Roth, Zweig and the Ostjuden

Yesterday I blogged about Josepth Roth and his nostalgic salute (in The Radetzky March) to his Galician homeland (link). The Galician salute was almost a superfluity in the novel, not at all necessary to the plot, although perhaps useful to suggest the breadth and diversity of the Austrian Empire.

The other great nostalgiast of the Austrian Empire is Stefan Zweig. Roth and Zweig are easy to confuse, but only from a distance. They were both Jewish; both industrious and productive practitioners of a kind of high-end journalism; they shared an affectionate, if ironic, affection for the Empire after its collapse in the debacle of World War I.

But the differences are dramatic. Zweig’s father was a rich textile manufacturer. He spent his young adulthood among the aesthete glitterati, scarcely aware that he was a Jew; for years he presided over a salon at Salzburg. The critic Joan Acocella remarks on “his willingness to disassociate himself from the poor, despised Ostjuden, who [in the early 20^th Century] were pouring into Western Europe in flight from the Russian pogroms.” See her Introduction to the NYRB edition of Beware of Pity xv (2006).

Roth was one of the ostjuden. He was the orphaned son of a nobody from Brody near Lviv (Freud’s mother came from the same place).

No surprise that Roth salutes the ostjuden. More remarkably, there is a somewhat similar strain in Zweig’s only novel, Beware of Pity. The plot revolves around the household of Herr von Kekesfalva, seemingly a country aristocrat but in truth not at all what he appeared to be. We learn his story from another character, the all-seeing Doctor Condor (who himself may be modeled on Sigmund Freud, but that is yet another matter). Dr. Condor says:

Perhaps we had better begin at the beginning and for the moment leave our aristocratic friend Herr Lajos von Kekesfalva completely out of the picture. For when my story begins no such person existed. There was no landed proprietor in a long black coat, with gold-rimmed spectacles, no Hungarian nobleman. There was only, in a wretched little village on the Hungarian-Slovak frontier, a keen-eyed, narrow-chested little Jewish lad called Leopold Kanitz, familiarly referred to, I believe, as Lämmel Kanitz. …

Yes, Kaniktz—Leopold Kanitz, I can’t change that. It ws only much later that on the recommendation of a Minister the name was so sonorously Magyarized and decked out with the prefix of nobility. … Kekesfalva’s father, or rather Kanitz’s father, then, far from being an aristocrat, ws the poverty-stricken, be-ringleted Jewish landlord of a wayside tavern just outside of town. The woodcutters and coachmen looked in there every morning and evening to warm themselves with a glasss or two of kontuschowska before or after their drive through the Carpathian frost. Sometimes the fiery liquid went too quickly to their heads; at such times they would smash chairs and glasses, and it was in a brawl that Kanitz’s father received his death blow. …

Dr. Condor indulges himself with a leisurely and loving account of Kanitz’s maturation. It turns out he was another of those traders of whom Roth spoke:

He became what is known in Galicia as a “factor”, a man who trades in everything, acts as middle-man for everything, and in all sorts of ways spans the bridge between supply and demand. … [H]e knew everything and was an expert on everything; was there a widow, for example, who was trying to marry off her daughter, he would come out in the role of marriage broker; was there someone who wanted to emigrate to America and needed information and papers, Leopold would procure them. In addition, he bought and sold old clothes, clocks, antiquarian articles, valued and exchanged land and goods and horses, and when an officer wanted a loan, he always managed to procure it for him.

--Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity 95-97 (NYRB Classic 2006)

There is much more of this; clearly, Zweig enjoys it at least as much as Dr. Condor. It’s readable and engaging, yet I don’t think it strikes quite the right note. Joan Acocella says: “Zweig’s portrayal of Kekesfalva’s early years is what, today, many of us would call anti-Semitic writing.” Id. I don’t think it is quite that – there is nothing here any more harsh than “Figaro qua! Figaro là!” I think the problem, rather, is that it doesn’t quite work: Zweig is trying has hard as he knows how to understand Kanitz, but his product has a manufactured tone about it. Roth’s effort seems to me, on the one hand more spooky and remote, and on the other, more engaged and ultimately more plausible.

