Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) reflects the triumph and tragedy of European Jewry. Born to an affluent Viennese Jewish family, he became the most popular German-language author of his time. Mentored by Theodor Herzl, whom he admired, he nevertheless rejected Zionism and instead advanced a concept of Judaism that has the world entire as its home. In 1942, he committed suicide alongside his second wife, Lotte, in Brazil, where he found refuge from the Nazi regime.

Zweig was a son of his times who transcended time. In recent years, he enjoys a renaissance in Israel. New translations of at least 20 of his works were released over the past decade, mostly by Tesha Neshamot and Modan publishing houses.

Some of Zweig’s correspondences are archived in the National Library in Jerusalem, including his suicide note, in which he wrote: “I greet all my friends! May they live to see the dawn after the long night. I, all too impatient, am going before.”

The following conversation explores Zweig’s literary and intellectual legacies. The participants are Harel Cain, the most prolific of Zweig’s translators to Hebrew; Dr. Stefan Litt, Director of European Language Holdings in the Archives Department and Curator of the Humanities Collection at the National Library in Jerusalem, and editor of a much-praised collection of Zweig’s correspondences on Judaism and Zionism, Stefan Zweig: Briefe Zum Judentum (2020), recently published in a Hebrew translation (Carmel, 2024); and Prof. Uriya Shavit, Head of the Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry at Tel Aviv University and editor-in-chief of the For a Righteous Cause Report. The conversation was edited for clarity and length.

Prof. Shavit: Will it be correct to say that Stefan Zweig has been the bestselling translated author in Israel in recent years? For sure among non-contemporary authors.

Mr. Cain: I think it is correct. Certainly, since 2012, when the copyrights for his works expired, there is a renaissance. Not only in Israel, but in other countries as well, although not so much in the German-speaking countries. I don’t have exact sales figures, but look in all sorts of online forums for book lovers; every couple of days, someone asks for a recommendation for a Zweig book. And there are so many responses, and so many people say that they love him.

Some of his novels are really evergreen. I guess that is part of the reason for their success. They engage with eternal topics that don’t get old. The psychology of growing up, for example, in Burning Secret (Brennendes Geheimnis, 1913). Even if the values of society change, the appeal of the theme is everlasting.

I care mostly about my translations, which are of his novellas. Back in the 1970s, 1980s, I think his biographies were more popular. One recent exception is the biography of Magellan (Magellan, Der Mann und seine Tat, 1938), whose new translation was a huge bestseller (Modan, 2021).

Prof. Shavit: It’s an amazing book. I watched the new Magellan movie (Lav Diaz, 2025) at the Jerusalem Film Festival. What a terrible, terrible movie. It reminded me once again that a great story doesn’t necessarily make for great storytelling, for great art, and how big Zweig’s achievement was.

Mr. Cain: To my shame, I haven’t read the book. I know very well the books I translated, but I haven’t read a lot of other things. Translations are kind of a competition. I don’t read other translators’ works. To my shame, I haven’t read Magellan in Hebrew or in German yet, but I have to do it.

Prof. Shavit: If it was just the issue of copyright, then you have dozens of well-known authors whose copyrights have expired, so that’s too easy an explanation for Zweig’s recent popularity. So is the explanation that he is popular in Israel because he is Jewish. There are not a few renowned authors from his time who are Jewish and are all but forgotten today.

I want to propose an alternative thesis. And I say in advance: I enjoy reading Stefan Zweig, and I also don’t like, in general, the patronizing argument that if a book is enjoyable and sells well, then it means the book is not good. Often, the contrary is true.

Having said that, I feel that Zweig is currently so successful in Israel because his in-between positioning fits the spirits of the few people in Israel who still read books, and who do want an experience with some measure of depth, but whose patience is more limited than it used to be. His works offer drama that borders on melodrama but usually does not cross the line. They combine 19th-century naturalism and very coherent time-lined plots with touches of 20th-century subtle psychoanalysis. They are outdated in a way that provides escapism, but are also not too far removed from present-day realities. And they are never too long. The reader gets the satisfaction of having read a literary work from cover to cover, but is never exhausted.

Has Zweig been that successful in other countries recently?

Dr. Litt: His literature still works very well in France. It works in Spain, in Italy, and even in South America.

In Germany, if you go into a large bookshop, then you have this table where you have all the nice, very thick editions of the complete works by Kafka, Tolstoy, and other canonical authors, and you will find Zweig there. So he is among the authors considered to be a good fit for this kind of entrepreneurship.

But he is by far not as popular in Germany as he is in Israel. In Germany, other authors appeal more to readers who are not nostalgic about the good old days. And let us not forget that the reality described in his books is mostly an Austrian reality. I believe he is more popular in his homeland.

The so-called Salzburg edition, the scientific annotated seven volumes of his complete works (edited by Werner Michler and Klemens Renoldner and published by the Salzburg-based Stefan Zweig Center, 2017-2023), shows that the urge to engage with his works, to come up with something new, even if it is not really new, is still out there. The only comparable thing in Germany is the annotated edition (Oliver Matuschek, Fischer, 2020) of The World of Yesterday: Memoires of a European (Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers, 1942). It is a very helpful edition that offers some new insights, and it is really too bad that it has not been translated into Hebrew yet.

Prof. Shavit: The thing is that in Israel, unlike in Germany, Zweig has never been seen as the sentimental author for high school kids who are not yet ready to read more demanding literature.

