The Use of Man by Aleksander Tišma (1980, translated from Sebro-Croatian by Bernard Johnson, 1989)

It took me about  third into The Use of Man by Aleksander Tišma (1924 to 2003, Sebro-Croatia) before I realized it is truly a masterpiece, the power of the work kind of sneaked up on me.  It is set right after the close of World War Two, with memories of times of the war and in concentration camps.

Terrible things happened in the Novi Sad, in what is now Yugoslavia.  We see things from the point of view if several characters.  There is a horrific extremely well realized section focusing on a year a female inmate in a concentration camp spent as a work in a brothel  for camp workers and German soldiers.  Tisma writes out of deep feeling and culture.  It somehow is so sad to me to imagine how many who truly lived the reading life  died in the Holocaust.  There is a very fascinating section on a young man who gets the only job he can, translating for the police.  He knows some will view him as a traitor but he has to gave money coming from somewhere.  Prostituition is rampant as men are gone to soldiers or camps and women have few options.  Sex is cheap and soon the police translator is our all the time looking for women.  There is a wicked very interesting  twist to his story.  

The novel is structured in an intricate circular fashion.  The Use of Man is very much a first rate work of art and should be on the reading list of anyone into Holocaust and post World War II in Eastern Europe fiction.  

About the Author

Aleksandar Tišma (1924–2003) was born in the Vojvodina, a former province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that had been incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia after the First World War. His father, a Serb, came from a peasant background; his mother was middle-class and Jewish. The family lived comfortably, and Tišma received a good education. In 1941, Hungary annexed Vojvodina; the next year—Tišma’s last in high school—the regime carried out a series of murderous pogroms, killing some 3,000 inhabitants, primarily Serbs and Jews, though the Tišmas were spared. After fighting for the Yugoslav partisans, Tišma studied philosophy at Belgrade University and went into journalism and in 1949 joined the editorial staff of a publishing house, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Tišma published his first story, “Ibika’s House,” in 1951; it was followed by the novels  Guilt and In Search of the Dark Girl and a collection of stories, Violence.  In the 1970s and ’80s, he gained international recognition with the publication of his Novi Sad trilogy: The Book of Blam (1971), about a survivor of the Hungarian occupation of Novi Sad; The Use of Man (1976), which follows a group of friends through the Second World War and after; and Kapo (1987), the story of a Jew raised as a Catholic who becomes a guard in a German concentration camp. Tišma moved to France after the outbreak of war and collapse of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, but in 1995 he returned to Novi Sad, where he spent his last years.  From The New York Review of Books

In the interests of full disclosure I was given a review copy of this book.

Mel u

The Leviathan by Joseph Roth -1940- translated by Michael Hoffman in 2011)

When November began I had never heard of Joseph Roth (born 1894 in the Ukraine, died 1939).  Now after reading three of his works and learning what I could about his life I consider him one of my most cherished writers.  For sure I plan to read all of his work available in English in Kindle Format.  There is no biography of Roth available in English but there is very valuable and deeply felt remarks on him by his award winning translator Michael Hoffman to be found in some of the works he translated.  Roth life was dominated in the last decades by alcohol.  Hoffman and others call his death at 45 suicide by alcohol.   He lived the last 12 years of his life in near poverty in hotels.  He loved living in hotels.  He was partially supported for a number of years by Stefan Zweig.  Even when destitute, whenever he got any money, he gave much of it away to those less fortunate than himself.  He left his beloved Vienna the day the Austrians opted for unity with Nazi Germany and never returned.  He loved the cultural depth of Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was deeply hurt by its destruction.  

                 

           Mrs Joseph Roth

Leviathan, (to me it feels like a short story but it seems to be called a novella so I will accept that) seems to be his last published work of fiction, first coming out the year after he died.

Michael Hoffman says Leviathan is kind of a cross between a short story, a fable and a parable. He says it feels like something Tolstoy might have written.  

It is the story of a coral merchant deep in the interior of Russia in a small town beyond whose borders he had never traveled.    Coral was very desired as decorative jewelry and he cherished his corals thinking of himself as almost a great leviathan protecting them.  He longs to see the ocean and when a sailor from Odessa comes to town on a visit he befriends him and the sailor invites him to visit his ship. The merchant, Progrody Nissan is married, childless to his regret and no longer has much interest in his lost her looks wife.  He never cheats on her but he enjoys having 12 beautiful girls working for him in his coral shop.  He goes away for three weeks and a disaster occurs while he is gone. A merchant opens a shop in the neighboring town selling beautiful but artificial  coral at a price well below his offerings.  I want to leave it open for people to discover what happens in this work for themselves so I won't relate the fascinating and ultimately horrible events that follow.

 

The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig 1942

I am really glad I decided to once again participate in 

German Literature Month November 2013.  I thank Caroline and Lizzy for hosting this great reading event.

