How I Became a Hooligan was only one of two books published by Sebastian in 1935. His third novel, Oraşul cu Salcâmi (The Town of Acacias), also appeared that year. A coming-of-age novel that explores the traditional Romanian theme of the differences between life in the provinces and life in the capital, Oraşul cu Salcâmi remains arguably Sebastian’s most popular novel with Romanian readers. In September of that year, he wrote a series of highly regarded articles on Romanian theatre. He continued to practise law, write the French books column for the magazine Vremea (The Times), and contribute to the French-language Bucharest newspaper L’Indépendence roumaine. In 1938 his first play, the comedy Jocul de-a vacanţa (The Vacation Game), was produced and received a warm reception. In 1939 he published a book-length study of the correspondence of Marcel Proust and in 1940, with Romania at war, The Accident appeared. After this, the walls closed in on Sebastian; he published no more books in his lifetime.
Sebastian survived the Holocaust, but at a terrible price. Romania remained neutral at the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, but, sympathetic to Nazi Germany, found itself under threat from the Soviet Union. Moscow annexed Bessarabia and northern Bukovina and pressured the government in Bucharest to return northern Dobrogea to Bulgaria. On January 2, 1938, in the first of a series of blows that would cripple Sebastian’s ability to earn a living, all Jewish lawyers were expelled from the bar association. As the war advanced, Sebastian lost the right to publish his journalism. He was ejected from the Romanian Academy, membership in which had provided him with a modest stipend. His railway pass was withdrawn, ending, almost forever, his relationship with the mountain landscapes, hiking and ski trails he loved (he made a final trip to the mountains, in a state of deep depression, in December 1944). Anti-Semitic residency laws artificially inflated the rent of his downtown apartment to a price far beyond his means, forcing him to move into a gloomy slum with his mother and one of his brothers. (His other brother lived in France.) In order to pay the humiliating tariffs imposed on Jews in either cash or extensive donations of clothing to the war effort, he had to borrow money from friends, who now pretended not to know him when he passed them on the street. But the most unendurable blow came in 1940 when Nae Ionescu, having been interned in a concentration camp as the anti-Semitic Goga-Cuza government tried to subdue the competing right-wing force of the Iron Guard, fell ill and died at the age of forty-nine. Sebastian wept uncontrollably. Long afterwards, Ionescu came to him in dreams to shake his hand.
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 anti-Semitic oppression took the form of daily humiliations and sporadic, unpredictable pogroms against Jewish neighbourhoods rather than mass slaughter. Unable to publish, Sebastian devoted much time to the diary he had begun to keep in 1935, taught himself English and read the complete works of Honoré de Balzac. He listened to the radio to follow the progress of the war, practise English and take in the classical music concerts that transported him (only late in the war did it strike him that most of these broadcasts came from German-speaking cities where he would have been killed). He planned and wrote fragments of an epic novel that was to open with a theatre company’s tour of the Romanian provinces. Sebastian used his knowledge of English — a language little studied in Romania at that time — to earn money surreptitiously by doing anonymous translations, notably of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The promise that others might sign his work yet allow him to receive the royalties, gave him the energy to write again for the theatre. In 1944, after the fascists were removed from office and Romania nominally joined the Allied Powers, he succeeded in publishing illegally in the newspaper România Liberă (Free Romania). The first of the three plays he had been working on, the Chekhovian Steaua fără nume (The Star Without a Name), now regarded as one of the classics of Romanian theatre, was staged in Bucharest that same year. It was advertized as the work of another writer to circumvent the ban on performing plays by Jewish authors.
The Mihail Sebastian who emerged from the Second World War was an angry man. During the war, his friends had prospered by professing fascism, while he had been ostracized and consigned to a slum. Cioran had been living in Paris on a scholarship; Eugen Ionescu, in spite of his Jewish ancestry, had succeeded in escaping to France in 1942. Eliade had been rewarded for his collaborationism with plush diplomatic posts in Lisbon and London. Camil Petrescu had been named Director of the National Theatre for the duration of the war years. When the Red Army rolled into Bucharest at the end of August 1944, the collaborators began to greet Sebastian again. Some of the more conspicuous fascist supporters, such as Petrescu, made a public display of their friendship with the man they had not spoken to in five years in the hope of warding off anti-fascist retribution. Other Romanian intellectuals, however, held Sebastian, as a contributor to the notorious Cuvântul, partly responsible for bringing fascism to Romania.
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. But Sebastian’s vision of his country had changed. In the final pages of his wartime diary, the adjective “Balkan,” wielded as an insult, recurs in his descriptions of Romanians and their culture. He felt foreign to Bucharest intellectual life in a way he never had before; oppression had made him see the world as a Jew, a stance that in the 1930s he would have considered parochial and artificial. In late 1944, he turned down offers of at least half a dozen good jobs out of disgust at the “terrible (morally terrible) jostling, as people hurry to occupy positions, to assert claims, to establish rights.” Finally, he accepted a post as a press officer for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the new pro-Soviet government. He agreed to give a lecture series on the novels of Balzac at the Free Workers’ University. On May 25, 1945, hurrying across Bulevardul Regina Maria to make a class, Sebastian was hit by a truck and killed instantly. He was thirty-seven years old. In 1946 and 1947 the two remaining plays he had completed at the end of the war, Ultima oră (Breaking News) and Insula (The Island) were staged, with the former becoming a smash hit and an indispensable part of the repertoire of Romanian comedy. In 1947, King Michael abdicated under Soviet pressure and fled to Switzerland. Romania began to be absorbed into the Soviet Bloc and the era to which Mihail Sebastian and his work had belonged became part of history.