Montaigne by Stefan Zweig Original text © Atrium Press Ltd, 1976 First published in German in Europäisches Erbe, S. Fischer Verlag, 1960 Translation © Will Stone 2015 First published by Pushkin Press

 

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig Original text © Atrium Press Ltd, 1976 First published in German in Europäisches Erbe, S. Fischer Verlag, 1960 Translation © Will Stone 2015 First published by Pushkin Press

Completed in Petropolis, Brazil - 1942

This is part of our  participation in German Literature 10 -November 2020

This my 8th year as a participant in German Literature Month.  It seems important in these dark times to continue traditions cherishing culture, historical knowledge and literacy.

I first became aware of Stefan Zweig during GL Month in 2013.  He is now one of my favorite writers.   

 Posts on Stefan Zweig

My  favorite works by Zweig are first "Mendel the Bibliophile", then Chess, and The Post Office Girl, and “Twilight”.  

 Stefan Zweig

November 28, 1881 - Vienna, Austria - born 

1941 -  moves with his second wife to Petropolis,Brazil

 to escape what he saw as the destruction of the culture of Europe

February 22, 1942 - Petropolis Brazil  - dies 

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 

Born: 28 February 1533, Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France

Died: 13 September 1592, Château de Montaigne, Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France

In his very well done introduction William Stone tells us the background behind Zweig’s move to Petropolis Brazil (located 68 Kilometers North East of Rio de Janeiro).  Zweig was convinced everything he loved in Europe was going to be destroyed by the Germans.  Now 

Petropolis is a get away for affluent Cariocas and a winter playground for Europe’s elite.  I spent some time there twenty years ago and it was then a totally beautiful place.  I imagine the tropical lushness of the area and the beauty of the citizens after leaving war ravaged Europe in 1941 must have been near overwhelming for Zweig.  Maybe Zweig’s spirit was 

damaged beyond recovery.

In a cabinet in his house in Petropolis Zweig, fluent in French, found a copy of the Essays of Montaigne.  Of course he knew of him but he had never read any of his essays.  He saw a Kindred spirit in Montaigne who saw his own time as a period of cultural decline and never ending war. Montaigne was born into an affluent French family and came to inherit a large house and an agricultural enterprise.  He married, was mayor of his town, traveled extensively but around age forty he began to think about the meaning of hid life in a decaying era in France.  He began to retreat into a tower house, reading ever more deeply in his library.  Zweig as Stone details totally identified with Montaigne.

Zweig gives a good bit of biographical information on Montaigne.  He explains why he found him so profound.

I am very glad I read this book, reading time maybe two hours.  

Stone has also translated Zweig’s treatise on Friedrich Nietzsche and I hope to read it soon.

Ambrosia Bousweau

Mel u

In the Snow (Im Schnee, 1901) - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - translated by Anthea Bell - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig - 2013 -

In the Snow (Im Schnee, 1901) - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - translated by Anthea Bell - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig - 2013 - 

German Literature 10 - November 2020

This my 8th year as a participant in German Literature Month.  It seems important in these dark times to continue traditions cherishing culture, historical knowledge and literacy.

I first became aware of Stefan Zweig during GL Month in 2013.  He is now one of my favorite writers.   

My Posts on Stefan Zweig

My favorite works by Zweig are first "Mendel the Bibliophile", then Chess, and The Post Office Girl, and “Twilight”.  

 Stefan Zweig

November 28, 1881 - Vienna, Austria

February 22, 1942 - Petropolis , Brazil 

Some critics of Zweig suggest he never faced in his writings the fate of Jews in Europe.  They have never read “In The Snow” which gives a vivid treatment of an attack by a group of  German Flagellants on a peaceful Jewish community.

“The Flagellants were abroad in Germany, wild, fanatically religious men who flailed their own bodies with scourges in Bacchanalian orgies of lust and delight, deranged and drunken hordes who had already slaughtered and tortured thousands of Jews, intending to deprive them of what they held most holy, their age-old belief in the Father. That was their worst fear.” - from the story

There is no dates given in the story.  Many in Europe felt the Black Death 

was caused by Jews.  The Flagellants made it their mission to kill as many Jews as they could.  The peak period for this was 1347 to 1351.  We do know the story takes place in a Jewish community in Germany in the 14th century:

“A small  MEDIEVAL German town close to the Polish border, with the sturdy solidity of fourteenth-century building: the colourful, lively picture that it usually presents has faded to a single impression of dazzling, shimmering white. Snow is piled high on the broad walls and weighs down on the tops of the towers, around which night has already cast veils of opaque grey mist.”

