Because of Romania's opportunistic treatment of Jews, he survived the war and the Holocaust, only to be killed in a road accident early in 1945. His remarkable diary was published only recently in its original language and is here translated into English for the first time.Sebastian's Journal offers not only a chronicle of the darkest years of European anti-Semitism but a lucid and finely shaded analysis of erotic and social life, a reader's notebook, and a music lover's journal. Above all, it is a measured but blistering account of the major Romanian intellectuals, Sebastian's friends, writers and thinkers who were mesmerised by the Nazi-fascist delirium of Europe's 'reactionary revolution'. In poignant and memorable sequences, Sebastian touches on the progression of the machinery of brutalisation and on the historical context that lay behind it.One of the most remarkable literary achievements of the Nazi period, Sebastian's journal vividly captures the now-vanished world of pre-war Bucharest. Under the pressure of hatred and horror in the 'huge anti-Semitic factory' that was Romania in the years of World War II, his writing maintains the grace of its intelligence, standing as one of the most important human and literary documents to survive from a singular era of terror and despair.

    The evolution of the Romanians in the century between the 1770s and the 1860s was marked by a transition from long-established agrarian economic and social structures, locked into an essentially medieval political system, to a society moulded by urban and industrial values and held together by allegiance to the nation-state. This fascinating analysis of the building of a European nation-state is the first detailedf account of the Romanians during this dramatic period.

    Roman - The Burning Bush and Romanian Monasticism During the Time of Communism. Being part of the "Burning Bush" movement in Romania cost Fr. Roman eleven years of freedom. The essay "Romanian Monasticism During the Time of Communism" is an invaluable historical account about the origins, the development and the meaning of Orthodox Monasticism in Romania, allowing us to understand better not only the meaning of monasticism, but also trials and tribulations of an Orthodox nation.

    The sadness and paradoxes of exile and the clarity of a cross-cultural awareness become for Ursu the psychological and descriptive framework for poems infused with the emotion and images of erotic longing and spiritual loneliness. The combination of elegy and wit in the poems of Ovid, the poet of exile with whom Ursu claims kinship, is evident in her poetry as well. Always conscious of both her new American freedom and the remorselessness of time and death, Ursu explores the American landscape through "the sad aura of those coming from Eastern Europe / as if from some kind of inferno." She displays remarkable insight into America's often formless and shallow "society of consumers," and yet her newly Americanized vision also allows her to reimagine and reevaluate her life and her country. The alienating repression of recent Romanian history has led Romanian poets, with Ursu as a source of inspiration for their almost violent intensity of language, to resist and penetrate all boundaries and limits, whether political, ideological, or aesthetic. The sympathy of her cultural observations and the physicality of her poetic images and the desires that inform them give Ursu's poems an affecting and universal perspective in which disperate experience and places coalesce in a singular human landscape.

    During the Ceaucescu years in Romania it was the poets who dared to transmit covert messages of protest, and during the December 1989 Revolution many of them risked their lives on the streets. In Ireland, poets gave voice to the sentiments of the independence movement early in this century and during recent years their work has been read for insights on the violent sectarian divisions in the North. This Bloodaxe anthology of contemporary Romanian poetry is the outcome of a strangely imaginative collaboration between poets from these two countries on either fringe of the new Europe. Ten leading Irish poets have produced their own distinctive version of poems by ten leading Romanian poets.