"Mihail Sebastian's 1934 masterpiece, now available in English for the first time, was written as the rise of fascism forced him out of his literary career and turned his friends and colleagues against him. Confronted with the violence of a recurrent anti-Semitism, Sebastian questions its causes in this perceptive testimony, illuminating the ideological debates of the interwar period with wit, simplicity and vivacity"--

Five stories trace the sentimental education of a restless, complex, and contradictory man from youth to late middle age. In "Skushno," the adolescent Gregor is disgraced and exacts revenge on the Jewish boy who is a rival for his aunt's affection. "Youth" finds him on the run from his aristocratic family, supporting himself as a window dresser, and enmeshed in an unhappy affair with a Jewish woman he calls the "black widow." Vienna in the years leading...