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The Last Miracle

Jewish Stories

Part of Pushkin Press Classics

Author Stefan Zweig
Translated by Anthea Bell
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Paperback
$17.95 US
Steerforth Press | Pushkin Press Classics
On sale Sep 09, 2025 | 192 Pages | 9781805331834
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A unique collection of stories—presented together here for the first time—from one of the great voices of the European Jewish diaspora

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.
Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York—a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press. View titles by Stefan Zweig

About

A unique collection of stories—presented together here for the first time—from one of the great voices of the European Jewish diaspora

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.

Author

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, into a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a poet and translator, then as a biographer. Between the wars, Zweig was an international bestseller with a string of hugely popular novellas including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Amok and Fear.In 1934, with the rise of Nazism, he left Austria, and lived in London, Bath and New York—a period during which he produced his most celebrated works: his only novel,Beware of Pity, and his memoir, The World of Yesterday. He eventually settled in Brazil, where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in an apparent double suicide. Much of his work is available from Pushkin Press. View titles by Stefan Zweig

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