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The Last Miracle: Jewish Stories
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.
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.
192 pages, Paperback
Published September 9, 2025
24 people want to read
About the author
Stefan Zweig
2,255 books10.5k followersStefan Zweig was one of the world's most famous writers during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the U.S., South America, and Europe. He produced novels, plays, biographies, and journalist pieces. Among his most famous works are Beware of Pity, Letter from an Unknown Woman, and Mary, Queen of Scotland and the Isles. He and his second wife committed suicide in 1942.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Zweig studied in Austria, France, and Germany before settling in Salzburg in 1913. In 1934, driven into exile by the Nazis, he emigrated to England and then, in 1940, to Brazil by way of New York. Finding only growing loneliness and disillusionment in their new surroundings, he and his second wife committed suicide.
Zweig's interest in psychology and the teachings of Sigmund Freud led to his most characteristic work, the subtle portrayal of character. Zweig's essays include studies of Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky (Drei Meister, 1920; Three Masters) and of Friedrich Hölderlin, Heinrich von Kleist, and Friedrich Nietzsche (Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, 1925; Master Builders). He achieved popularity with Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; The Tide of Fortune), five historical portraits in miniature. He wrote full-scale, intuitive rather than objective, biographies of the French statesman Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935), and others. His stories include those in Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925; Conflicts). He also wrote a psychological novel, Ungeduld des Herzens (1938; Beware of Pity), and translated works of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Emile Verhaeren.
Most recently, his works provided the inspiration for 2014 film The Grand Budapest Hotel.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 20, 2025
Who remembers Scholem Asch, Franz Werfel or Lion Feuchtwangler? In our past century's upheaval, caught between and during the great wars of Central Europe, these assimilated Jewish storytellers took on historical epics, sometimes Christian in content, generated film adaptations and topped the bestseller charts. Today, the revival of attention generated leaves arguably paired contenders amid small-press backlists. Joseph Roth, in a revenant production-line beyond the grave reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño, revives, if often in recycled English versions from by now rather musty predecessors.
Yet, this milieu resists mothballs. At least for one chronicler of this age of {Sachertorte} and coffee. Pacing ahead of this venerable if semi-obscure ensemble, readers today find a contender in their lead.
Roth's contemporary, Stefan Zweig, must credit from his postmortem perch Wes Anderson's {The Grand Budapest Hotel} for his resurrection on screen and sustained in print. Pushkin Press' go-to German translator, the late Anthea Bell, gains lead credit in {The Last Miracle: Jewish Stories}. In a crowded field, Bell's prominence as the most prolific of Zweig's interpreters ensures she remains the prime mover responsible for bringing Zweig's diverse backlist back into print. Rather than a fussy tangent, this editorial comment admits Jonathan Katz, Peter Gay, Joel Rotenberg and Leon Ferousse among others, who offer deft evocations of Zweig for demand today. Their subtle nuances may assist literate, discerning consumers. Additionally, the novella concluding this anthology first appeared in 1936; soon after through Eden and Cedar Paul's voices. These entries date back to 1901 in the original.
For Zweig's wry style, redolent of psychological depth, rhetorical shifts in class and dialect and finely honed emotional registers of the educated ranks of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its aftermath, challenges those of us unable to comprehend such sources. This exacting tone, which depends upon hesitation, ambience and suggestion, cannot survive blunt dubbing into demotic candor or dumbed-down chatter. Like Anderson's movie, the atmosphere radiates with wistful musings amidst decline.
In the opening, Mendel the Bibliophile sets up shop in Vienna's Café Gluck. Impecunious, eccentric even by a bookseller's thrifty regimen and a failed yeshiva student seduced by texts in substance and as commodities, he's available for consultation day long into night. He's so immersed in recall of his trade that even a Great War passes him by. When his Russian origin and paucity of proper papers fail to dissuade imperial bureaucracy, his predicament--not uncommon for those familiar with Zweig's oeuvre and his own circumstances when a second global conflict erupts--resonates and long lingers.
