Our Aspal Vintage imprint focusses on masterpieces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Buy from Waterstones
Buy from Amazon
Jewish Women
by Max Brod
Translated from the German
The first ever translation of Max Brod’s novel (originally published in German in Berlin, 1911) which portrays the prosperous and settled world of assimilated Prague Jewry before the First World War – the world not only of Max Brod but also of his life-long friend, the writer Franz Kafka.
Although now overshadowed by Kafka’s success, Brod was an accomplished and prolific author in his own right. This novel is set in the spa town of Teplitz (Teplice) and is a cameo of the lives of prosperous Jewish families before the First World War. It draws a compelling and poignant picture of the normal everyday lives of its characters, so touchingly unaware of the traumas to come in the following decades when their communities would be shattered beyond repair.
Reviews
‘A superb book to be sure.’
(NB Books)
‘… beautifully evokes the tensions of class, Zionism and nationalism that were about to sweep Europe.’
(Jewish Renaissance)
‘…Max Brod’s popular novel … first published in 1911 and now reissued in a lucid translation.’
(The Times Literary Supplement)
Buy from Waterstones
Buy from Amazon
Arnold Beer
by Max Brod
Translated from the German
This novel by Max Brod was first published in Berlin in 1912. The eponymous hero Arnold Beer is a young Jewish man living in the assimilated community of Prague. He is talented but something of a dandy and dilettante. Some aspects of Brod’s novel are clearly autobiographical – Beer is heavily involved in the promotion of an air show and there are clear echoes of the show in Brescia in 1909 which Brod and his friend Franz Kafka attended.
Buy from Waterstones
Buy from Amazon
Three Sentimental Stories
by Paolo Bettoni
Translated from the Italian
These tales belong to the ‘sentimental’ genre of Charles Dickens. Innocent and virtuous souls are plagued by poverty and sometimes by malevolent guardians and neighbours. Occasionally fate intervenes through generous and honest benefactors.
In Vice, Virtue and Poverty, a desperately poor young girl decides to surrender her virtue in order to relieve her family from cold and hunger. But rescue comes from an unexpected quarter. The Gentleman Beggar portrays the fate of a nobleman who has squandered two fortunes and is reduced to poverty, but finds an unlikely benefactor in a former servant. In A Lamb between Two Wolves, a guardian uncle, driven by unbridled greed and wickedness, finds ingenious ways to turn his nephew, a young and healthy heir to a large fortune, into a dying wastrel.
Buy from Waterstones
Buy from Amazon
Short Stories
by Hans Arnold
Translated from the German
Six cameos of domestic life in North Germany in the mid-19th century, mainly concerning affairs of the heart. Arnold has a light and sympathetic touch and a legendary talent for farce.
In The Wild Junker the eponymous hero returns from five years of travelling abroad to find that his childhood sweetheart has given up waiting for him and is engaged to another. And in You Have to be Lucky! the hero meets the love of his life minutes after proposing a ‘marriage of convenience’ to a neighbour’s daughter.
Buy from Waterstones
Buy from Amazon
The Innocents
by Alfredo Panzini
Translated from the Italian
Three short stories about individuals who through no fault of their own have suffered life changing traumas and in their struggle for happiness are destined to be thwarted by a seemingly malign fate aided by their own unworldliness.
A pampered and sensitive young nobleman struggles to come to terms with the loss of his family fortune in The Black Dog. He succeeds in finding a way to earn his daily bread but the effort involved exacts a very high price. In Nora a young orphan girl is raised by an unsympathetic aunt and adored by her dying cousin. She finds consolation outside the suffocating atmosphere of the family but there are unexpected consequences.
The Cedar of Lebanon
by Grazia Deledda
Translated from the Italian
The Cedar of Lebanon is a collection of thirty-one short stories which were written towards the end of Nobel prize winner Deledda’s life and published posthumously. The collection contains themes which were dear to Deledda’s heart and draw on both her Sardinian childhood and her later years in Rome.