Voyage into Savage Europe

<p><strong>From the translator of Avigdor Hameiri's <em>Hell on Earth</em> winner of the 2019 TLS-Risa Domb/Porjes Prize</strong></p><p>In this unique memoir now in English for the first time Israel’s first Poet Laureate Avigdor Hameiri details a trip to Europe in 1930 from the perspective of a Hungarian Jew who had served in the Habsburg Army. Upon visiting Austria Hungary Romania (including parts of ceded Hungarian Transylvania) and Czechoslovakia (including his Carpatho-Ruthenian homeland) he sees Europe in flux on the brink of an unknown disaster. Austria and Hungary are full of youth whose philosophy is eat drink and be merry; tomorrow we die. <span>There is fear of Bolshevism from without but the unfelt danger is German Fascism. Jews (especially in Hungary) are assimilated but cannot escape from their Jewishness: some are Zionists. Romania is corrupt and antisemitic. In Carpatho-Ruthenia Hameiri has two premonitions warning him to return to Israel a prediction of the destruction soon to befall Europe. </span></p><p><span>Hameiri also gives accounts of the artistic and cultural scenes of 1930s Europe as well as the world of Carpatho-Ruthenian Hasidism which was soon to be destroyed by the Holocaust. From the growing danger and confusion surrounding inter-war Europe in prose at once compassionate and bitingly sarcastic comes a sweeping account of Jewish life in 1930 from one of Israel’s prolific writers.</span></p>