Dr. Litt: Yes. I can say with certainty that it is not possible to write a PhD thesis in Germany about Zweig. He is regarded there as entertainment-literature. As too flat. I totally disagree. I don’t think he is flat. But of course, he is also not Thomas Mann. That is pretty clear when you compare the two, right?

Mr. Cain: I have this kind of weird guess that might also explain why Zweig is not as popular in German-speaking countries. And I have nothing to back it up. And Stefan may say it is nonsense. But maybe the reality of Zweig being driven out of Austria and his books being banned and his committing suicide in Brazil – maybe that’s a deterrence for some readers in Germany and Austria, just like his Judaism may make him more popular in Israel.

Prof. Shavit: I would beg to differ, because if being forced into exile by Nazism was a deterrence for present-day readers in German-speaking countries, then this would apply to Thomas Mann as well.

I want to ask something about your translations. They are masterful. What I find remarkable about them is that the Hebrew is very much present-day Hebrew. And yet somehow, the German is vividly present. I cannot explain this achievement, but it is there.

Mr. Cain: I think that trends and fashions in translating into Hebrew changed over time. Back in the 1960s and until the 1990s, there was this intentional drive to use very literary Hebrew, very high language, including, oftentimes, when it was really not necessary. So fashions have changed, certainly. I started translating books from German 10 years ago, and I was already part of this new kind of style in translation that rejected the high language.

Another thing is that my native language is Hebrew. I think that translators should translate into their native tongue. People sometimes wonder if I also translate into German. Not a chance! I wouldn’t be able to do that.

I learned German not as some of the old-style translators, who grew up in Germany and Hebrew was sort of their second language. They obviously had a very good ear for German. You would think that that helped them. But unlike them, I learned my German at the Goethe Institut and then at the Department of German Literature at the Hebrew University. So most of my acquaintance with German literature is with old classical authors. And when I read Zweig, I don’t have this feeling of, “oh, this is very old-fashioned German, oh, that’s high language,” that maybe native German speakers have. Zweig feels natural to me.

Prof. Shavit: Am I right that you are also unique in that this is somewhat of a hobby for you? I mean, you are in high-tech.

Mr. Cain: I actually don’t know if I am unique, because I know of at least one more very gifted translator who works in tech, Erez Volk, who translates from, I don’t know, a dozen languages. A very, very gifted translator.

Of course, it is very hard to live off a translator’s fees, but doing it part-time kind of gives me the privilege of just picking the translation jobs that I want, and I was lucky to be offered to translate Zweig, although I wasn’t some kind of Zweig fan before. But I kind of felt almost intuitively that translating him would be great, and that he would sell well.

By the way, in Israel, your compensation is not based on sales. In Germany, it is. But it’s a good feeling to know that my translations of Zweig are being read by many people. I translated something by Rilke one or two years ago; I think it sold around 50 copies.

Prof. Shavit: There is something that puzzles me about Stefan Zweig. The abundance is just… I just cannot make sense of it. I cannot understand how it is humanly possible.

Within approximately 40 years, he wrote dozens of novels and short stories. And here’s the thing. Most of them, at least those that I have read, are written with inner passion and intent. And care for detail. I almost never have the impression that he promised someone 5,000 words for a nice paycheck and wrote a story just in order to deliver.

Magellan – well, other gifted authors would have had to spend years just on the research. And it is just one of several undertakings of his that required incredible dedication for research.

Mr. Cain: He was not claiming to be a historian. He wrote historical fiction. I don’t think that he even tried to be scientifically accurate, not even about names and dates necessarily. He was just a very good storyteller. So maybe all the research that writing Magellan took from him was, I don’t know, to read two scientific biographies.

Prof. Shavit: But I would say that to be able to write about anything so vividly, it has to come from a very inner place. And you cannot reach that inner place in writing about historical events unless the events you want to write about have been really immersed in your mind as real and alive. I don’t think you reach that point through reading one or two works written by scholars.

Mr. Cain: And that is what people like. That is why they buy his books. You want to listen to his story.

Dr. Litt: I think we have in Zweig the very rare example of someone who was very much gifted and whose passion was the gift that he had.

He was not dependent on his success because he was very well-positioned economically even before starting his writing career. So he was able to transform his hobby into a kind of profession in a rather relaxed manner. He did not need to have a speedy success; perhaps that helped him have one.

Prof. Shavit: The point about his life of comfort, well, that makes his diligence even more impressive. Think of Balzac, the bankrupt Balzac, whom Zweig admired and whose biography he wrote. If Balzac didn’t write so much, he’d be financially ruined. So he wrote. Which didn’t help him much.

Mr. Cain: Compare Zweig to his friend Joseph Ruth. His good friend Joseph Ruth. A heavy drinker who was always short of cash. And Zweig was this rich, spoiled kid who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, who was raised in a really affluent family, a family that had servants alongside even on vacations.

Dr. Litt: Apparently, he was really like Mozart. There is a legend that Mozart told a friend that his new symphony was ready, and he just needs to write it down on paper. I think the same was true for Zweig. Maybe his ideas were all so well set up already when he sat down to write them on paper.

Eva Alberman is the last living niece of Zweig’s secretary-turned-second wife, Lotte. She is in her mid-90s and active in the preservation of his legacy.

She stayed with Stefan and Lotte for holidays in their house in Bath, England; she was really part of the family and part of the business. And she saw exactly how Stefan Zweig worked, so her memories are instructive if we want to understand how he managed to be so prolific.

So, his manuscripts were handwritten. Lotte typed the texts in four copies using carbon paper. And Zweig took one of the typed copies and went through it and made some changes, amendments, and additions. Then he gave that copy back to the secretary, who embedded the corrections in four new copies. He didn’t produce many drafts. He actually once said that he produces only one and then comes the biggest fun of the writing process, what he called the ‘shrinking it together.’

