By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — Stefan Zweig published the story The Burning Secret in 1913. He was a master of the psychological story and a pioneer of the genre of fiction biographies, translated into 50 languages. A fine artist and psychologist, Zweig showed a lack of understanding of the world in which he lived and failed to adequately write an autobiography.
On July 7, 1904, the funeral of Theodor Herzl, who died at age 44, took place in Vienna. Zweig recalled: “It was an amazing day, a day in July, unforgettable for anyone who survived it. Because suddenly, from all continents, from all countries, people – Western, Eastern, Russian, Turkish Jews, from all provinces and small towns – began to come to all the stations in the city, every train, day and night, with the stamp of grief on their faces. Vienna noticed at once that not just a writer or a medium-sized poet had died, but one of the creators of ideas that only appear victoriously in one country or another, in one nation or another, at gigantic intervals.”
In 1901 Theodor Herzl, a doctor of law, a prolific playwright, and a brilliant journalist, was editor of the literary supplement to the newspaper Neue Freie Presse. He published the first works of the nineteen-year-old Zweig. “The name of the editor of the Neue Freie Presse was Theodor Herzl, and he was the first man of world-historical proportions whom I encountered in life, of course not yet knowing what an incredible turn this individual was to make in the destiny of the Jewish people and in the history of our time,” Zweig wrote in his memoirs, Yesterday’s World. A Jew, a cosmopolitan, a humanist, a pacifist, a supporter of a united Europe, Zweig did not accept Herzl’s Jewish nationalism. At a request of Herzl to help organize a Zionist movement, Zweig refused: the Jewish theme was too small compared with the problems of Europe.
Stephan Zweig was born on November 28, 1881, into an assimilated family of Viennese Jews. “My mother and my father were accidentally Jewish by birth,” Zweig wrote. He claimed that Viennese Jews were “free” from “any restriction or prejudice against themselves. […] Neither at school, nor at university, nor in the literary world did I ever experience any oppression as a Jew. […] There was no city in which it was easier to feel European.” Zweig’s description was the result of his misperception of the spiritual climate of the empire’s capital. At the first cataclysm of war, freedom and tolerance exploded, and the Austrian capital became a center of nationalism, a symbol of imperial vanity, a knot stretched by the centrifugal forces of the multi-tribal mobs and the dynastic vanity of a receding degenerate Habsburg ruling elite.
In 1917, Zweig published the anti-war drama Jeremiah, based on the book of the prophet Jeremiah. The pathos of the play is rejection of violence: Jeremiah calls for submission to Nebuchadnezzar, for “there is nothing more important than peace,” but he is considered a traitor. In the bloody madness of World War I, Zweig calls for surrender to the invader. He is convinced of the victory of morality over immorality in a nonviolent way.
Zweig, who lived in Salzburg, visited Vienna and found himself in a café where he had met a bookseller many years earlier. From this encounter arose the short story “Mendel the Bookseller” (1929).
A quiet Jew from Galicia, hunchbacked and unkempt, who spoke “with a strong accent,” Jacob Mendel was obsessed with a passion for books. “Thirty-three years ago, with a still soft black beard and curly paeans, he, an unassuming Jewish lad, came from the East to Vienna to prepare for the office of rabbi, but soon abandoned the one stern God […] and gave himself to the sparkling and millennial polytheism of books.” He is known and revered among book lovers and specialists: “This remarkable man knew nothing in the world but books, for all the phenomena of existence found reality for him only translated into letters, assembled into a book and as if emasculated. But he also read books not for their content, not for the thoughts or facts contained in them; only the edition, the price, the format, the title page fascinated him.”
Mendel is so engrossed in his work that he is not interested in what is happening outside the Glück Café, where his desk stands. He doesn’t read the newspapers, he doesn’t notice people, he is completely immersed in his books: “Jacob Mendel didn’t see or hear anything that was going on around him.” Unaware of the war going on, he writes two postcards to publishers in Paris and in London, asking why he has not yet received the books he bought. He, to all the misfortunes of a Russian subject, is arrested for suspicious correspondence with clients from hostile countries and held in a camp for two years, from which he returns in broken health. He was in the camp as a spy.
Jakob Mendel, a Jew from the Belarusian town of Petrikov, who had lived in Vienna for more than 30 years, was recognized by the Austrian authorities as a Russian spy. A man far removed from everyday life, distracted, naive, detached from people and events, an eccentric who stays in the world of books, is mistaken for a spy who betrayed the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the war. Mendel ̶ is the victim of one of the many slanders against the Jews. Zweig writes of this obsession with a shudder. He describes Mendel with love and with sympathy. However, the author’s relationship with his hero is dual. The author sympathizes with the bookseller, admires his rare talent, but is embarrassed by Mendel. He carefully and confidently separates himself from his character, building an impassable barrier between himself and his hero. He sees him as a vanishing anthropological type, a man of the past: “He sits stubbornly and unperturbedly staring into a book through his spectacles, staring intently and as if spellbound, reading, muttering and purring to himself, rocking back and forth with his dull, spotted bald head, ̶ a habit acquired in cheder, in a Jewish elementary school in the East.”
