Karl Emil Franzos

Karl Emil Franzos was notable not only as a prominent nineteenth-century author and journalist, but also for having focused on the scenes and conflicts of small-town Jewish life. First in Austria, then in Germany, Franzos wrote prolifically, often setting his stories in the town of “Barnow,” the name he gave his childhood home of Czortków, Podolia (now Chortkiv, Ukraine). He was educated in Bucovina and spent his adult years in Vienna and Berlin, establishing a publishing house in 1895. Though Franzos was highly educated and knew several languages, he found that positions as an academic or judge were closed to him because he was Jewish. He refused to convert and became a journalist instead. He is recognized for his embrace in the 1870s of Ghettoliteratur, an apologetic literature that focused on the scenes and conflicts of small-town Jewish life to illustrate the Jewish embeddedness in the Central and East European landscape and to advertise how and why Jews could benefit from liberal German qualities of self-improvement and education (Bildung). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, he became less apologetic (or optimistic) about the ability of Bildung to solve the problems affecting East European Jews, and moved from liberal Romanticism toward literary naturalism, which is reflected in his 1896 novel Leib Weihnachtskuchen und sein Kind (Leib Weihnachtskuchen and his Child). Franzos also championed reform and opposed oppression; he saw the latter coming as much from Orthodox Judaism as from external forces.