I read once that the original first draft of the manuscript of the historical biography of Marie Antoinette, which is quite a remarkably thick book compared to Zweig’s other books, comprised almost 1,000 sheets! That means that he threw away half of it, more or less. He said that it gives him much pleasure to see how he can improve his own texts by kicking words out.

Mr. Cain: He believed that texts cannot have any superfluous parts. Everything has to be very compact and concise. I am actually not sure he always kept that promise. I think his style is characterized by sentences that kind of follow each other and repeat each other with variations. He was an advocate of being very concise, but I think he is not necessarily a good example of being concise.

Prof. Shavit: Think of other prolific authors – let us think again of Balzac or Thomas Mann. Unlike them, with Zweig you don’t find those three or four pages describing garments or furniture, these cut-and-paste, or long artificial, uninterrupted speeches delivered by one of the characters. I do admire that about him. Perhaps his interest in Balzac was motivated by a sense of pride, pride in resisting the temptation to write-by-the-pound.

Mr. Cain: Well, I think after you translate a lot of stuff by Zweig, you kind of start to see his method; actually, he can devote a whole chapter to describing, I don’t know, the hands of the gamblers in the casino in 24 Hours in the Life of a Woman (Vierundzwanzig Stunden aus dem Leben einer Frau) or, I don’t know, he quotes, kind of semi-quotes, a long speech about Shakespeare in Confusion of Feelings (Verwirrung der Gefühle). But I agree that he doesn’t dedicate much effort to just describing the scenery or just kind of what people like or what they wear.

Dr. Litt: Indeed, you do have those repetitive elements, or those lengthy descriptions in his works, but this is not what we remember after we read them, okay? And this is what we definitely remember after being through a very long and exhaustive novel by Thomas Mann. Which is full of spirit, of course, and very intellectual and has so many different layers and blah blah blah, but it is hard to read, while Zweig’s works are not hard to read. You have an amazing experience reading them, even though they are sometimes sad.

I admit that there are certain novels by Thomas Mann that I stopped reading in the middle because reading them was not an amazing experience.

Prof. Shavit: That is quite a confession.

Dr. Litt: Yes, but there are two or three that I really found thrilling. Still, I had the feeling, wow, this was hard work.

Prof. Shavit: Perhaps it is also because when you are compelled to read something for the Abitur (state matriculation exams), it is automatically categorized as, you know, not fun.

I have to say something in defense of Thomas Mann. I sometimes wonder whether the really dense, very boring and unnecessary parts in his novels are, in fact, necessary in order to lead you, to those incredible climaxes that the same novels have. Where there is greatness in his books, well, there are few authors who reached the heights Mann did.

Mr. Cain: I tend to agree. Maybe you need all of this fluff, all of what you call the boring parts, to get to the climax.

Prof. Shavit: When I read about Zweig’s main hobby, I couldn’t help thinking about a famous quote by an Israeli football player. He was once asked, “Do you have any hobbies other than football?” and he answered, “English football.”

Zweig’s career was made of words, a total dedication to words. And then, what was his hobby? Collecting autographs and manuscripts. Football, and then English football. And I always thought that to be a great author, you have to have some passion that is external to writing, or else, what will your writing draw from?

Dr. Litt: I think that Zweig did have at least one major hobby, and that was music, but to the best of my knowledge, he hardly dared to write something about it. I would have really liked to read a biography by him of, say, Bach or Tchaikovsky.

Still, he was extremely attracted to the musicians of his time. He was in very, very good contact with Arturo Toscanini. He hardly missed any concert that took place around where he was living, and there were quite a number of them in Salzburg, of course, although he tended to escape the famous Salzburg Festival because too many people would knock on his door and he couldn’t stand that. But otherwise, he was deeply into music.

He was also somewhat intrigued by the developments in the field of psychology and was quite good friends with Sigmund Freud. They had thorough discussions.

Very often today, I hear female readers of Zweig who say, “Well, there’s hardly any man I can think of who so perfectly understood the psychological world of women like he did.”

Prof. Shavit: Why was he so passionate about obtaining the original manuscripts of masterpieces? I mean, what do you gain from possessing Balzac’s original manuscript?

Mr. Cain: I think he was fascinated with the act of creation, with the creation process, basically. With how others create.

He started with collecting autographs and moved on to obtaining original manuscripts. He liked to collect. He had, you know, Beethoven’s desk and such things.

One recurring theme in his novellas is the character of the monomaniacal genius. Another recurring theme is the character of the obsessed person. Obsessions are a big obsession in his writing.

Think about the book collector in Buchmendel (1929) – that man is a living catalogue of books, but doesn’t really know the content of the books. His brain is a library catalog, but he is only familiar with the metadata. Zweig was fascinated with people who could do one thing, but would do that one thing very, very well. And maybe words were the thing he could do very, very well. Words in the broad sense of the word, writing letters, corresponding.

Prof. Shavit: And he was a Jew. So here’s a fact that emerges from Stefan’s masterful annotated collection of letters in which Zweig related to Judaism and to Zionism: these themes were far from a main preoccupation for him.

I understand that he wrote approximately 25,000 letters and postcards in his lifetime. And the edited compilation presents just 120 correspondences located that engage with Judaism and Zionism. So in the end, if his letters and correspondences are any guide, Judaism and Zionism preoccupied around one percent of his time.