As with "Downfall of the Heart," explicitly Jewish identity shadows itself in a second depiction of a defector from tradition. At sixty-five, a father feeling as if a {black mole} burrows into his bowels, undermining his conscience, turns towards tardy repentence via a rabbi after torment. His daughter of nineteen, he surmises one midnight prowl, enjoys the favors of a swain. This unfounded supposition destroys his sanity. It's typically melodramatic, for even in Zweig's capable craft, his tales can tilt into despairing soliloquies testing the patience of audiences of our less indulgent and more permissive age.
In another period of strife, "The Miracles of Life" relates two journeys. From Venice, an artist weary of wine and whores searches for inspiration in Antwerp. He seeks his model for a "Madonna of the Wounded" in Esther, a refugee from a pogrom in Germany. She rebuffs his earnest attempts to woo her into the Catholic embrace, while around them intolerance returns. Flanders folk revolt against the Spanish occupation and seek to destroy any delineation of iconic expression, defacing any delicacy.
It's reminiscent of Thomas Mann's odd fable retelling the Holy Sinner, as well as subversive if hushed reflections on puzzles of belief told by Zweig's troubled peers. Action steps aside and uneasy thought advances. A mood of contemplation as armed factions clash around a crowded continent for sectarian mastery suggests that morals of such lessons echo within alleys and naves of a newer, angry Europe.
Near Poland's frontier, perhaps distant relatives of Esther, certainly loyal to her heritage, rush onto a frozen lake, as Flagellants, Christian fanatics, hunt their enemies down during Hanukkah. "In the Snow" sketches a vignette, a forlorn raw image which repeats in Zweig's panicked and persecuted scenarios. It's brief, a glimpsed mass terror, as asylum seekers dash towards safety. Or its icy mirage.
Finally, the Roman remnant of those earlier exiled ancestors of Zweig and his beleagured Ashkenazi compatriots resisting their relentless foes epitomizes itself in the lengthier plot (nearly half of {The Last Miracle}) of "The Buried Candelabrum." Teutons and Vandals force the capital of doomed Latin Imperium into capitulation. It's 455. Young Benjamin follows the rumors whispered in the diaspora of the last remnant of the Temple in Jerusalem, a sacred menorah, as it's hauled off to Arian Carthage, to Justinian and Belisarius' Byzantium and then the Holy Land port of Joppa. In antiquated cadences of the Pauls, this extended itinerary trundles rather than scurries along, and the somber phrasing and sonorous prose carry the fusty air of the heyday of Ben Hur. Zweig's nimbler as he skips and dashes.
Uneven, if a timely compendium, whose arrangement hints at the quintet's themes of dispersion, hate, loss, mourning and endurance. Bell's results meet expectations of current trends, which favor Zweig's penchant for interior exploration of motives as Jewish characters strive to outwit antagonists. The Paul couple demonstrate how Zweig's themes emerge from ancient anxiety to embed a Hebraic dogged determination to endure despite fierce forces which refuse to let up against their descendants.
ARC Edelweiss. Standard disclaimer.
Yet, this milieu resists mothballs. At least for one chronicler of this age of {Sachertorte} and coffee. Pacing ahead of this venerable if semi-obscure ensemble, readers today find a contender in their lead.
Roth's contemporary, Stefan Zweig, must credit from his postmortem perch Wes Anderson's {The Grand Budapest Hotel} for his resurrection on screen and sustained in print. Pushkin Press' go-to German translator, the late Anthea Bell, gains lead credit in {The Last Miracle: Jewish Stories}. In a crowded field, Bell's prominence as the most prolific of Zweig's interpreters ensures she remains the prime mover responsible for bringing Zweig's diverse backlist back into print. Rather than a fussy tangent, this editorial comment admits Jonathan Katz, Peter Gay, Joel Rotenberg and Leon Ferousse among others, who offer deft evocations of Zweig for demand today. Their subtle nuances may assist literate, discerning consumers. Additionally, the novella concluding this anthology first appeared in 1936; soon after through Eden and Cedar Paul's voices. These entries date back to 1901 in the original.