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The March of Radetsky by Joseph Roth I hope to read all his work

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori amazing work of art.

"Flypaper" by Robert Musil

"Mendel the Bibliophile" by Stefan Zweig - I totally love this story.

"The Dead are Silent" by Arthur Schnitzler an entertaining work from 1907

"There Will Be Action" by Heinrich Boll a very good short story by Nobel Prize Winner

Transit by Anne Seghars 1942 very much worth reading

There was a time when Stefan Zweig was the most translated German language author. So far I have read and posted on two of his marvelous short stories and a suburb short novel, Chess Game.  Zweig is now an author that I have added on to my read as much as I can list.  I only E Read and fortunately a lot of his work is available in Kindle Editions. 

I did a bit of research on Stefan Zweig to see how his reputation stands now.  Many of his books and stories have been recently brought back in print in English by Pushkin Press and The New York Review of Books so I am assuming there is a strong interest in his work.  I found a bizarre review in The Guardian that called all of his work, including his suucide note, "putrid".  Others, many more, call him one of the great European writers of the 20th century.  I have so far read his Chess Game and "A Letter from an Unknown Woman" and a story I am crazy about "Mendel the Bibliophile".  Zweig, who I am just getting to know, is a chronicler of a culture, one he passionately loved, in decline.  According to Zweig in The World of Yesterday Vienna was the perfect home for Jews in Europe.  Many, including his family, grew truly rich.  The pattern, as Zweig tells us he exemplified, was for one generation to make money, another to build on it and a third to have no interest in commerce but seek excellence in the arts, literature, academia or in a life supremely well lived. 

This is an autobiographical work but it is not a "tell it all" book.  It is primarily Zweig's reflections on the many great writers and artists he was acquainted with.  Zweig was very deeply, as was the culture he came from, into the reading life.  He loved Rilke and worshipped Goethe.  His chapter on Paris really made me wish I could time travel.  His accounts of Viennese cafe society make us mourn for its passing.  

The World of Yesterday is an elegy to a culture destroyed by the worst impulses of man as embodied in the Nazis.  Zweig left Europe and moved to Brazil.  

As one reads this book you are almost forced to try to understand why shortly after he submitted it to his publisher, he and his beloved wife both committed suicide.  It is tempting to read the book as a suicide note and maybe there is truth in that.  He was deeply hurt by the destruction of the wonderful culture of the Austrian Jewish community by the Germans and their broader destruction of the glory of European culture.   Maybe he could not go on in a world so full of hate.  

If you search, you will find spiteful rude posts on this book. All I can say is "shame on those who say such things".  

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori 1981

I am very happy to be once again participating in German Literature month.  The only real requirement is that the work was originally written in German. There are lots of reading ideas on the webpage for the event and a sign up link.

German Literature Month November 2013

So far I have read and posted on these works, all but Kafka are new to me writers. 

The Tin Drum-by Gunther Grass

"The Judgement" by Franz Kafka

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque -very powerful war novel 

"A Letter from an Unknown Woman" by Stefan Zweig. 

The Death of the Adversary by Hans Klein - a work of genius

"The Job Application" by Robert Walser 

Chess Game by Stefan Zweig-I will read much more of his work

"The Battle of Sempach" by Robert Walser

I have also listed to podcasts of "Basta" and "Frau Wilkes" by Robert Walser

The Radetsky March by Joseph Roth great work on the decline of the Empire

I am discovering one after another great new to me writers in my readings for German Literature III. I will be hopefully reading all of the translated and available as a kindle fiction of Joseph Roth, Stefan Zweig, and Robert Walser.  I now adding Gregor Von Rezzori to this list.  

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is a brilliant masterful work of art.  It is structured through five short stories

all told by the same narrator.   In fact taken seperatly they are great stories.   What these storied

show us about the depth of hatred of Jews that permeates Austrian society would fill a dozen

history books.    You can see all sorts of subtly in the forms of prejudice.  The narrator distinqishes

what he sees as high refined and cultured "European" Jewish from "Yids".  Von Rezzori portrays

through the narrator the deep corruption of Austrian society and lets us see why Austriians accepted 

Hitler as their leader.  

Memoirs of an Anti-Semite can stand with the greatest novels of the 20th century.  It is just a flat out 

brilliant book. 

Gregor von Rezzori was born in 1914 in Chernivtsi in the Bukovina, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now part of Ukraine. In an extraordinarily peripatetic life von Rezzori was succesively an Austro-Hungarian, Romanian and Soviet citizen and then, following a period of being stateless, an Austrian citizen. The great theme of his work was the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual world in which he grew up and which the wars and ideologies of the twentieth century destroyed. His major works include The Death of My Brother Abel, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite and his autobiographical masterpiece The Snows of Yesteryear. He died in his home in Italy in 1998. - 

From New York Review of Bbis Web page.