The Last Miracle: Jewish Stories

'Thoughtful, highly observant, and humane' Guardian

Two thousand years of human struggle

Five tales of family breakdown, political struggle, and monomaniacal obsession from one of the defining voices of the European Jewish diaspora.

Moving back through time from the First World War to Ancient Rome, these stories play on the tension between religion, society and individual with masterful irony. We encounter heroes and bookworms, visionaries and gadabouts, patriarchs and rebels - united across the centuries by faith, and by the intensity with which they live and die, their individual passions blazing out against the forces of history.

Includes:

'Buchmendel'

'Downfall of the Heart'

'The Miracles of Life'

'In the Snow'

'The Buried Candelabrum'

Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.

Translated by Anthea Bell and Eden and Cedar Paul.

Stefan Zweig was born in 1881 in Vienna, a member of a wealthy Austrian-Jewish family. He studied in Berlin and Vienna and was first known as a translator and later as a biographer. Zweig travelled widely, living in Salzburg between the wars, and enjoying literary fame. His stories and novellas were collected in 1934. In the same year, with the rise of Nazism, he briefly moved to London, taking British citizenship. After a short period in New York, he settled in Brazil where in 1942 he and his wife were found dead in bed in an apparent double suicide.

Anthea Bell (1936-2018) was one of the leading literary translators of her time. Her work from German, French and Danish into English encompassed the writings of Kafka, Freud, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, Georges Simenon, W.G. Sebald, René Goscinny, and more - including many translations of the work of Stefan Zweig for Pushkin Press.

Eden Paul (1865-1944) and Cedar Paul (1880-1972) together translated dozens of books from French, German, Italian and Russian during their thirty years of marriage. Among them were writings on psychoanalysis and socialist thought, as well as many of the works of Stefan Zweig.