Zweig treats the bookseller as an alien from another world with whom he can have nothing in common.
Deep empathy for Mendel does not drain an ounce of Jewish sentimentality or a drop of solidarity from the sensitive soul of the narrator. Zweig reaches for Mendel, but drives away any manifestation of national identification. At the same time, he cannot completely hide his Jewish complexes from the reader. The author tries to emphasize in Mendel character traits that antisemites believe Jews do not possess. Zweig refutes the myth of the selfishness of Jews: “Money played no role in his world.” The writer subconsciously whitewashes the Jews, protecting them from evil tongues that attribute them to calculating and predatory behavior. Mendel is the naive, peaceful and harmless man the author wants to portray the Jews as, contrary to antisemitic prejudice about their villainous nature.
Zweig describes the narrator’s remorse in the short story Mendel the Bookseller for forgetting Mendel: “For years I had not remembered Mendel the Bookseller. Regretting his forgetfulness and callousness toward the Eastern European Jewish Bookseller, swaying as if at prayer when reading books, the writer relives his indifference to traditional Jewry. Coincidentally or not, the name of the hero of the story coincided with that of the Yiddish writer Mendel Moicher Sforim, a traditional Jew, also a native of Belarus. The image of Mendel, created by Zweig’s pen, is apparently for him a generalized image of a Jew going back in time to be replaced by a European. Zweig distances himself and alienates himself from Mendel. Mendel’s oddity is the metaphorical oddity of Jews, alienated from “normal” people, alienated from those around them, but wishing no harm to anyone.
Zweig expresses in this character his attitude toward the Jews. The bookish Mendel, devoted to selling books, does not understand books as such, is not deep enough to understand their spiritual significance. His studies are superficial, just as the attitudes of unassimilated, typical Jews toward European culture are superficial. Mendel shows “pure” Jewry as an anachronism, as an outlier. Mendel is cut off from great events, from the world and war. He knows nothing of what is going on outside his cafe, just as traditional Jews know nothing of the great events taking place in Europe. This attitude coincides with what Zweig told Herzl: the Jewish problem is too small compared to the problems of Europe. Isolated from the real world, Mendel sincerely feels no danger in writing postcards to foreign colleagues in the enemy camp. Zweig symbolically portrays the Jews as Mendel, cut off from the social storms of Europe. In this image the writer describes the alienation of the Jews from society, their isolation from history, their extra-historicality. The description of Mendel and the typical Jewry behind him, this “yesterday’s world,” shows Zweig himself as someone who stands outside history, disconnected from the ugly essence of real life, nervously alienated from the Jews and believing in the victory of cosmopolitanism. Zweig himself appears as a man outside history, lonely and alienated from reality.
On February 22, 1942, during a carnival in Rio de Janeiro in the nearby mountain resort town of Petropolis, Stefan Zweig and his second wife Charlotte committed suicide. Having moved from England to the United States and then to Brazil, having lost Europe, the dear old world, the cultural atmosphere of his native language, isolated from all that was dear to him and terrified of the victories of the Nazis, Zweig felt it was over. The loss of his home in Austria and the intellectual home of Europe caused a deep depression in the European Zweig. In the preface to Yesterday’s World, the writer states: “Thus I belong to no one else, I am everywhere a stranger, at best a guest; and my great homeland ̶ Europe ̶ is lost to me.” Before his suicide he wrote: “It is over, Europe has destroyed itself, our world is destroyed, and at the age of 60 I am broken and half destroyed, I no longer want to exist.” He exaggerated the power of Nazism, underestimated the power of world resistance to Hitler because he was disconnected from reality, like the bookish Mendel he described.
Zweig’s enormous literary talent and encyclopedic knowledge gave him the tools to penetrate deeply into the human soul. From the magnificent psychological analysis in his stories and biographical novels it seems that he knew everything about people and, like no one else, understood the driving forces behind their actions. Yet he, a connoisseur of the movements of the human soul, long maintained an idealistic image of a society in which reason triumphs. He, who knew so much about people’s true drives and aspirations, about the predominant role of the dark forces of the subconscious, believed in the victory of pure cosmopolitan ideas over racism, nationalism and fanaticism. On the Jewish question, he remained an emancipatory dreamer, blinded by refined mirages, searching for a fictional world of humanism and departing at the collapse of the dream of the unattainable goal of a serene Europe.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 8 books and about 500 articles in paper and online, was published in 62 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English and German.