Synopses & Reviews
The first English-language publication of a previously lost European jewel, Viennese Romance is set in the early 1900s and introduces us to Michael Rost, an 18-year-old Jewish youth. Hungry for experience, he comes to Vienna and forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path: whores, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men alike. When a shady businessman takes the penniless Rost under his wing, he rents a room in the home of an affluent bourgeois family. He is seduced by the lady of the house while her husband is away on business, and shortly after starts an affair with her 16-year-old daughter as well. This love triangle threatens to destroy the entire family. In the mesmerizing figure of Michael Rost, we see the tortured relationship between cosmopolitan Jewish intellectuals and early 20th-century Europe. A compelling portrait of a decadent society, Viennese Romance also probes the obsessive–destructive nature of love.
Review
“A very beautiful novel. . . . Like any truly good literature, Vogel is worth reading over and over.” —Yotam Schwimmer, Ynet
Review
“What a wonderful novel it is. Brave and bold in content, with erotic scenes and a sensational love triangle at its hub, it is written in Vogel’s distinctive style, through which he probes his characters’ souls and skillfully sculpts their physical attributes. There is Vogel’s trademark investigation of the lineaments of passion and, as always, his fear of passion’s institutionalization. The author’s love of the city’s frenetic pace shines through, along with the remnants of spirituality that are crushed amid the gears of the modern machine.” —Noa Limone, Haaretz
Review
“In some ways, Vogel is like an early Woody Allen . . . he was introverted, consumed with sexual hang-ups, and lived as a perpetual outsider.” —Tablet Magazine
Synopsis
Available in English for the first time, here is David Vogel's previously unknown novel that had literary Israel abuzz when it was published in 2012, almost one hundred years after the author started working on it.
David Vogel has long been regarded as a leading figure in modern Hebrew literature, and his work has been compared to that of Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Vogel was thought to have written only a single novel: his masterpiece, Married Life, which was published to great acclaim in 1929. Yet he had been working on another novel, which was only discovered recently.
Set in the early 1900s, Viennese Romance tells the story of Michael Rost, an eighteen-year-old Jewish youth who travels to Vienna, hungry for experience. There, he forms passing relationships with everyone who crosses his path -- prostitutes, revolutionaries, paupers, army officers, and rich men alike. When a shady businessman takes the penniless Rost under his wing, he rents a room in the home of an affluent bourgeois family. He is seduced by the lady of the house while her husband is away on business, and shortly after begins an affair with her sixteen-year-old daughter as well. This love triangle threatens to destroy the entire family.
With a foreword that explains how this lost novel came to light, Viennese Romance is a seminal work that explores the conflicts faced by many Jewish intellectuals in early twentieth-century Europe. A compelling portrait of a decadent society, it also lays bare the obsessive-destructive nature of love.
About the Author
David Vogel was living in Vienna when World War I broke out, and he was arrested as an enemy alien. In 1923, he published his first collection of poems, and in 1929 emigrated to Tel Aviv. After a year he left for Berlin, and later settled in Paris. After the outbreak of World War II, he was imprisoned by the French as an Austrian citizen, and later by the Nazis as a Jew. In 1944, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he perished.