Dr. Litt: One percent of his writing time, let’s put it like that.

Prof. Shavit: Since writing was more or less his life, it is fair to say one percent of his being.

Dr. Litt: There were long discussions with friends and acquaintances, which we are unable to reconstruct. We have no idea what was said in those discussions about Judaism, about Zionism, and to what extent.

By the way, you seem impressed with the scope of his correspondences, so I should note that most of his famous contemporaries, to mention again Thomas Mann, or Hermann Hesse, they wrote approximately the same amount of letters. So he was not an exception. And if you sum up all the emails that we write, I think the numbers are quite the same.

Prof. Shavit: Well, my emails are never two pages long.

Dr. Litt: He very often wrote a very short message on a postcard. Postcards were so common then.

Anyhow, I am far from being able to say that I have read the majority of his letters. I have seen and read maybe 5,000 or 6,000 or so, which is quite a number, but it is still far away from the totality of the corpus. And I am not certain that we will ever be able to reconstruct the complete corpus because correspondences got lost or, at best, still wait to be discovered.

Even today, I am sometimes approached by a colleague in the library who is cataloging a very tiny archive of a totally forgotten Yiddish writer from, say, Ukraine. And even there, we find two more letters by Stefan Zweig, which are sometimes not so overwhelming, but still contain new findings.

Having said that, the bottom line is that we do have a good sample because I can claim to have read about a fifth of the corpus of his correspondences. And that gives me a kind of indication about the extent to which Zweig discussed Judaism and Zionism with others.

So, we can say that he was intrigued by these issues, but as you said, there are many more letters in which they are not addressed at all. It is clear that his main focus is the literary world, publication. That was his preoccupation.

When analyzing the corpus of correspondences that engaged with Judaism, I see that definitely in the years of the Weimar Republic, between 1919 and 1932, he was engaged mainly with literary-creative aspects of Judaism, and less engaged with antisemitism or Zionism, which he turned to, of course, after 1933.

Mr. Cain: I am much less of an expert on this compared to Stefan, but I want to say that I found striking what I read in the biography of Zweig by Oliver Matuschek – by the way, I think it is a good biography, Drei Leben (2006, S. Fischer). His parents were not observant Jews, but they did go to synagogue on the high holidays. What was even more striking to me is that their friends were all Jews. They didn’t really socialize with non-Jews.

Zweig, on the other hand, kind of broke away from this. He had this network of connections all over Europe, and most of them were not Jewish. And I doubt that he ever went to a synagogue. So, in his self-perception, of course, he knew he was Jewish, but he really kind of left the Jewish milieu of Vienna that his family belonged to. Maybe his biographer is wrong, I don’t know. But I was surprised by this aspect of Zweig.

You said that one percent of his correspondences were about Judaism. There is more Judaism in his literary writing. Of course, The Buried Candelabrum (Der begrabene Leuchter, 1936). The Buchmendel, who is a very charming Eastern European Russian Jew. The woman courted by the baron in Burning Secret.

Prof. Shavit: She’s Jewish, you say! Never noticed that.

Mr. Cain: And a very beautiful Jew, yes. It is mentioned at the beginning of the novella. For someone who we feel was so detached from his Jewish identity, well, you can still see him talking about Jews.

Prof. Shavit: On the other hand, if you are living in and writing about early 20th-century Vienna and the German-speaking literary and cultural worlds, there will be Jews there whether you are a Jewish author or not.

Mr. Cain: The Buried Candelabrum is one of the texts I enjoyed the least translating. I think it is no fault of Zweig. I felt the text was written for a non-Jewish public to kind of explain the Jewish story. You have in that story wrong quotes from the Siddur that I tried to correct.

Prof. Shavit: It’s not his greatest work, indeed.

Mr. Cain: It’s not one of the best, but beyond that, I felt that for me, as an Israeli Jew, being kind of spoon-fed this introduction to Jewish history, well, I didn’t need it.

Prof. Shavit: I find it interesting that you didn’t mention Jeremiah (1917), the play that Zweig wrote while serving as a non-combative soldier in the First World War. It was staged in the young Yishuv in Hebrew at the Ohel Theatre in Tel Aviv in 1929.

Mr. Cain: I didn’t read it. I know it exists.

Dr. Litt: It didn’t work well on stage. It was long, way too long. The Hebrew version was shorter, per Zweig’s request. But ironically, the original version was a bestseller as a book. People loved reading it. That is very unusual. You know, to read a play… I mean, that’s not usually easy and enjoyable. Maybe you remember that from our school days…But in this case, it worked, and it was a bestseller. And that’s maybe also the reason why you can locate today Jeremiah very, very easily in second-hand bookstores.

Prof. Shavit: The play is essentially about the end of the Second Kingdom, the end of Jewish sovereignty, and accepting the end of Jewish sovereignty as Jewish fate. Zweig was mainly interested in the Prophet, whereas the translator, Avigdor Hameiri, was mainly interested in the fate of the nation.

Which brings me to the next point. Zweig reminds Israeli Zionists of a very uncomfortable truth. He reminds them of just how marginal Zionism was as a political movement, let alone as a practical mission, when it got started.

When Zweig was in his teens at the end of the 19th century, only a small minority of Jews in the world were active Zionists. A year after Herzl died, in 1905, Max Nordau lamented how, despite the massive grief and the great publicity of Zionism, only about one in 60 Jews in the world is a Zionist.

So on that fateful day in 1901 when the almost 20-year-old Zweig, the aspiring young writer, was accepted for a meeting with Theodor Herzl, then in his fifth year as the leader of political Zionism, Herzl was the exception in the Jewish world, and Zweig, who was not an active Zionist or even an expressed sympathizer of the movement, was the norm.