For Zweig's wry style, redolent of psychological depth, rhetorical shifts in class and dialect and finely honed emotional registers of the educated ranks of the Austro-Hungarian empire and its aftermath, challenges those of us unable to comprehend such sources. This exacting tone, which depends upon hesitation, ambience and suggestion, cannot survive blunt dubbing into demotic candor or dumbed-down chatter. Like Anderson's movie, the atmosphere radiates with wistful musings amidst decline.
In the opening, Mendel the Bibliophile sets up shop in Vienna's Café Gluck. Impecunious, eccentric even by a bookseller's thrifty regimen and a failed yeshiva student seduced by texts in substance and as commodities, he's available for consultation day long into night. He's so immersed in recall of his trade that even a Great War passes him by. When his Russian origin and paucity of proper papers fail to dissuade imperial bureaucracy, his predicament--not uncommon for those familiar with Zweig's oeuvre and his own circumstances when a second global conflict erupts--resonates and long lingers.
As with "Downfall of the Heart," explicitly Jewish identity shadows itself in a second depiction of a defector from tradition. At sixty-five, a father feeling as if a {black mole} burrows into his bowels, undermining his conscience, turns towards tardy repentence via a rabbi after torment. His daughter of nineteen, he surmises one midnight prowl, enjoys the favors of a swain. This unfounded supposition destroys his sanity. It's typically melodramatic, for even in Zweig's capable craft, his tales can tilt into despairing soliloquies testing the patience of audiences of our less indulgent and more permissive age.
In another period of strife, "The Miracles of Life" relates two journeys. From Venice, an artist weary of wine and whores searches for inspiration in Antwerp. He seeks his model for a "Madonna of the Wounded" in Esther, a refugee from a pogrom in Germany. She rebuffs his earnest attempts to woo her into the Catholic embrace, while around them intolerance returns. Flanders folk revolt against the Spanish occupation and seek to destroy any delineation of iconic expression, defacing any delicacy.
It's reminiscent of Thomas Mann's odd fable retelling the Holy Sinner, as well as subversive if hushed reflections on puzzles of belief told by Zweig's troubled peers. Action steps aside and uneasy thought advances. A mood of contemplation as armed factions clash around a crowded continent for sectarian mastery suggests that morals of such lessons echo within alleys and naves of a newer, angry Europe.
Near Poland's frontier, perhaps distant relatives of Esther, certainly loyal to her heritage, rush onto a frozen lake, as Flagellants, Christian fanatics, hunt their enemies down during Hanukkah. "In the Snow" sketches a vignette, a forlorn raw image which repeats in Zweig's panicked and persecuted scenarios. It's brief, a glimpsed mass terror, as asylum seekers dash towards safety. Or its icy mirage.
Finally, the Roman remnant of those earlier exiled ancestors of Zweig and his beleagured Ashkenazi compatriots resisting their relentless foes epitomizes itself in the lengthier plot (nearly half of {The Last Miracle}) of "The Buried Candelabrum." Teutons and Vandals force the capital of doomed Latin Imperium into capitulation. It's 455. Young Benjamin follows the rumors whispered in the diaspora of the last remnant of the Temple in Jerusalem, a sacred menorah, as it's hauled off to Arian Carthage, to Justinian and Belisarius' Byzantium and then the Holy Land port of Joppa. In antiquated cadences of the Pauls, this extended itinerary trundles rather than scurries along, and the somber phrasing and sonorous prose carry the fusty air of the heyday of Ben Hur. Zweig's nimbler as he skips and dashes.
Uneven, if a timely compendium, whose arrangement hints at the quintet's themes of dispersion, hate, loss, mourning and endurance. Bell's results meet expectations of current trends, which favor Zweig's penchant for interior exploration of motives as Jewish characters strive to outwit antagonists. The Paul couple demonstrate how Zweig's themes emerge from ancient anxiety to embed a Hebraic dogged determination to endure despite fierce forces which refuse to let up against their descendants.
