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“Alone Like Us, Perhaps”: Rereading an Ambivalent Masterpiece

JL;DR SUMMARY Ronit Mazovskiy's exploration of Mihail Sebastian's novel, 'For Two Thousand Years,' sheds light on the complex identity struggles of Bucharest's Jewish intellectuals during the 1930s in the face of rampant antisemitism. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

HolocaustJewish IdentityZionismAssimilationJewish IntellectualsRomaniaMihail SebastianCriterion Group1930s Bucharest

Places mentioned

Bucharest, Romania
"As a student at a university in Bucharest, this new path is obscured to him at every pass since he stands at two removes from the active game of existence; firstly as an intellectual and secondly as a Jew."
Romania
"In other incidents around campus, fistfights break out between Jewish students and their non-Jewish peersshirts and hats ripped, insults hurled, some blows exchanged. These eerily resonant scenes are from Mihail Sebastians autobiographical novel For Two Thousand Years, which was published in Romania in 1934 and skillfully translated into English by Philip Ceallaigh in 2016."
Israel
"When the journal, which had been smuggled out of Romania to Israel by his brother in 1961, was finally published in 1996, it caused an intense backlash in Romania for its unsparing documentation of Romanian antisemitism."
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Cairo Item ID 62718
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Retrieved 2025-09-30 05:30:52 UTC
Curated 2025-09-30 08:32:54 UTC