The vast majority of Jews were not Zionists. Some were hostile, some were indifferent, and some were undecided. The reason why Zweig was so anxious to meet Herzl was not that Herzl was the charismatic leader of Zionism, the so-called King of the Jews, but that he was one of the leading editors in the most important German-language newspaper, Die Neue Freie Presse.

What a meeting! It is described in The World of Yesterday. Who could be as theatrical as Herzl in creating a dramatic suspense before giving the young man, on the spot, what he never dreamed of having – the ultimate approval in the form of accepting his contribution for publication? And who could better describe this single life-changing moment, this father-and-son scene that synthesized regal patronization and noble generosity, than Stefan Zweig?   

And yet – while Zweig admired Herzl and recognized to his last day the good that he had done him, he never became a Zionist.

Mr. Cain: Growing up in Israel, you learn that Herzl was the Neue Freie Presse correspondent in Paris who reported about the Dreyfus Trial and came up with the idea of a Jewish state. But nobody tells you that he was the editor of the literary supplement of that newspaper. And that was a very influential role for literary aspirants in Vienna.

Prof. Shavit: Reading The World of Yesterday, as well as Zweig’s correspondences about Zionism, I sense a great deal of apologetics, and not very convincing ones, as to why he did not become an active Zionist or, at the very least, an expressed advocate.

One argument he presents is that he felt that to be involved in something, he would have to be fully dedicated to it. Thus, because his focus was writing, and because he saw himself as a man dedicated to universal values, he could not become a Zionist.

The other argument, perhaps a more profound one, is ideological. Zweig was against the transformation of Judaism into a nationalist movement. For him, Jews had a specific vocation in the world; they were a people of a Weltgeist. Their role was to counter nationalism and to spread about universalism. Their loss of sovereignty, their homelessness, their being above the notion of territorially-based nationhood, was part of their identity, a part that should be accepted by them. I should note that these notions were not exactly original; Moritz Güdemann, the Chief Rabbi of Vienna and an opponent of Herzl, said the same already in 1897.

Dr. Litt: Zweig’s position regarding Zionism was probably encouraged by his lifestyle, that he enjoyed so much his frequent travels and felt that he was at home in different places, whether London, Paris, Milano, or Buenos Aires, as much as one can be at home when not. Since he was an acclaimed author and a rich man, he was always welcome everywhere. When you are in that position, it is easy to feel comfortable in universalism; to feel that the big world is your home. Take away the success and the money, and you won’t make it that far.

Also, he was maybe a bit repelled by the reality that Zionism was largely a movement of poor Jews. The rich Jews didn’t usually support it back then. He was somehow fascinated by the Ostjuden, to whose world he was first exposed during the First World War, as did so many other Austrian and German Jews, but he clearly understood that their world is not his world, and was not a world he wanted to be part of. Perhaps he did not appreciate that his great mentor, Theodor Herzl, was doing business with those guys; perhaps he was not comfortable with that. That is just an assumption.

Prof. Shavit: In The World of Yesterday, Zweig describes how he accidentally ran into Herzl in Vienna, in a park, several months before Herzl died. Herzl felt Zweig was shying away from him and invited him to a meeting. Zweig never came. He explains in the book that because of his appreciation for Herzl, he didn’t want to bother him, but reading between the lines, it is a tough sale. It seems that Zweig tried to avoid Herzl.

And tried for a reason. In a letter he wrote to Rabbi Alfred Wolf, who studied his writings (February 4, 1937) Zweig admitted that he originally engaged with Zionism as a debt to the confidence Herzl placed in him, but that because he always rejected narrow-mindedness, he never thought of Zionism as the one solution, with a definite article, for the problem of the Jews; that while Zionism is a blessed ideology, he would not like to see the universal, supra-national Judaism confined in between the walls of the Hebrew language and nationalism.

Dr. Litt: Zweig, as a person, was sitting on the sidelines. He was observing and never ceased to observe.

In the 1930s, he was good friends with Chaim Weizmann, and I think that the same story happened there. Okay, so he was fascinated by the leader and the intellectual Weizmann. He even gave him some advice about the writing of his autobiography. But again, he basically told Weizmann, I see you are doing this business called Zionism. I am not part of it, yet it is still fascinating to see you doing that.

Prof. Shavit: One of his letters informs that he entertained the option of collecting material to write the great epic novel about the Zionist Yishuv. But the letter reads quite clearly that this wasn’t a plan that was ever meant to be realized, and in any case, that even in the context of thinking about realizing it, Zweig did not consider a visit to Palestine (letter to Egon Zweig, April 14, 1930).

By the way, I really like his sarcastic comment against 14-day tours in faraway lands by American authors, although there is at least one great book by Mark Twain that counters it.

Dr. Litt: I think Zweig was mainly explaining in that letter to Egon, his Zionist cousin, who was already there, in Palestine, why it was absurd to think that he could accept the suggestion that he, the famous author, should write the story of the Yishuv and, in doing so, tremendously help its efforts. Zweig refused the idea suggested by Egon very elegantly and very politely and said, Okay, to do so, I will have to research the life stories of so many people and to shrink them together to one very condensed story, which could have been fascinating to do, if only I had the time.

Mr. Cain: Walter Benjamin was offered by Gershom Scholem, who was certainly a Zionist and was here in Jerusalem and was his best friend, to come here and save his life. And you can see in the correspondence between them, which I happened to translate, that Benjamin just could not imagine himself living in what was then Mandatory Palestine; what would he do there? It was too small for him.

