For Two Thousand Years

"Ich habe Leute beim Roulette gesehen, die vor Spielleidenschaft ganz entstellt waren. Aber am verworfensten scheinen mir nicht die, die sich wie wahnsinnig ins Spiel stürzten, alles verlieren: Geld, Ehre und Leben, sondern die ängstlichen Spieler, die um jede Spielmarke zittern, alle fünf Minuten endlose Berechnungen anstellen und das Spiel abbrechen, wenn sie eine noch annehmbare Verlustgrenze erreicht haben. Die Mittelmäßigkeit beim Laster scheint mir die entehrendste aller Mittelständigkeiten."'Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years' - Philippe Sands, Guardian Books of the Year A prescient interwar masterpiece, available in English for the first time'Absolutely, definitively alone', a young Jewish student in Romania tries to make sense of a world that has decided he doesn't belong. Spending his days walking the streets and his nights drinking and gambling, meeting revolutionaries, zealots, lovers and libertines, he adjusts his eyes to the darkness that falls over Europe, and threatens to destroy him.Mihail Sebastian's 1934 novel was written amid the anti-Semitism which would, by the end of the decade, force him out of his career and turn his friends and colleagues against him. For Two Thousand Years is a lucid, heart-wrenching chronicle of resilience and despair, broken layers of memory and the terrible forces of history.At a dark moment of identity politics and resurgent nationalism, the books that have left the deepest impression have been those that offer a sense of what we might learn from times past. Nothing I have read is more affecting than Mihail Sebastian's magnificent, haunting 1934 novel, For Two Thousand Years (trans Philip Ó Ceallaigh), now available in English Philippe Sands Guardian Books of the Year