Wobick-Segev on Torberg, 'Tante Jolesch: Or, the Decline of the West in Anecdotes'

H-German Wobick-Segev on Torberg, 'Tante Jolesch: or, The Decline of the West in Anecdotes'

Review published on Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Friedrich Torberg. Tante Jolesch: or, The Decline of the West in Anecdotes. Translated by Maria Poglitsch Bauer. Afterword by Sonat Birnecker Hart. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2008. 240 pp. $24.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57241-149-4.

Reviewed by Sarah E. Wobick-Segev (Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Madison) Published on H-German (March, 2009) Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Kaffeeklatsch: Tales from the Central European Coffeehouse and Beyond

In the 1970s, Friedrich Kantor penned two literary works under his pseudonym, Friedrich Torberg, that depict the largely Jewish cultural milieu he inhabited and helped create in his central European homeland prior to the Anschluß. Tante Jolesch (1975) and Die Erben der Tante Jolesch (1978) were intended to form together a nostalgic requiem for Austrian-Jewish culture and those who created it. This first English edition, encompassing a translation of the first book and selections from the second, opens a window to a period of vibrant Jewish life and its ultimate destruction. Historically and literarily rich, the book is simultaneously amusing and tragic. This particular edition is completed with an afterword by Professor Sonat Birnecker Hart, which is intended to situate the literary work in its historical, and especially, Jewish context.

Torberg's work depicts a dual fall: that of Austria, which the author dates not to 1918 but to 1938, and that of its Jewish population: "two definitively vanished elements of Western civilization" (p. 1). We, the readers, already know how this story ends. Yet, while familiar, anecdotes make the narrative of decline more human and the consequences more concrete. We are introduced to prominent figures of Austrian Jewry in their heyday, as Torberg perceived it. He lived in a moment of intense intellectual, cultural, and even athletic dynamism, where Jews participated in and often propelled along the flourishing culture of early-twentieth-century Austrian (and central European) life. The anecdotes might begin and end with the coffeehouse, but they span the gamut of the Austrian Jewish experience. Topics include (but are certainly not limited to) spas and vacation culture, the Jewish press, psychoanalysis, and the Jewish sports movement. As such, this work offers both a wonderful beginning--as it is a testament to the breadth and wealth of Jewish life in central Europe prior to the Shoah--and a clear ending. Torberg concludes his story with the Holocaust and the destruction of the overwhelming majority of the Jews of Austria: "They all once lived and are no longer alive--neither they nor the surroundings and settings in which they moved, neither their coffeehouses nor editorial offices, neither weekly family tables nor resorts where one summered. Nothing. They could all be found until the start of World War II.... The well from which I drank has gone and soon no one will know anymore where it was to be found" (p. 4). Torberg restricts his reflections on postwar culture in both America and Europe to those reminiscent of the Frankfurt school--certainly as he writes, in referring to the subtitle and goal of the work, "I concentrate rather on one symptom of decline, namely that in our technocratic world, in our materialistic consumer society, eccentrics and originals are bound for extinction" (p. 3). Ultimately, he is not interested in his exile (after many turns, in the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Wobick-Segev on Torberg, 'Tante Jolesch: or, The Decline of the West in Anecdotes'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/45782/wobick-segev-torberg-tante-jolesch-or-decline-west-anecdotes Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German

United States) or survival, except insofar as it provides a remote foil to his lost friends, family, and homeland.

Hart's afterword contextualizes both author and literary work nicely within the historical setting of the former Habsburg Empire. This significant task is carried out in a succinct fifteen pages.The afterword is strongest where Hart weaves Torberg's biography into the larger cultural context of pre- Shoah central Europe. I have but two concerns. Hart tends to overuse the term "acculturation," which is often used as a seemingly benign version of the stronger term, "assimilation." Acculturation as an analytical category is too reductionist and contradicts not only her own narrative, in which the Jews of Austria were agents in the construction of culture (not merely passive recipients of the trappings of an external culture), but also Torberg's tales, in which Jews similarly did not simply participate in Austrian culture, but were also some of its finest producers. Recent historiography has moved us beyond teleologies of assimilation and acculturation, and the afterword would have benefited from fine-tuning to take these works into consideration.[1] Secondly, I cannot help but notice a degree of slippage between Torberg's melancholy and romanticism, notably concerning the Habsburg Empire, and Hart's own analysis. This is especially present in phrases such as "Although Jews were not the only ones who found the idea of a functioning multi-ethnic state appealing, they were the only group within the Empire that did not rejoice in a national identity of their own and thus had more reason to hope that the Empire would remain intact" (p. 226). Though Zionism by no means enjoyed the support of a majority of Vienna's or Austria's Jews, it is difficult to assert that Jews "did not rejoice in a national identity of their own" while at the same time pointing, several pages later, to the importance of Hakoah--"Austria's largest all-around sports team" (p. 229). Hakoah, as its Hebrew name might suggest, had Jewish national tendencies and "embraced the Zionist movement," yet did not deter Jewish athletes of other political persuasions from joining.[2] Finally, a selected bibliography for further reading on the topic of Austrian and central European Jewish history might have enhanced the afterword, or at least have pointed the interested reader in some useful directions. In the end, however, these points should not detract from the overall merit of this short essay.

Given that the original work is well known to German-speaking audiences, the importance of this edition is that it offers a competent (albeit sometimes slightly quirky) translation of an important cultural artifact for English-speaking audiences. Regarding the translation itself, I do not want to seem pedantic. However, there is something odd in reading "die Weisen von Zion" translated as the "Sages of Zion" (p. 174) and not the idiomatically correct "Elders of Zion." It was equally curious to read the sentence: "The German language, for some strange reason, contains several negative adverbs for which no positive alternative exists--unwirsch, ungestüm, unflätig" (p. 170). No translation or note is given to explain these three words. Generally, though, it must be said that the translation is largely capable and succeeds in rendering complicated linguistic digressions into understandable English (one must only consider the chapter title,"Digression about the Little Word 'What'," to appreciate the complexity of the translator's task).

In sum, I would recommend this book for general audiences and in particular for use in undergraduate classes on Austrian, central European, and Jewish history. The anecdotes provide an entry point for students largely unfamiliar with central European Jewish history and would help them to understand the cultural, political, and intellectual world inhabited by the Jews of the region. Moreover, it is a delightful text to read and presents lively, colorful figures that help illuminate an

Notes

[1]. The literature that revises narratives of acculturation and assimilation is expanding constantly. A couple of highlights are Samuel Moyn, "German Jewry and the Question of Identity: Historiography and Theory," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 41 (1996): 291-308; and Scott Spector, "Forget Assimilation: Introducing Subjectivity to German-Jewish History," Jewish History 20 (2000): 349-361.

[2]. John Bunzl, "Hakoah Vienna: Reflections on a Legend," in Emancipation through Muscles: Jews and Sports in Europe, ed. Michael Brenner and Gideon Reuveni (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 109-110.

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Citation: Sarah E. Wobick-Segev. Review of Torberg, Friedrich, Tante Jolesch: or, The Decline of the West in Anecdotes. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2009.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24054

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.