Beware of Pity is, in its own way, a wonderful novel: both Roth and Zweig paint indelible portraits of life in the old Empire. But at the end of the day it is Roth the nobody who does a better job with life among the nobodys.

Sadly, there are other points of convergence between Roth and Zweig. Both found their lives destroyed by the Nazis. Zweig committed suicide in Brazil in 1942; Roth preceded him, having died of alcoholism (suicide by bottle?) in Paris in 1939.

"But Doctor, Is It Curable?"

We’ve come a long way towards believing that the doctor ain’t god, and also that some patients are just not going to get well. You can find an interesting contrast to that attitude in an instructive, but perhaps obscure, source: Stefan Zweig’s novel, Beware of Pity, where Dr. Condor (who seems pretty clearly a mouthpiece for the author), unburdens himself on the concept of “incurable” in medicine.

Zweig is a provocative source for this sort of thing because he is writing about Vienna, his home and a city he understood well. Vienna is interesting because (in the early 20^th Century) it was a society in decay with a lot of attention to sickness and death—yet at the same time a center for explosive growth in knowledge, not least medical knowledge. It’s no accident that Vienna produced, along with Stefan Zweig, Dr. Sigmund Freud, whose great paper Analysis Terminable and Interminable, on the concept of cure, was published almost simultaneous with Zweig’s novel (link). In any event, I wonder what Freud would have thought of Zweig’s Dr. Condor:

You’ll never get me to utter the word “incurable.” Never! I know that it is to the most brilliant man of the last century, Nietzsche, that we owe the horrible aphorism: a doctor should never try to cure the incurable. But that is about the most fallacious proposition of all the paradoxical and dangerous propositions he propounded. The exact opposite is the truth. I maintain that it is precisely the incurable that one should try to cure, and, what is more, that it is only in so-called incurable cases that a doctor shows his mettle. A doctor who from the outset accepts the concept “incurable” is funking his job, capitulating before the battle begins. Of course I know that it is easier, more convenient to pronounce certain cases “incurable” after pocketing one’s fee, to turn one’s back on them with a sigh of resignation—indeed, extremely convenient and profitable to concern oneself exclusively with those cases that have been shown to be curable, in which one can turn up page so-and-so of the medical text-book and find the whole treatment set out for one in black and white. Ah well, those that care to can go in for that sort of witch-doctoring. As for me, it seems to me as pitiable a thing as if a writer were only to attempt to say what had already been said, instead of trying to force into the medium of the spoken word the unsaid, nay, the unsayable; as though a philosopher were to expatiate for the ninety-ninth time on what has long been known instead of tackling the unknown, the unknowable.

--Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity 139
(NRB Classsics paperback ed. 2006)

When Condor/Zweig speaks of philosophers, I wonder if he is thinking of another famous Viennese—the one who said “"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (link).

Amos Oz, Spy

Caution: This post is about Amos Oz' To Know a Woman (link). It's not really a spoiler but if you are planning to read the book, you might not want to read this just yet.

Anyway--The Mr. and Mrs. Buce Readaloud Club has completed its perusal of TKAW. I still can't quite make up my mind about it, but in this case, that's a compliment: I suspect it is intentional that the book leaves loose ends, questions unanswered, issues unresolved--some things we'll never know. So, high marks, and I may have stuff to say about it in, oh maybe a couple of months.

But one thought. The protagonist is/was a spy. It's not a spy novel in the Eric Ambler sense of the term, but spying and the spy' s mind do factor in. The protagonist watches and listens. He takes in his surroundings as if--because--his life depends on it. And he never lies.

I have no reason to suppose that Oz was ever a spy. Or at any rate, not in the nationalist/professional sense. But for a writer, perhaps spying is a way of life. He watches and listens, he takes stuff in. And he never lies. Or at any rate, he tries not to lie, and in this case, I'd say that Amos Oz, writer and spy, has pretty well brought it off.

Next up: Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity.

Update: Okay, so I never said it was original (link):

Mr. Oz warns sternly against reading the novel as "political allegory" or "confessional," but agrees that Ravid [the protagonist of TKAW] could stand in for him. "A secret agent is a perfect metaphor for a storyteller," he said. "What he does for a living is what I do for a living: put himself under people's skins, try to be empathic, to see four or five contradictory points of view, to have more than one identity."

New York Times, February 24, 1991