The Rediscovered Writings of Veza Canetti: Out of the Shadows of a Husband (review)

Abstract

Rediscovered Writings of Canetti: of Shadows of a Husband, by Julian Preece. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2007. 184 pp. $75.00. Canetti's writings were first published in 1930s and were aU but forgotten until her husband, Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti (1905-1994, Nobel Prize, 1981) released them in 1991, thirty-seven years after her death. Since then, her importance has been increasingly recognized and appreciated as one of most significant female voices of Vienna during Austria's Systemzeit in 1930s. Canetti was born as Veneria Taubner-Calderon in 1897 into a mixed Sephardic-Ashkenazi Jewish family and lived as an assimilated Jew in Leopoldstadt, Vienna's second district. In 1934, she married seven-year younger Elias Canetti, who shared with her his Sephardic Jewish heritage. Between 1933 and 1938, she wrote extensively and published her work in Arbeiter-Zeitung. Canettis barely escaped Anschlus in 1938. They fled England, where died in 1963. Canetti was an unrivaled observer of life of disenfranchised in Austro-fascist Vienna of 1930s. Her oeuvre that survived nearly four decades of destruction, silence, and neglect consists of two novels, three plays, and several short stories. Julian Preece is well known in Canetti-research circles. He is coeditor of a volume on Elias Canetti and has contributed several chapters on Canetti's work scholarly essay collections. In 2006, Ariadne Press published The Viennese Short Stories, which are Preece's translations of some of Canetti's writings. Already in 1995, Preece published in Modern Austrian Literature article entitled The Re-Discovered Writings of Magd-Canetti: On Psychology of Subservience. monograph that is under review here bears essentially same title, yet its subtitle reads Out of Shadows of a Husband. In his introduction his book Tfce Rediscovered Writings of Canetti, Preece explains that he is strictly interested in what he calls literary between Elias and his wife Veza, their private drama played out against backdrop of European history and cultural politics. It is his intention tell the story of this collaboration and conflict, hurt, revenge, reconciliation, renewed partnership, and finally, shared obscurity in exile (p. 8), and he rejects notion supported by several distinguished contemporary Austrian and German writers and scholars that Vezas more famous and longer lived husband stifled her ambitions (p. 33). Lastly, Preece deems Nobel Laureate's claim believable that his wife chose pseudonym Veza Magd (Magd means maid; she also used pseudonyms Veronika Knecht and Martha or Martina Murner) not because she felt that she had serve him but rather to serve' people she wrote about (p. 33). Preece's book is divided into eight chapters in which author describes and discusses, analyzes, and interprets Canetti's youth and early years of Canetti marriage when successfully wrote for various journals of Socialist Left in Shared Beginnings and Worker's Writer: at Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1932-33, difficult and terrifying time in Vienna before couple's traumatic escape England in 1938 in Writing under Cover, 1934-38. In chapter Rivalry and Partnership, Preece describes years in England where wrote her novel Tortoises in 1939 but could no longer find an authence for her work, a state of affairs that induced her destroy most of her writings in 1956. …