Married Life

Written in Hebrew and published in Palestine in 1929, this is the only novel by Vogel, a poet who is presumed to have died at Auschwitz in 1944. Set in Vienna in the 1920s, the novel is a portrait of the disastrous marriage of one Rudolph Gurdweill, a poor Jewish intellectual, to a sadistic and anti-Semitic baroness. Her unfaithfulness and cruelty to the well-meaning but helpless and masochistic writer clearly represents the relationship between Vienna and its Jews. The complex atmosphere of Viennese culture between the wars is conveyed in highly detailed descriptions; countless cigarettes and cups of coffee and endless rendezvous in cafes seem to be central to the existence of these doomed characters. An important novel, not only as a historic document, but as a work of literature that echoes both Kafka and Mann.