The Impossible Exile; Stefan Zweig at the End of the World

New York: Other Press, 2014. Second printing [stated]. Hardcover. Good/Very good. Elisabeth Prochnik (author photograph). [14], 390, [4] pages. Illustrations. Notes. Address label from previous owner and ink notation on fep, and ink notation on title page. Some underlining and marks noted. Notes on first rep. Inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Inscription reads For David Pinsky--Thank you for your interest in my book! George Prochnik. An original study of exile, told through the biography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, the man who inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel. By the 1930s, Stefan Zweig had become the most widely translated living author in the world. His novels, short stories, and biographies were so compelling that they became instant best sellers. The Impossible Exile tells the tragic story of Zweig's extraordinary rise and fall while it also depicts, with great acumen, the gulf between the world of ideas in Europe and in America, and the consuming struggle of those forced to forsake one for the other. It also reveals how Zweig embodied, through his work, thoughts, and behavior, the end of an era, the implosion of Europe as an ideal of Western civilization. George Prochnik's biography of Stefan Zweig, The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, received the National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir in 2014 and was short-listed for the Wingate Prize in the United Kingdom. Prochnik is also the author of In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise, and Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology. He has written for The New Yorker, New York Times, Bookforum, and Los Angeles Review of Books. This copy is believed to have been owned by the David E. Pinsky who received his BS. and LLB. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, after which he served as law clerk to Third Circuit Court judge Austin L. Staley. He subsequently worked on the legal staff of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund under Thurgood Marshall on the celebrated 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case on school desegregation. After a number of years as associate professor of law at Rutgers University, he moved to Washington, DC. in 1963, where he worked in the office of the general counsel of the Department of Housing and Urban Development until his retirement in 1991. He died in 2020. Derived from a Kirkus review: Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) stands in for Europe's uprooted intellectuals in this elegiac portrait by Prochnik. Zweig was one of the most famous and successful authors in the world in the 1920s and early '30s, best known for his novellas and breezy biographies of historical figures like Erasmus and Marie Antoinette. When the Nazis came to power, Zweig was in a much better position that most, with plenty of money to fund his travels as he roamed from Switzerland to southern France to England and the United States in search of a refuge from the fascist madness. His relative comfort, however, could not make up for the trauma of being ejected from the culture that he, like many other German-speaking Jews, had believed belonged to them as well. Prochnik, himself a polymath writer with European Jewish roots, was prompted by the story of his own family, which also fled Nazi-occupied Vienna, to investigate Zweig's experience of exile. Unable to envision himself settled in America despite four stays in New York, Zweig finally moved to a small village in Brazil in 1941, hoping for peace in which to write. Prochnik sensitively considers his final books—the poignant memoir The World of Yesterday (1942) and Brazil: Land of the Future (1941), which determinedly celebrated his adopted country's embrace of "the humanist values his native Europe had so wretchedly betrayed." In the end, accumulating losses and dwindling hopes of a better tomorrow drove Zweig to commit suicide not long after his 60th birthday. Intelligent, reflective and deeply sad portrait of a man tragically cut adrift by history.