Mihail Sebastian (1907-1945), pseudonym of Joseph Hechter was born in 1907 in Braila, a city on the Danube within a Jewish family. He belongs to the generation of Eliade, Ionesco and Cioran, was a close friend of them all, especially Mircea Eliade. Great connoisseur of French literature, novelist, journalist, playwright and memoirist, was one of the most controversial writers of the thirties and a prominent figure of the intelligentsia of the interwar Bucharest. During the war, because of his Jewishness, he suffered retaliation from the anti-Semitic legislation, which stripped him of all his rights to turn it into a sub-human being: he banned the practice of law, publish, possess a radio , skiing, reside between Romanians and imposed compulsory labor. The memories of those events the embodied in a written diary between 1935 and 1944, faithful mirror of the Romanian society of the time and witness a tr ‡ logic that, for the first time revealed the responsibility of Romania in the Holocaust story.
With the defeat of Nazism regained their rights, but could hardly enjoy his freedom, he died in Bucharest, hit by a truck of the Russian army, May 29, 1945, thirty-eight years. His works include the novel The accident (2004) and said Journal 1935-1944 (2003), both published in Castilian. Pre-Texts soon publish his novel Women.