TANTE JOLESCH
OR THE DECLINE OF THE WEST IN ANECDOTES
By Friedrich Torberg
Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer
Edited and with an afterword by Sonat Birnecker Hart
249 pages $ 24.00
Ariadne Press, Riverside, CA 2008
Already a much loved classic in Austria, Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes is Friedrich Torberg's tribute to the largely Jewish coffeehouse world that flourished in Vienna amidst the afterglow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its final collapse in 1938. Based on Torberg's personal memories of intellectuals and eccentrics of the time, including Egon Friedell, Fritz Grünbaum, Egon Erwin Kisch, Alfred Polgar, and Franz Werfel, this work evokes the storytelling and humor prominent among Vienna's coffeehouse denizens. These anecdotes allow one to journey into the lives of assimilated Jews before the Shoah, one that begins in the living room of Tante Jolesch, revolves around the coffeehouse, and extends to summer resorts, sports matches, dinner parties, a psychiatric hospital in the care of Sigmund Freud, and the office of a US consular official in charge of granting visas to the United States.
Friedrich Torberg (1908-1979) joined the literary elite of pre-war Austria at the age of 22, but his career was cut short by the Nazi ban on Jewish writers. Invited by the New York PEN-Club as one of "Ten outstanding German anti-Nazi writers," Torberg was able to flee to the United States, where he wrote screenplays and articles for German-language newspapers. In 1951 Torberg returned to Vienna and became a journalist, critic, and translator.
AFTERIMAGES: A FAMILY MEMOIRA
By Carol Ascher
239 pages $ 24.00
Holmes & Maier Publishers, Inc., Teaneck, NJ, 2008
THE GROUND UNDER MY FEET
By Eva Kollisch
224 pages $ 14.95
Hamilton Stone Editions, Maplewood, NJ, 2008
SHAKESPEARE'S KITCHEN
By Lore Segal
240 pages $ 14.95
The New Press, New York, NY, 2008
Memories of Austria under Hitler, emigration, resettlement, and the search for community are evoked by three gifted women writers - two who left Vienna as children, and one born a few weeks after her parents' arrival in the United States.
In The Ground Under My Feet (Hamilton Stone Editions, pb 2008) Eva Kollisch captures the buildup of anti-Semitic violence in Baden, outside Vienna, her flight on a Kindertransport, her family's resettlement in Staten Island, and her long search for community in the United States and Austria.
Afterimages: A Family Memoir by Carol Ascher (Holmes and Meier, hc 2008) chronicles Ascher's childhood in Topeka, Kansas, where her father, a refugee psychoanalyst, found work at the Menninger Sanitarium, as well as her recent return to Vienna to uncover her father's roots.
Finally, Shakespeare's Kitchen, by Lore Segal, a collection of stories about a Viennese émigré's need to create an American community (The New Press, pb 2008), has just been released in paperback; Segal first caught national attention with her gripping account of the experiences of Kindertransport children in Other People's Houses.
