Reviewed by Lauren Goldenberg
“I will never cease to be a Jew, of course,” the narrator of Mihail Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years declares. “That is not a position I can resign from. You are or you’re not. It’s not a matter either of pride or shame.” The speaker of these words is unnamed, but is so closely modeled on the author that the novel itself is nearly autobiographical. In some ways it feels more like a historical document: it was published in Romania in 1934, and has only now been translated into English by Philip O Ceallaigh, a famous Irish writer and translator. For Two Thousand Years begins in December 1923, when a new constitution making Jews Romanian citizens takes effect and recounts, from the narrator’s perspective, the experience of being a Jew in Romania between the two world wars. The narrator, a law student, is trying to focus on his intellectual endeavors while suffering regular anti-Semitic attacks and beatings, which have increased in reaction to the new law: “I received two punches during today’s lectures and I took eight pages of notes. Good value, for two punches.” He chronicles that year in a notebook that he eventually loses but refers back to throughout the novel. This notebook is the novel’s heart, and through it we witness how he suffers this violence with discretion and dignity, how he tries to make sense of his being a Jew, and how he remains mostly a silent witness to debates among his friends and acquaintances on Communism and Zionism, all while he tries to forge his own space of freedom to think...
Reviewed by Sho Spaeth
Inheritance comes in many forms, not all of them easy entries in a grim tally of money in or money out. For the death of a parent, the stakes are even higher. In the days and months before they die, in the weeks and years after they are no longer alive, the child will weigh on a different scale the benefits they have been bequeathed by birth—ethics, aptitudes, relative station in society—against the defects that have come to them by blood—congenital illness, self-destructive tendencies, a feckless family. Grief masks what some kin feel as survivor’s guilt, even as they sense a lingering, atavistic dread that some sins, too, are hereditary.
The bleakness of this perspective is undeniable in the first chapter of Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother, translated from the Japanese by Juliet Winters Carpenter. The protagonist, Mitsuki, considers what she has been left with on the night of her mother’s death. There is the relatively meager amount of money she and her sister will split; there is the simple fact that they are both middle-aged women in an aging nation in decline; there is the romantic, grasping desire to want a beautiful life, a predilection that Mitsuki likens to a congenital defect, passed along from one generation of her family to the next; finally, there are the ruins of her own personal and professional circumstances, left unattended as she has been obliged to take care of her mother. And so the novel begins with a character who has long thought her mother’s death would mark a release, and instead finds herself mired in the messy reality of living, suffering under constraints of a different kind...