In the case of Zweig, it must have been even worse. He was this cosmopolitan citizen of the world. What would he do in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, or Petah Tikva, of the 1930s? These places just were not appealing to him on a personal level. So maybe he was curious about this weird movement of Jews, but for him personally, no, he was not interested.

Prof. Shavit: Well, let’s not forget that Herzl visited the Land of Israel only once. And he wasn’t that impressed with what he saw.

Mr. Cain: Think about other German literary figures who did end up in Israel, like Else Lasker-Schüler or Arnold Zweig, and others whose names I cannot remember. They were something back in Germany, and nothing here.

Prof. Shavit: All of this reinforces the question of why Zweig wanted his correspondences, of whose historical value he was very much and somewhat arrogantly conscious, to be archived in the National Library in Jerusalem. That, at the very least, indicates faith in the endurance of the Zionist enterprise, and perhaps more than faith, perhaps also a sense of belonging, after all.

Dr Litt: I think there are a number of motivations that we have to consider regarding his gift.

When I first met this collection of letters, comprising a bit more than a thousand letters which he donated in the early 1930s, I was wondering, how did he make the selection? Because there were large parts of his collection that he didn’t send to the National Library. So I wondered, what were the criteria? What did he choose to send?

At first, I was thinking too simplistically that maybe he sent the letters he received from Jews. But this was not the case. He provided the archive with letters by Thomas Mann on the one hand, and on the other hand, he did not provide letters that he received from Martin Buber, Max Brod, or Agnon.

I don’t have a 100 percent answer, but I have an idea. In one of his postcards to Hugo Bergmann, the director of the National Library at the time, sent when the process of delivering his archive was ongoing, Zweig wrote that he had already sent the National Library all the letters from the deceased correspondence partners. So, basically, it was a matter of storage space. When he was leaving Austria and had to restrict himself to like 20% of the space that he had before, then he had to make tough decisions. One was that he should give away correspondences with people who were no longer alive and with whom he did not have an ongoing dialogue anymore; people who belonged to the past.

That explains one portion of the correspondences he provided the National Library. The second portion were correspondences with people who were still alive at the time yet were very openly expressing their anti-fascist, anti-Nazi points of view. The assumption – it is not mine originally, but unfortunately I cannot recall who was the scholar who shared it with me – is that maybe Zweig was thinking that these letters must not fall into the hands of the Gestapo. Where could they be hidden? The best place is where no one would assume Zweig would send them to. And that’s the National Library in Jerusalem.

Prof. Shavit: But if that was the motivation, why the National Library in Jerusalem and not, say, Harvard University?

Dr. Litt: Maybe the answer is given in a letter that he wrote to Hugo Bergmann on December 11, 1933. He wrote Bergmann that he thought that his donation would be a tremendous addition to “your library – our library.” So you see that indeed, at that very moment, he saw himself as being part of the Jewish intellectual world, which finds its manifestation in the National Library in Jerusalem. And he wanted to be part of it.

That was actually the only time that he really gave a considerable amount of his personal papers to any institution during his lifetime. He never did that again. Not before, not after. With one exception: he donated the handwritten draft for The World of Yesterday to the Library of Congress in Washington. But that is it. He donated some of his autographs that he collected, but these were not his own works.

Prof. Shavit: That almost feels, you know, as the aging Jew who starts attending a synagogue. That a spark was there, as the cliché goes.

Dr. Litt: Yes, that sentiment was there.

As Zweig wrote several times very openly in his letters, he never hid the fact that he was Jewish. For him, this aspect of his identity was sometimes there, sometimes not so much so. Sometimes it was in addition to a certain point of view. Sometimes it disturbed him or confused him. And I think that in this he was not so different from many other people then, and maybe also now.

So definitely he saw himself as part of what was happening in the Yishuv, but to a point. There is one letter, I think it is included in the collection I edited (letter to the Viennese Zionist Dr. Marek Scherlag, June 22, 1920) where Zweig wrote that he had rejected Jewish nationalism because after two thousand years in which the Jews had plowed the world with their blood and ideas they could not restrict themselves to being again a tiny nation in an Arab corner.

Prof. Shavit: There is a wonderful story in the compilation of correspondences, a rather romantic one. How the lady by the name of Hanna Yakobson from Bat Yam rang the National Library one summer day in 2016. She is the step-daughter of Hans Rosenkranz, a now all but forgotten author and publisher. As a young man, he corresponded with Zweig, who was already a famous author at the time, yet answered his queries with great respect and thoroughness.

Yakobson offered 30 of those letters between Zweig and her stepfather to the National Library. Now, I have to admit the story would be even more romantic if those letters were not known before. But still.

In The World of Yesterday, Zweig describes how Herzl, 20 years his senior, told him that had he not sojourned in Paris, he would have never come to the idea of Zionism. He explained how important it is for a young man to move outside his comfort zone. Zweig gave the young Hans Rosenkranz the same advice (December 10, 1921). He wished for him to spend some of his young years outside Germany in a country where the ‘Jewish question,’ as he referred to it, is not so intense. Yet he did not encourage Hans to travel to the Land of Israel; quite the opposite, he emphasized how important it is not to be preoccupied with the ‘Jewish question’ and that people who were preoccupied with it – he gave the example of Arthur Schnitzler – never fully grasped it. A year later, after Hans specifically asked him about going to Palestine, Zweig wrote in his reply (November 6, 1922) about a 17-year-old pioneer who died there of malaria, and his father, whom Zweig still occasionally met, was heartbroken. In that letter, Zweig reminisced about a conversation in which Herzl tried to persuade him to become an active Zionist, and the young Zweig declined. His explanation was that he had to be fully committed to what he was doing, and since he was committed to art, he could not commit to Zionism. Zweig advised Hans that he should not become an active Zionist as an escape from his disgust with Germany, but only if he fully believed in that ideology.