The worship session is in process at the Synagogue, held in the large house of the Rabbi.  A stranger approaches with terrible news. All the Jews in a neighboring community have been killed by a hoard of Flagellants.  They are now heading toward them.  The man turns out to be the fiancé of a woman at the service.  Everyone has friends and relatives who they fear are lost.  The community begins to pack up all they own to try to escape.  They will ultimately all freeze to death as they run.

A few days ago I posted on a very illuminating book, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany by Edward Westermann (forthcoming March 15, 2021), which demonstrated that during the Holocaust those doing the killing were intoxicated by the joy it brought them.  They inflamed their joy with alcohol.  Ordinary Germans would get drunk watching mass shootings, often taking pictures with dead bodies. This same spirit was alive and well in Germany in the 14th century.

I hope to read a few more Zweig short stories this month.

.

(The flagellant movement and the pogroms against the Jews, although not always uncontrolled, were certainly hysterical—highly emotional— responses to the Black Death. Flagellation, or whipping—performed for a variety of motives including penitential atonement, mortification of the flesh, imitation of Christ, or divine supplication—was not unusual in the Middle Ages. As a punishment for sinful behavior it appears from an early date in Christianity and was included in the first monastic rules from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Self-inflicted flagellation became common in Christian observance during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In 1260, there arose in Perugia, Italy, a public, collective, processional movement of voluntary flagellants, the forerunner of the movement during the Black Death...from Bedford Series)

Mel u

 

Forgotten Dreams” - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - first published in The Vergessene Träume, 1900- translated by Anthea Bell - 2013 - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press

 

“Forgotten Dreams” - A Short Story by Stefan Zweig - first published in The Vergessene Träume, 1900- translated by Anthea Bell - 2013 - included in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press

Website of German Literature 10

This will be my 8th year as a participant in German Literature Month.  It seems important in these dark times to continue traditions fostering culture, historical knowledge and literary depth. 

I first became aware of Stefan Zweig during GL Month in 2013.  He is now one of my favorite writers.   

My Posts on Stefan Zweig

My favorite works by Zweig are first "Mendel the Bibliophile", then Chess, and The Post Office Girl, and “Twilight”.  

 Stefan Zweig

November 28, 1881 - Vienna, Austria

February 22, 1942 - Petropolis, Brazil 

“Forgotten Dreams”, a brief work, begins with a description of the exquiste view from a magnificient Villa:

“THE VILLA LAY CLOSE TO THE SEA. The quiet avenues, lined with pine trees, breathed out the rich strength of salty sea air, and a slight breeze constantly played around the orange trees, now and then removing a colourful bloom from flowering shrubs as if with careful fingers. The sunlit distance, where attractive houses built on hillsides gleamed like white pearls, a lighthouse miles away rose steeply and straight as a candle—the whole scene shone, its contours sharp and clearly outlined, and was set in the deep azure of the sky like a bright mosaic.”

If Zweig’s body of work had to be summed  up in a sentence it might be described as an elegy to the lost glories of a culture in decline.

The plot is about a man revisiting a woman he once loved long ago.  When a servant gives her his card she is quite surprised.

“She reads the name with that expression of surprise on her features that appears when you are greeted in the street with great familiarity by someone you do not know. For a moment, small lines appear above her sharply traced black eyebrows, showing how hard she is thinking, and then a happy light plays over her whole face all of a sudden, her eyes sparkle with high spirits as she thinks of the long-ago days of her youth, almost forgotten now.”

Of course she is described as besutiful.

In their ensuing conversation we learn the woman once had dreams, hopes and values.   Over years, she settled for wealth and comfort.

Maybe Anthea Bell choice this as the lead story in the collection as it is a very Zweigian work, embodying his values.

I have still not read all the Short Stories in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig from Pushkin Press.  I hope to post on a few more this month.

"A Summer Novella" by Stefan Zweig (1906, translated by Anthea Bell)

German Literature VI Annoucement

Links to Participant Posts


German Literature and History on The Reading Life

Stefan Zweig on The Reading Life

My Readings For German Literature VI November 2016

1.  The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

2.  Royal Highness by Thomas Mann

3. A Small Circus by Hans Fallada

4.  Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse

5.  "Did He Do It" by. Stefan Zweig

6.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig (second reading, no post, posted on in Nov 2015)

7.  The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

8.  "The Ballarina and the Body" by Alfred Doblin

9.   Confession by Stefan Zweig

10. Schlump by Hans  Herbert Grimm

11.  "Flower Days" by Robert Walser (1911, no post)

12.  "A Summer Novella" by Stefan Zweig 

13.  "Kleisr in Thunder" by Robert Walser. (3rd reading, no post)

When I first saw the story title, "A Summer Novella" I assumed the work was a novella.  It is not and I cannot help but think this might be Zweig having a bit of fun with his readers.  Like many of his works, the story is structured as one man telling a story to another.  In this case the story is set at a nice hotel.  One man relays the events he set in motion when he made up an anonymous love letter, just for a joke, and sent it to a young girl staying at the hotel with her parents.  He can see she is shocked and intrigued.  He decides to send her more increasingly ardent letters.  He watches her reading them in the hotel dining room when her parents are not around.   Soon he sees her suriptiously eyeing a dashing young Italian man staying in the hotel.   She seems convinced he is her mystery lover.

The man listening to the story tells the narrator he should expand it into a novella.  

I found this a clever story.

Mel ü

 

Confusion by Stefan Zweig (1927, a novella, translated by Anthea Bell)

Stefan Zweig on The Reading Life

"One of the most callous criticisms of Stefan Zweig’s suicide along with his wife Lotte came from Thomas Mann. “He can’t have killed himself out of grief, let alone desperation. His suicide note is quite inadequate. What on earth does he mean with the reconstruction of life that he found so difficult? The fair sex must have something to do with it, a scandal in the offing?”  From Yiyun Li, 

Includes these works

Burning Secret

Chess Game

Fear 

Confusion

Journey to the Past

German Literature VI Annoucement

Links to Participant Posts


German Literature and History on The Reading Life

My Readings For German Literature VI November 2016

1.  The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

2.  Royal Highness by Thomas Mann

3. A Small Circus by Hans Fallada

4.  Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse

5.  "Did He Do It" by. Stefan Zweig

6.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig (second reading, no post, posted on in Nov 2015)

7.  The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

8.  "The Ballarina and the Body" by Alfred Doblin

9.   Confession by Stefan Zweig

Confession is one of the five works included in The Collected Novellas of Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell. Socially unacceptable romantic entanglements and out of the publicly

approved forms of sexuality are frequent themes in Zweig's work.  In the novella I just retread, Journey into the Past,a young man and the wife of his mentor and benefactor fall in love.  

For the time being some of my posts will be brief.  The election of Trump has made me too sad,to feel why bother. 

The best thing about this novella are the descriptions the narrator, he is looking back from any years ago,on his younger days patrolling Berlin looking for easy women and prostitutes.  The professor has adRk secret also.he is a closeted homosexual.  The narrator's description of gay cruising in Berlin, rent boys, back alley sex and all was very well done.

For those wanting wanting to get into Zeiwg, this collection would be a good start. ,

I love as given a review copy of this book.

 

"Did He Do It" by Stefan Zweig (first published 1987, in The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, translated by Anthea Bell)

German Literature VI Annoucement

Links to Participant Posts


German Literature and History on The Reading Life

Stefan Zweig on The Reading Life

This will be the fifth year The Reading Life has participated in German Literature Month.  This event is one  of the reason it is great to be part of the international book blog community.  Last year I was motivated to read world class literary works by writers like Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Stefan Zweig, Hermann Hesse as well as lesser know treasures.  I learned a lot from the many very erudite posts by coparticipants and from those by our very generous hosts Caroline of Beauty is a Sleeping Cat and Lizzy of Lizzy's Literary Life.  You will find excellent reading suggestions and planned events on their blog.  To participate all you have to do is to post on any work originally written in German and put your link on the event blog.  

My Readings For German Literature VI November 2016

1.  The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse

2.  Royal Highness by Thomas Mann

3. A Small Circus by Hans Fallada

4.  Rosshalde by Hermann Hesse

5.  "Did He Do It" by. Stefan Zweig

6.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig (s cond reading, no post, posted on in Nov 2015)

The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig, translated by the award winning Althea Bell, with twenty one stories and a novella is a magnificent,  beautiful book.  I have been reading and posting on the stories through now three German Litetature Month events.  I do have one complaint.  No where are we provided with first publication information.  I learned from an Amazon reviewer who kindly listed all first publication dates that "Did He Do It" as not published until 1987, forty five years after Zweig died but I have no idea why. Where was this story all those years,  did Zweig feel it was not worthy?  Did a journal editor reject it?  If you know the back story on this work, please leave a comment. (Added note,thanks to Jonsthan I have first publication data, some editions of the collection have this)

