Manès Sperber: A First Look

Manès Sperber appears to have been a figure of some consequence in his time. Born in the shtetl to face for the horrors of his century, he was variously a Zionist, a communist, a former communist, a psychotherapist, a medium-productive author, and an editor at a prestigious publishing house. But he died in 1984. I know a little about Eastern European historyand I had never heard of him until a couple of years back when I ran into an appreciation by Clive James. I've had a chance now to read the first volume (there are three) of his memoirs, and I think I'll be going back for more. He isn't perhaps as elegant as Gregor von Rezzori, about whom I wrote a while ago, nor Elias Canetti, of whom I have to admit I have read precious little. And while I don't know for certain, I suspect the Sperber novels don't measure up to Joseph Roth or even Stephan Zweig.

But each of us does things in his own way, and Sperber's way seems worth taking seriously. On the current evidence, his prose is mostly straightforward and unadorned; but he seems to have a remarkably clear eye for the workings of the human mind, and he seems to care about getting things right. And aside from elegance, he differs from von Rezzori (still fresh in my mind) in at least one other way: almost alone of the Eastern European literary pantheon, von Rezzori was not Jewish. Sperber is Jewish and thus perhaps inevitably was impelled to engage more closely with the action and passion of his time.

This first volume takes the reader just to the end of World War I, but he spent those years in Vienna enjoying, if that is the right word, one of those childhoods that must have been interesting to look back on, even if not much fun at the time. He was not separated from his family, but his parents were desperately poor and not able to give him much by way of framework or direction. Thus he finds himself footloose, as it were, a semi-streetkid at large in a dying empire. There's a priceless passage in which he faces down a Teutonic bully of a schoolteacher, not so much by malice as just by the accident of being so much more mature and self-sufficient than the poor sap ever suspected.

About the same time that I was reading Sperber, Mr. and Mrs. Buce were enjoying a readaloud of the first volume of Parade's End, the World War I tetralogy by Ford Madox Ford. More about that later. Ford's English soldiers were, of course, embroiled in the awfulness of the Western Front. But the English Home front was just about as isolated from the War as it was possible to be--suspended in time, or in some kind of bubble. A long way from the trenches, and a long way from dying Vienna.

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Ref: God's Water Carrier, vol. 1 of All Our Yesterdays