What can we make of all of this? That not only was Zweig skeptical about Zionism, he also discouraged others whom he cared about from joining the movement, and yet, apologetically so. His relationship with Zionism was not an easy one.

The chain of mentoring is also fascinating. Herzl and Zweig understood, and told their admirers, the intrinsic meaning of ‘no man is a prophet in his own town’; that to revisit reality and then change it, you have to travel somewhere else. Yet their sojourning led them to such different positions, and led them to lead others to such different positions.

It is the greatest of ironies that the correspondences that document all these thoughts are safely preserved today in Jerusalem.

Mr. Cain: Compare it to the ending of The Buried Candelabrum. When the menorah, the real menorah, ends up being buried somewhere in the Land of Israel, until the day comes when the children of Israel ingather in the land and find it. So while Zionism was not a practical thing for Zweig, it was a kind of ideal, a distant future mythology.

Prof. Shavit: With one difference; we know where the letters are. We don’t know where the menorah is.

Mr. Cain: Indeed. I said before that I didn’t like that story; that it is spoon-feeding the reader with some kind of introduction to Jewish history, et cetera, but you cannot ignore a kind of very idealized myth of Zionism that is there. He could have chosen another ending.

Prof. Shavit: In writing about antisemitism, Zweig is very conscious of its dangers. He was not naïve; he did not think it would go away. But he does not search for a solution. His position in a letter to young Hans Rosenkranz, dated to the summer of 1921, resembles the ultra-Orthodox one: being persecuted is our destiny as Jews. Our tragedy is our fate; it is who we are. So here we have a man with a sense of history, but so passive about history.

Mr. Cain: I don’t know if there is a reference in his literary works to antisemitism of the modern European variety. Even in Chess Story (Schachnovelle, 1942), the one text where Nazism is mentioned by Zweig, the victim is not Jewish.

Prof. Shavit: How do you explain that there is no rebellion, no resistance; that there is this acceptance of fate as if Jewish action cannot change it?

Dr. Litt: When Zweig wrote about something Jewish in his literature, he tried to place it on a meta-level. That contrasts with his contemporaries, for example, his good friend Max Brod. Now, you cannot compare Brod’s quality of writing to that of Zweig’s, but you have to appreciate that Brod never feared to put the cards on the table and say explicitly that there’s Zionism and there’s antisemitism, and we as Jews face a lot of dangers in our society and have to find a good solution.

Zweig, on the other hand, never, never, never tried to propose some politically concrete idea in his writings. I think he somehow feared that once he did, he would be burned as a very popular author; that his position as a sophisticated cultural figure that was above politics would be damaged. Politics was the last thing he wanted to be part of.

But he was not always passive. Hannah Arendt wrote a grim and unpleasant review about The World of Yesterday, in which she accused Zweig of having had such an easy life and never doing anything for the Jews. Actually, she didn’t know the whole story.

One of the findings in the letters I had edited is that Zweig indeed tried somehow to intervene in the face of Nazism, not as a single person, but as part of a group, and on a very high-class intellectual level. Yet apparently, it was not really easy to bring 15 or 20 famous and outstanding personalities from the European Jewish society to sign a manifesto against antisemitism.

Prof. Shavit: Stefan, I want to say a word about that proposed manifesto as it is presented in a letter in the compilation you edited (May 7, 1933).

Zweig went out of his way to emphasize that he did not want whining. What he wanted was a manifesto in which German-writing Jewish authors defend their contribution to German culture, how they served it in a spirit of cooperation, how they added to its glory across the world. He was hanging on to something that by that point had vanished.

It is difficult to read that letter; you realize how little power intellectuals have in the face of evil, especially if they were not loud enough on time.

It is intriguing that the developments in Germany did not change his basic view of Zionism. They did not lead him to think that maybe, after all, Zionism was the solution.

Dr. Litt: Yes, but even at the moment he decided to commit suicide, in early 1942, it was totally unclear what would happen in Palestine. Things could have turned out very differently if the Nazis had managed to conquer Palestine. Note also that he killed himself just one month after the Wannsee conference, well before the extermination of European Jewry began in earnest.

Prof. Shavit: I was always curious, why did he commit suicide? Why the impatience to wait for the tide to possibly turn? I mean, he was a man who felt comfortable away from home. Is there still a mystery to crack here?

Dr. Litt: Zweig suffered from time to time from depressions. When the circumstances did not support his being and his well-being as an author and a cosmopolitan, it may have added to his depression.

I once read that he may have decided to kill himself after Brazil joined the anti-Hitler coalition. Perhaps he felt that his efforts to find a safe haven failed, that there was no place to go. He was really deeply frustrated about how efficiently and successfully the Germans were marching on. He and his wife committed suicide a year before Stalingrad [was won]. There was not a single sign that the Nazis would be stopped any time soon.

Prof. Shavit: So he could have committed suicide, you know, 10 days before the Nazis take over the United States and drive inward to South America.

Dr. Litt: Well, I don’t know. It was a dramatic decision. It made a dramatic impression across the world. His suicide note is in our library. You know, there are phrases that he crossed out there. He was really a man of style until the last moment.