"Did He Do It" centers on a dog.  I acknowledge it as a bit smaltzy, maybe that is why a journal editor somewhere long ago declined to publish the work.  The story is set in rural England.  It is depicted as a beautiful calm care free place.  Biographical readers of Zweig might see his longing for a civilized place to live.  A married couple is getting to know their new neighbors.  The man has a good job in London.  They first get to know the wife who seems to have a sadness about her.  Then they meet her husband.  He is a person of great enthusiasm for everything.  His wife is great, his job wonderful.  He seems to wear his wife out with his exuberance. There only lacuna is their childlessness.  The couple next door d

Decide they need a dog, a band their friend's dog just gave birth to a litter of Bulldogs. .  The man falls in love with the dog who becomes the ultimate spoiled brat, dominating the household.  The build up of the household power of the dog is very well done.  Then the dog's life takes a huge down turn when the husband forgets all about his when his wife becomes pregnant.  When the baby is born he is completely shocked when he is actually relegated to a yard dog.  I pretty much saw the ending coming as will you.  It was still exciting and scary.

"Did He Do It" was fun to read.  

Please share your favorite Zweig works with us. 

Mel ü

Montaigne by Stefan Zweig (first published in 1960, published in 2015 in translation by Will Stone, from Pushkin Press)

"As others strain for eminent positions and to gain influence, celebrity, he labours only for himself. He has entrenched himself in his tower, he has raised the wall of his thousand books between himself and the clamour."

"Arguably the most important encounter, and the one whose implications remain hitherto unsung, especially in the English-speaking world, occurred in the autumn of 1941, in Petrópolis, Brazil, when, at the eleventh hour, Zweig discovered one Michel de Montaigne. For it was here in the spartan bungalow perched above the jungle, where the Zweigs were to spend the last pensive months of their lives, that Stefan, exploring the damp cellar soon after arrival, stumbled upon a “dusty old edition” of Montaigne’s famous Essais. The seemingly random discovery, “einen grossen Fund”, as he excitedly called it later in a letter to his ex-wife Friderike von Winternitz, proved a fateful intercession, and the sudden all-encompassing focus on Montaigne would eclipse competing works in progress during Zweig’s final months. More than any literary seduction, the stricken exile, so bereft of comradeship, was spiritually rewarded with a new-found friend, a fraternal counsellor speaking from a distance of four centuries, whose example chimed with Zweig’s ever more powerful inward convictions concerning personal freedom in the face of tyranny and the absolute necessity to remain true to oneself." From the introduction by Will Stone

The back story of this work is just amazing.  Zweig and his second wife have left Europe, stopping inNew York City, to move permanently to Petrópolis, Brazil.  He felt the Europe he loved, that of the  halcyon days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was gong to be forever destroyed by the barbarism of the Nazis.   He felt in Petróplois, close to Rio de Jeniro, he had found a retreat.  The world as he knew it and had a place was in his mind coming permanently to an end. In one of the greatest bits of literary serendipity of which I have heard, in the basement of the house he is renting he finds a copy of the essays of the great French writer Montaine.  He had never really previously read Montaine and begins to totally throw himself into the essays and the thoughts of Montaine.  (1532 to 1592, considered the originator of the essay as a literary art form). Much of the work of Montaine is based on cultivating your self through intensive and extensive reading.  Born into moderate wealth, for yeR he lived in a tower he had bui,t on his property, surrounded by 1000s of books.  Both Zweig and Montaine are paradigms of The Reading Life.   

Montaine had no lidelogy, no doctrines he advocated.  He lived largely by and through his reading.  He had a wife and children but rarely wrote about them.  He withdrew from the world, refused the political positions his rank brought him, withdrawing within his tower. 

"never mind the world! You cannot change it, or improve anything. Focus on yourself, save in yourself what can be saved. Build as the others destroy, strive to remain sane in the deluge of madness. Close yourself off. Construct your own world."

These thoughts below are as powerful now as they were in 1580 when they were written or 1939 when Zweig first read them

"Only the contemptuous stand in the way of freedom, and Montaigne despises nothing more than “la frénésie”,* the violent madness of those dictators of the spirit who crave with supreme arrogance and vanity to impose on the world their “glad tidings” as the sole and indisputable truth, and for whom the blood of hundreds of thousands of men is as nothing in the fanatical pursuit of their cause. This then is Montaigne’s attitude in the face of life, and as with all freethinkers it comes back to tolerance. He who demands freedom of thought for himself recognizes the same right for all men, and no one respected this tenet better than Montaigne."