ARC Edelweiss. Standard disclaimer.
October 20, 2025
it's ok, I'm over my disappointment that four of the five stories are already published in the complete short stories by Pushkin Press. That's on me- I should have done my homework more rigorously.
Only the last one here ('The Buried Candelabrum') was an undiscovered gem.
Still, reading through them all again, I came to have a keener appreciation of the subtlety and finess of Zweig's prose and meticulous plot structure.
I did struggle most with the 'Miracles of Life' story, because it felt that the young girl, Esther, is patronized and belittled. I certainly would NOT be so bold as to assume that absolutely all young women just want to hold a baby and that'll sort them all out, poor dears!!!
But then I remember that Zweig is writing from a world now long dispersed, with assumptions and expectations that were of his time, if not ours. And in really, what's really going on here? What's revolutionary is that Zweig makes time to consider what a young lady is feeling at all, and to carefully and systematically work through the trauma of bereavement and orphanhood. He seeks to understand the individual's psychology, and that is still, even now, a pretty radical position to hold. Yes, there's the heavy weight of Marianism implicit in the modelling for the Virgin Mary, but the story finishes with the suggestion that transcendence over trauma is available.
The last story ('The Buried Candelabrum') shows Zweig bearing towards the profoundly spiritual, almost mystical nature of the Jewish experience. This is a touching story, for Zweig, at the time of writing, could in no way have predicted the creation of the state of Israel. Indeed, at the time of writing, the Jewish diaspora was undergoing a whole new level of terror and extermination at the hands of the third Reich and it's allies. Zweig himself, escaped to South America, but ultimately did not live to see the end of the war. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the flourishing of darkness all around him.
I will never not love Zweig's gentle humanism, his patience and his genteel optimism. Dear publishers, if you ever read this (unlikely, I know), and if you ever discover some unpublished works. by Zweig, please do publish them!
Only the last one here ('The Buried Candelabrum') was an undiscovered gem.
Still, reading through them all again, I came to have a keener appreciation of the subtlety and finess of Zweig's prose and meticulous plot structure.
I did struggle most with the 'Miracles of Life' story, because it felt that the young girl, Esther, is patronized and belittled. I certainly would NOT be so bold as to assume that absolutely all young women just want to hold a baby and that'll sort them all out, poor dears!!!
But then I remember that Zweig is writing from a world now long dispersed, with assumptions and expectations that were of his time, if not ours. And in really, what's really going on here? What's revolutionary is that Zweig makes time to consider what a young lady is feeling at all, and to carefully and systematically work through the trauma of bereavement and orphanhood. He seeks to understand the individual's psychology, and that is still, even now, a pretty radical position to hold. Yes, there's the heavy weight of Marianism implicit in the modelling for the Virgin Mary, but the story finishes with the suggestion that transcendence over trauma is available.
The last story ('The Buried Candelabrum') shows Zweig bearing towards the profoundly spiritual, almost mystical nature of the Jewish experience. This is a touching story, for Zweig, at the time of writing, could in no way have predicted the creation of the state of Israel. Indeed, at the time of writing, the Jewish diaspora was undergoing a whole new level of terror and extermination at the hands of the third Reich and it's allies. Zweig himself, escaped to South America, but ultimately did not live to see the end of the war. Overwhelmed by what he saw as the flourishing of darkness all around him.
I will never not love Zweig's gentle humanism, his patience and his genteel optimism. Dear publishers, if you ever read this (unlikely, I know), and if you ever discover some unpublished works. by Zweig, please do publish them!
December 31, 2025
the first book i finished in 2025 was a collection of zweig stories and so is the last. beautiful, beautiful stories. the miracle of life particularly struck me this time - it hadn’t left nearly as strong of an impression the first time i read it. and i remembered that last year i noticed that each of his stories come in the form of an overheard conversation, a letter whose contents are slowly revealed, a memory disclosed at night in private. it gives you this (absolutely irresistible) feeling that you’re privy to some big and personal secret. genius
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews