The Death of the Tavern Keeper’s Wife

Leopold Kompert grew up on the “Gasse”—the one street in small Bohemian towns where Jews were allowed to live. The son of a poor wool merchant in Münchengrätz (Mnichovo Hradište), he left home at age seventeen, and supported himself as a tutor and journalist while traveling throughout the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Kompert’s nostalgic stories of small-town Bohemian Jewish life are foundational texts of the “ghetto fiction” genre, and in his later years he was a significant figure in the Viennese Jewish community.