I am grateful to Pushkin Press for publishing so much of Zweig in translation. 

This is a serious and elegant book. 

Mel u

"Leporella" by Stefan Zweig. 1929

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

German Literature Month V has only a few days left.  I have greatly enjoyed participating in this wonderful event. I commend and thank the hosts for their hard work.  There are lots of wonderful edifying posts by event participants.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

I am debating with Ambrosia as  whether or not we will host a party this year.  

Works I Have So Far Read for G L V

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser. a serious work of art

7. The Hotel Years Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Hoffman, a brilliant collection of feuilletons translated and introduced by Michael Hoffman

8.  "The Dandelioln" by Wolfgang Borchert. 

9.   "The Foundling" by Heinrich Von Kleist

10.  "A Conversation Concerning Legs" by Alfred Lichenstein 

11.  A Homage to Paul Celan

12.  "The Criminal" by Veza Canetti 

13.  Rebellion by Joseph Roth. Between the wars

14.  The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch - an amazing work of art

15.  The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.  Sex and the City redone in the Weimer Republic  

16.  Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada.  A panoramic view of the Weimer Republic 

17.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

18.  Fear by Stefan Zweig

19.  "Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig.

20.  "Oh Happy Eyes" by Ingeborg Bachman - no post

21.  Joseph Roth. Three Short stories published in Vienna Tales no post

Today is the last day of German Literature Month V.  The event really motivated me to read some great literature.  I will do a close out post probably tommorow but I offer my great gratitude to the Hosts for their hard work and support.  Without this event I might never have read Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, Gregor Von Rizzori, Herman Broch, Irmgard Bachman, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Walser, Heinrich Von Kleist or Gunter Grass.  

Stefan Zweig is one of my favorite authors.  Sometimes he may be melodramatic but he can tell a great story and has tremendous cultural depth.  He is entertaining, not for nothing was he once the most translated German language writer.

"Leporella" is a dramatic gripping story with no redeeming characters.  The center piece of the story is a mentally challenged woman who works as helper in the house of a Baron.  The Baron married his wife for her money, once married he resumed the ways of a dissolute playboy bachelor.  He was so uninterested in his wife the marriage was never consummated.  The wife is bitter over how she is treated, she tries to get back at her husband by withholding money from him but he gets around this.  One day one of his temporary loves, a young opera student refers to the helper as his "Leporella", a reference to a lover of Don Giovanni in the Mozart Opera and soon he starts to call her that.  She falls in love with the Baron when he gives her a trivial gift and even begins to procure girls for him.  I found that aspect of the story especially fascinating.  It was as if Leporella was vicariously having sex with the Baron.  She is presented as completely without sexual qualities, fit just to work.  Needless to say this does not work out well!

I don't want to spoil the fun of the plot other than to say there are several fascinating turns of events.  This is a look at a bitter world.  I greatlye givex  enjoyed this story.  As far as I know non German speakers cannot read it outside of The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig published by Pushkin Press.

Mel ü

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig. 1925. A reread from German Literature IV, November 2014)

Mendel, real or not, I deeply regret your passing and your fate.  Ambrosia Boussweau 

"Over everything else, understandably, the crematoria smoke still hung its tragic pall. The unparalleled magnitude of that catastrophe seemed to demand silence before its enormity, both from Jews and Gentiles."  Simon Schama

Lizzy's Literary Life


Beauty is a Sleeping Cat


German Literature Month V 

German Literature Month V has only about a week left.  I have greatly enjoyed participating in this wonderful event. I commend and thank the hosts for their hard work.  There are lots of wonderful edifying posts by event participants.  

German Literature IV Post Event Celebration. Copiously illustrated

I am debating with myself whether or not we will host a party this year.  

Works I Have So Far Read for G L V

1.  Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada. A brilliant recreation of life in Nazi Germany. 

2.  Ostend, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth and the Summer Before the End by Volker Weidermann. A fascinating social history 

3.  Buddenbrook Ths Decline of a Family by Thomas Mann.  Must reading 

4.  "The Governess" by Stefan Zweig

5.  Demian:  The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth by Herman Hesse.  Read the major works first.

6.  The Tanners by Robert Walser. a serious work of art

7. The Hotel Years Wandering Between the Wars by Joseph Hoffman, a brilliant collection of feuilletons translated and introduced by Michael Hoffman

8.  "The Dandelioln" by Wolfgang Borchert. 

