Academic Studies Press Voyage into Savage Europe: A Declining Civilization

From the translator of Avigdor Hameiri’s Hell on Earth, winner of the 2019 TLS-Risa Domb/Porjes Prize In this unique memoir, now in English for the first time, Israel’s first Poet Laureate Avigdor Hameiri details a trip to Europe in 1930 from the perspective of a Hungarian Jew who had served in the Habsburg Army. Upon visiting Austria, Hungary, Romania (including parts of ceded Hungarian Transylvania), and Czechoslovakia (including his Carpatho-Ruthenian homeland), he sees Europe in flux on the brink of an unknown disaster. Austria and Hungary are full of youth whose philosophy is “eat, drink and be merry; tomorrow we die.” There is fear of Bolshevism from without, but the unfelt danger is German Fascism. Jews (especially in Hungary) are assimilated but cannot escape from their Jewishness: some are Zionists. Romania is corrupt and antisemitic. In Carpatho-Ruthenia, Hameiri has two premonitions warning him to return to Israel, a prediction of the destruction soon to befall Europe. Hameiri also gives accounts of the artistic and cultural scenes of 1930s Europe, as well as the world of Carpatho-Ruthenian Hasidism, which was soon to be destroyed by the Holocaust. From the growing danger and confusion surrounding inter-war Europe, in prose at once compassionate and bitingly sarcastic, comes a sweeping account of Jewish life in 1930 from one of Israel’s prolific writers. Review “In 1930, the pioneering Hebrew writer Avigdor Hameiri left his home in Mandate-era Palestine to revisit the Europe he had left. This extraordinary travelogue, based on the newspaper reports he wrote after his journey, is the result. Hameiri writes as a committed Zionist, proud creator of a new Land of Israel, but also as a nostalgic Hungarian patriot still enchanted by Budapest, Vienna, and the enduring charm and grace of the world he quit. Yet his travels in Italy and Central Europe prophetically reveal a ‘barbarous’ continent shaken by nationalist fervour, distracted by mass entertainment, and torn by sectarian fanaticism. Hameiri may despise the movies as the epitome of modern decadence, but he composes each sharply-focused scene―from the café society of great cities to the village life of remote provinces―with a cinematic flair and pace. If his glimpses of the ‘primeval jungle’ of hatred and violence within European culture show a chilling foresight, so his dream of a continent united as ‘one large family’ looks towards a happier future. Peter C. Appelbaum’s gripping and flavourful translation does full justice to the surging, contradictory energy of this unique work of witness.”―Boyd Tonkin, author of The 100 Best Novels in Translation “Avigdor Hameiri left Europe after first-hand experience of the horrors of the Eastern front and captivity, years he described as continual madness. A decade later, he returns as a visitor to Europe, which is no longer insane, but has turned savage. His impressions of his native Hungary, Austria, Italy and neighboring countries are colored by the beastly, untamed, and wildly dangerous rise of National Socialist racism. Hameiri’s detailed, opinionated observations may not be factually accurate, but are an authentic product of its time and the vision of Europe in 1930. Hameiri documents his lost homeland and part of himself with it. While written for the Hebrew-reading public in then British mandatory Palestine, this book is quintessentially European, even with its focus on the Jewish community, and this excellent English translation puts it on the European bookshelf, where it belongs.” ―Tamar S. Drukker, Lecturer in Hebrew (Education), SOAS University of London “At first sight, it seems inconceivable that a poet and novelist reporting for a Jewish journal in Palestine would have been able to assemble, in a short time, such an immense collection of astute observations on the Europeans’ political, cultural, religious, and artistic problems in the early 1930s. Interestingly, Avigdor Hameiri was conc