Viennese Romance is an early, unfinished novel by the poet,
novelist and short story writer David Vogel.
Vogel was born in Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century and
was murdered in the Holocaust. As a
writer of Hebrew on European shores, he is considered both an anomaly and a
harbinger of things to come; he wrote of cosmopolitan themes in a then very parochial
language, mainly confined to a small, but rising number of Jews living in
Palestine.
This novel was found hidden among Vogel’s papers. You can find the very peculiar story of its
discovery here. The published novel is
very much the work of editors, who needed to take very large liberties with an unfinished
and rough manuscript.
Not surprising, this early work features one of Vogel’s
Ur-concerns, the fictional portrayal of his relationship with an older woman
and her daughter. The novel can be quite
graphic in its sexual content, and moves freely from character to character.
While nowhere near a fully realized or complete work,
Viennese Romance gives the Vogel reader some keen insights one of the more
important Hebrew writers of the twentieth century and his vanished world.
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