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In that unique and magical period between Christmas and New Year I managed to sit by a fire and make my way through a pile of books built up over the previous 12 months. They included Julie Burchill’s raucous book on the tragedy of not being born Jewish (a phrase which, when I used it in a synagogue recently, elicited a huge roar of dark laughter) and also one of the greatest books I had never previously read. I was reading Stefan Zweig throughout the year, but saved the memoir—The World of Yesterday—until the end.
Apart from the extraordinary descriptions of friends—Herzl, Rilke, Rodin, Strauss; there was no one Zweig did not know—the book is one of the most haunting I have read.
It brought to mind the only persuasive argument I ever heard for the tedious idea that Shakespeare may have been a Catholic. The idea (which relies on the “bare ruined choirs” sonnet, among others) suggests that the landscape of desolated monasteries formed the young poet. Crucially, it was this that made Shakespeare aware from the outset of one of the world’s hardest truths—that even the things you love most can be trodden over and wrecked by people utterly unworthy of them. However he acquired it, that knowledge certainly informed Shakespeare’s genius. Zweig saw his world swept away not once but twice and part of the terror of the memoir is the awareness that this same realisation would soon sweep him away with it.
In that unique and magical period between Christmas and New Year I managed to sit by a fire and make my way through a pile of books built up over the previous 12 months. They included Julie Burchill’s raucous book on the tragedy of not being born Jewish (a phrase which, when I used it in a synagogue recently, elicited a huge roar of dark laughter) and also one of the greatest books I had never previously read. I was reading Stefan Zweig throughout the year, but saved the memoir—The World of Yesterday—until the end.
Apart from the extraordinary descriptions of friends—Herzl, Rilke, Rodin, Strauss; there was no one Zweig did not know—the book is one of the most haunting I have read.
It brought to mind the only persuasive argument I ever heard for the tedious idea that Shakespeare may have been a Catholic. The idea (which relies on the “bare ruined choirs” sonnet, among others) suggests that the landscape of desolated monasteries formed the young poet. Crucially, it was this that made Shakespeare aware from the outset of one of the world’s hardest truths—that even the things you love most can be trodden over and wrecked by people utterly unworthy of them. However he acquired it, that knowledge certainly informed Shakespeare’s genius. Zweig saw his world swept away not once but twice and part of the terror of the memoir is the awareness that this same realisation would soon sweep him away with it.
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