This collection from one of the great writers of Europe’s Jewish diaspora shows the heat of individual passions blazing out against the levelling forces of history. In stories that move back through time from the First World War to Ancient Rome, we encounter heroes and bookworms, visionaries and gadabouts, patriarchs and rebel children – all tied together across the centuries by their faith and by the intensity with which they live and die.In ‘Mendel the Bibliophile’, a bookseller’s obsession with his wares blinds him to the progress of war and the threat it poses to his own life. Monomania is also an overpowering force in ‘Downfall of the Heart’, in which an aging father cannot accept his daughter’s embrace of new freedoms. ‘The Miracles of Life’ is a masterfully ironic tale, which plays with the tension between faith and morality, society and individual, against the backdrop of 16th-century Antwerp and the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule. ‘In the Snow’ sees a Jewish community in medieval Eastern Europe fleeing the violence of a Christian sect. And in the longest piece in the collection, the novella The Buried Candelabrum, we go all the way back to the ancient world, where the recovery of a sacred seven-branched candlestick stolen during the sack of Rome will become a young boy’s life’s mission.
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Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear. In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York-a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel, Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press.
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