Novel
Married Life
חיי נישואים
David Vogel · 1929
Synopsis
Vienna, in the twenties. Rudolf Gurdweil, a poor and gentle Jewish intellectual, meets an Austrian baroness, Thea von Takow, in a café. He is at once drawn to her, despite a dark foreboding, and marries her. A shared life begins in which she humiliates him, mistreats him and deceives him methodically, while he endures and consents, caught in a passion that subjects him to her. Around them, the city after the collapse of the Empire, its cafés, its poverty and a rising antisemitism.
Context
Written in Hebrew in Vienna in 1927 and 1928, the novel appeared in three parts with the publisher Mitzpeh and went unnoticed; in the early thirties, the author looked in vain for a German publisher. In 1986, Menahem Perry published a new version of it, established from a manuscript: the book became a bookshop success and made Vogel one of the great prose writers of the language. It was then translated, notably into English by Dalya Bilu and into French, in 2015, by Michel Eckhard Elial.
Who it is for
A long novel, nearly five hundred pages in French. It is worth knowing that the text read today is that of 1986, established from the author's manuscript.
Prizes and reception
Ignored when it appeared; a success after the 1986 reissue, then translated into several languages, including English and French.
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