He contributed money to help the leaders of the 1848 revolution. Both of my parents, born in this country (my father in 1868), speak only Romanian and brought me up as a Romanian.”
More ominous signs appeared. Cuvântul, Sebastian’s long-time intellectual home, became the official newspaper of the Iron Guard fascist movement. His friend Mircea Eliade campaigned for the Iron Guard in 1937, savaging the government for its “tolerance” of Jews, and boasting that he welcomed having the adjective “Hitlerian” applied to him. Sebastian struggled to sustain his friendships with Eliade, Cioran and Petrescu. The crisis seems only to have spurred his creativity. In 1935 Sebastian collected his ripostes to the attacks against him in a volume entitled Cum am devenit huligan (How I Became a Hooligan) — a book that inspired the contemporary Romanian novelist Norman Manea’s memoir of his return to Bucharest after the fall of communism, The Hooligan’s Return (2003).