9.   "The Foundling" by Heinrich Von Kleist

10.  "A Conversation Concerning Legs" by Alfred Lichenstein 

11.  A Homage to Paul Celan

12.  "The Criminal" by Veza Canetti 

13.  Rebellion by Joseph Roth. Between the wars

14.  The Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch - an amazing work of art

15.  The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun.  Sex and the City redone in the Weimer Republic  

16.  Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada.  A panoramic view of the Weimer Republic 

17.  Journey Into the Past by Stefan Zweig

18.  Fear by Stefan Zweig

Last year during German Literature Month IV I expressed my great love for a short story by Stefan Zweig, "Mendel the Bibliophile".  I wanted to reread it this month but I was somehow afraid it would not live up to my expectations.  I was so delighted to find I liked it even more this time.  I will just more or less for myself talk about some of the things that struck me on the second reading.

In the last twelve months I have read a good bit of Yiddish literature, holocaust works, and nonfiction on the issues between the so called European Jew and the Yiddish Jew.  I know this is a sensitive topic subject to uninformed misunderstandings but this conflict is very important in understanding much of the history and literature of Germany and the so called Mittleeuropa region.  Stefan Zweig epitomized the fully assimilated European Jew, deeply urbane, highly cultured and very affluent from old family money.  People of this background were a embarrassed by the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe and Russia.  I see now that one of the things "Mendel the Bibliophile" is about is this conflict.  The European Jew knows his real roots are with the Yiddish Jews but he is a bit embarrassed to admit this.  I also now understand why Mendel rocked back and forth as he read and why he read with such deep focus.  These are habits instilled in him from ancient traditions of study of the Torah.  The Yiddish culture was deeply into the reading life as were European Jews.  Joseph Roth has said the Prussian hatred of the Jews, he was writing from before the Holocaust begun, was a war on the book,on those who cherish reading and learning.

The narrator of the story has returned to the Gluck Cafe, from which Mendel dealt in books for thirty years.   His memory was amazing, ask him on any obscure work and he could tell you not just what it contained and when it was published, he could tell you how much it was worth and he could get you a copy.  He had contacts all over the book loving  world.  

World War One started but Mendel gave it little mind other than noticing some waiters were drafted to fight and that Herr Gluck's son was killed while serving in the  army.

Mendel maintained a vast correspondence.  He noticed his issues of a famous French journal devoted to rare books stopped coming eight months ago so he wrote to the office in Paris to inquire.  All out going mail was censored and two policemen had him brought in for questioning, asking him why he was corresponding with an enemy country?  Mendel is completely baffled, his work and the books transcend petty politics.  At first the police are planning to release him, then they found out he had as a child in the company of his family moved from Russia to Austria without official permission.  The officials are outraged to discover Mendel never bothered to apply for Austrian citizenship.  He is sent to a concentration camp as an enemy alien and kept there for two years until he was released when the war was over.  He returns to the cafe to find it has new owners who want to turn the coffee house into a sophisticated cafe.  Mendel in his thread  bare clothes, with his long beard and his custom of staying in the cafe 12 to 16 hours a day while buying only the two cups of coffee he could afford is not what the new owner wants.  Compressing a lot, he throws Mendel out one day accusing him of stealing a bread roll and tells him never to return.

The narrator has returned years later.  No one but an old lady who was a rest room attendant remembers Mendel.  She tells the man that Mendel's spirit was destroyed by what he saw in the concentration camp, by the agony of two years away from his reading and his work.  The close of the story is heart breaking.

Now on this reading I see the deep cultural clash in the story, the depiction of the base ignorance of the Prussian junker class and their servants, and a dark look at the future of all European Jews.

The only way I know that those who do not read German can read this amazing story is in The Collected Short Stories of Stefan Zweig published by Pushkin Press.

To any who would suggest, as big name critics and historians  such as   Hannah Arendt have, that Zweig never faced the fate of European Jews I would say you are just wrong.  Yes he fled Europe and could not face the world he thought was coming but it was not because he did not care but because he cared so much the pain killed him.  

I will be readi it  in 2016.  I found I recalled much of the story, but not all as I reread it.  

It is so interesting how being an illegal immigrant made the authorities fear Mendel.  

Mel ü