Married Life (Hebrew Classics S.) - Softcover

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.

A rich and powerful novel, with the protagonists and the historical setting vividly depicted, this title holds it's place in the urban novel genre as a modern classic in a strong European tradition. This novel belongs to the urban novel genre, and is set in the Vienna of the 1920's. The tortuous and humiliating marriage of Gurdwell and Thea is evocatively set against the backdrop of a city which had witnessed the collapse of it's Empire in the 1st world war. Social decay in the external environment of the city is mirrored by despair, cruelty, depravity and disintegration within the marriage, narrated in rich and vivid prose.