Transgressive Relations in the Archive

Scribe has just issued a novel from the first two decades of the 20th century. This would, in the case of most books, be an ordinary act. But Viennese Romance is a rather singular case. It was written by David Vogel, a Ukrainian-born Jew, who made his way to Vienna when World War I erupted. It was there that Vogel began his novel, which he continued writing until 1925, before emigrating to Tel Aviv, leaving for Berlin and eventually settling in Paris, where the book was completed. But matters literary soon took a back seat, when he was imprisoned by the French and deported to Auschwitz in 1944, where he was murdered.

Although lauded for what was known of Vogel's work, his novel Viennese Romance did not feature. Indeed the reason its publication is so extraordinary is that the manuscript had languished in an Israeli literary archive for decades, unknown, untouched, unread even. Published last year in Israel and now available in an English translation from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu, it grants us not only an insight not only into Vogel's rich literary mind but also an extraordinary outsider's view of fin de siècle Vienna.

Depicting the life of an 18-year-old Jew who is taken under the wing of a wealthy bourgeois hostess, with whom he has an affair, as well as one with her 16-year-old daughter, Viennese Romance makes for potent reading. Indeed the scholar Lilach Netanel, who discovered the text (and provides a brilliant, detailed introduction to the novel), believes that it was its subject matter – based in part on Vogel's own experiences – that encouraged the author to keep it hidden from view. Its publication brings both the text and the era it evokes back to life. Further editions of Vogel's work, Two Novellas and Married Life (the only novel he saw published during his lifetime), will also be published by Scribe. Click here to order a copy of Viennese Romance.

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