THE LAST MIRACLE

This collection from one of the great pre-war writers, himself a member of Europe's Jewish diaspora, highlights the precarious position that Jewish people have occupied throughout millennia, in stories that move across centuries and nations but show the unchanging pressure of outsider status. But these stories are about individuals, too--in Zweig's treatment, the particular passions of particular hearts will always blaze out brightly against the levelling forces of history. In 'Mendel the Bibliophile', a bookseller's obsession with his wares blinds him to the progress of war and the threat it poses to his own life. Monomania is also an overpowering force in 'Downfall of the Heart', in which an aging father cannot accept his daughter's embrace of new freedoms. 'The Miracles of Life' is a masterfully ironic tale, which plays with the tension between faith and morality, society and individual, against the backdrop of 1500s Antwerp and the Dutch rebellion against Spanish rule. 'In the Snow' sees a Jewish community in medieval Eastern Europe fleeing the violence of a Christian sect. And in the longest piece in the collection, the novella The Buried Candelabrum, we go all the way back to the ancient world, where the recovery of a sacred seven-branched candlestick stolen during the sack of Rome will become a young Jewish boy's life's mission.