The Death of the Tavern Keeper’s Wife

Leopold Kompert

1848

With every stone that was set in the new barn, another drop of life seemed to ebb from the wife of the randar or tavern keeper. When she looked out at the building, she often said that she would not eat the bread that would come from it next summer. Sometimes she was not able to leave her bed for several days. Moritz crept away with tears in his…

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Creator Bio

Leopold Kompert

1822–1886

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.

Related Guide

Folk Tales and Fiction, 1750–1880

The “return to history” of Jews in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and engagement between Jews and their majority cultures offered new models for imaginative writing beyond those within their ancestral traditions.

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