Mr. Cain: I base what I say on movies and books, not on first-hand research. But I feel that he was too lonely in Brazil. He was kind of fed up with everything. He wasn’t that young. We say 60 is young, but back then, it wasn’t that young. He felt that his career was behind him, that he wouldn’t see the liberation of Europe in his lifetime.

We can only speculate that maybe if he had made Aliyah and came to Israel, the energy of the Zionist movement would have uplifted his spirits. But alone there in Persepolis…I don’t think there was even a very big German-speaking intellectual circle around him there.

Prof. Shavit: The World of Yesterday, which he wrote shortly before he committed suicide, is not a bitter book. Reading it, you don’t sense a person who is very depressed or alienated from the life that he left behind him.

Dr. Litt: But it is also not a very nostalgic book. It is just a good autobiography. Actually, not so much a biography, more a picture of his times.

To write a proper autobiography, he would have had to address personal issues. His wives are not mentioned in The World of Yesterday, correct? He was dealing with the macro, not the micro.

Prof. Shavit: I guess that has to do with the spirit of the time. You don’t really write about personal issues directly. Well, it’s not as if Germans or Austrians today are very comfortable discussing their personal lives.

Mr. Cain: He wrote to Walter Benjamin to tell him that he had divorced his first wife. He mentioned it in a kind of a postscript at the end of a very long letter, kind of, oh, by the way, I divorced my wife.

Prof. Shavit: When people reconstruct their lives, they write from the point of view of the present. Yet in The World of Yesterday, Zweig doesn’t understand his Judaism differently than he did before the rise of Nazism. When you read his letters from before the rise of Nazism, he insists on a very internationalist, almost elusive definition of Judaism. He does not want Judaism to define him and confine him. I am curious that towards the end of his life, when he reflected upon his adulthood, he did not revise or critically reflect upon his understanding of what it meant to be a Jew.

Dr. Litt: He created an aura around himself, and he had a name to lose. He was by no means seeking this opportunity, this final deed, to Judaize himself publicly.

You can see that even in the last letter that I included in the book (September/October 1941), sent to a reform rabbi in Rio de Janeiro, Henrique Lemle. Zweig gently thanked him for the kind invitation to take an active part in a Yom Kippur prayer in his synagogue, but noted that his modest education in religious matters, which he described as typical to Austrian Jews, made him too insecure to participate. He declined the invitation.

Prof. Shavit: Stefan, what is your favorite Zweig story?

Dr. Litt: His best work is, in my opinion, the novel he never intended to publish that was published posthumously in 1982 – The Post Office Girl (Rausch der Verwandlung).It is better, in my opinion, than the novel he did publish, his longest work, Beware of Pity (Ungeduld des Herzens, 1939).My favorite short story is Letter from an Unknown Woman (Brief einer Unbekannten, 1922). I really love it because I see something very personal there from Zweig, and maybe a kind of confession, an unpleasant confession, about his own behavior when he was a young, rich, and spoiled gentleman. He wrote it when he was in his early 40s, and I think he was reminiscing about his behavior as a young man. The author who gets the letter from the woman is 41; I don’t think that is a coincidence.

Mr. Cain: I also like Letter from an Unknown Woman, which I happened to translate when I was 41. I want to choose two more. One is Burning Secret. This 12-year-old child with his mother in this posh hotel may be Zweig kind of remembering his childhood. And this baron, who tries to court the woman, maybe Zweig sees himself in him. It is a very good psychological novella about growing up, realizing what the world of adults is about.

The other one that I like a lot is very different from all his other works, and influenced by Herman Hesse, The Eyes of the Eternal Brother (Die Augen des ewigen Bruders, 1922). India was trendy back then. And I find the legend beautiful.

Prof. Shavit: We cannot end without a short literary experiment. If Zweig was alive today and landed in Vienna, how would he feel?

Dr. Litt: I am not an expert on present-day Vienna. Still, my feeling is that the mindsets of the big cities in Austria are still very much related to a reality that has long gone. Vienna definitely still has the spirit of being the capital of an empire; an empire that isn’t there anymore.

Prof. Shavit: Not even the best place in the world for an Apfelstrudel, if my experience is any guide.

Mr. Cain: I think that if Zweig had to choose between present-day Austria and present-day Israel, he would choose Austria, obviously.

Prof. Shavit: What would Zweig think of Tel Aviv if our resurrecting machine worked? I think that for someone who was so interested in humanity, in human weaknesses and obsessions, Tel Aviv could be an interesting place.

Mr. Cain: It is a very political question nowadays, and it’s very hard to answer now with what’s going on in Gaza. But if we go back to better times, we can speculate that he would have been proud of Israel’s achievements in science, or Agnon winning the Nobel Prize.

Dr. Litt: Perhaps he would have come to the conclusion that the concern he articulated in one of the letters we addressed before was realized. That it is impossible for the Jews, after all they had done in the world and for the world, to become a tiny nation in an Arab corner. My feeling is that this is exactly what is happening. Unfortunately, I see that there are so many efforts by the state to limit the intellectual world of this country to a very tiny level, focused on itself, not part of something bigger, which in fact we are. And that there are more and more parts of the population in this country that follow this path. 

Prof. Shavit: Stefan, if that resurrection machine brings Zweig to Tel Aviv, I would like the three of us to sit with him at “Stefan,” the small and flourishing Viennese Café on Tchernichovsky Street, opened by an Austrian who fell in love with an Israeli and settled here. There is so much to discuss. It can be a great start for a thrilling short story, especially if Zweig were to write it.