Jewish Stories

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A unique collection of stories—presented together here for the first time—from one of the great voices of the European Jewish diaspora This collection from one of the great pre-war writers, himself a member of Europe’s Jewish diaspora, highlights the precarious position that Jewish people have occupied throughout millennia, in stories that move across centuries and nations but show the unchanging pressure of outsider status. But these stories are about individuals, too—in Zweig’s treatment, the particular passions of particular hearts will always blaze out brightly against the levelling forces of history. 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