MegaloPsychia: The Other Cheek of Judaism

By Rami Elias Kremesti

According to Rami Elias Kremesti, nothing in life is worse than living in ignorance… After many years of living in depression, fear, anxiety, hate and confusion, the author feels he is finally emancipated and enlightened and wants to bring a taste of this sweetness to the reader… In his third book, he talks about the accomplishments of the Jewish people, the same people that were and are still demonized in his home country of Lebanon. Rami was lucky he was able to escape from the toxic milieu of Lebanon after the end of the civil war. Instead of East, he went to the decadent “West” where paradoxically, he tasted the truth in the poetry of Rumi in Los Angeles, which was his home for about six years. There he also met some Jewish people that became his lifelong loyal friends. As Rumi puts it, his soul caught fire… He discovered the meaning of loving one’s enemy and turning the other cheek… You see dear reader, when one tastes divine love, all pettiness, anger, and attachment dissolves… One starts to see unity instead of division… All religions, one praise, as Rumi puts it…In his first book, The Other Cheek of Islam, he reached out to his Muslim brothers. In his second book, For Love of the Sacred Awe, he talks about beauty and aesthetic. In his third one he reaches out to his Jewish brothers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jan 5, 2024
• ISBN: 9781398490888

Rami Elias Kremesti

Rami Elias Kremesti is a UK chartered scientist specialising in water treatment. His first love was chemistry. His second love is philosophy. After spending many years in the dark prison of depression and confusion, gradually, the self-imposed walls of ignorance started to crumble and the bright light came in… This is his third book which aims to dispel all the antisemitic lies he grew up with in his home country of Lebanon. In his first book, The Other Cheek of Islam, he reached out to his Muslim brothers. In his third one, he reaches out to his Jewish brothers.

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Dedication

I dedicate this book to my lifelong Jewish friend, Ravit Berg, who stood by me in the lowest moments of my life… For this I am forever indebted.

Copyright Information ©

Rami Elias Kremesti 2024

The right of Rami Elias Kremesti to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All of the events in this memoir are true to the best of the author’s memory. The views expressed in this memoir are solely those of the author.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398490871 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398490888 (ePub e-book)

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Acknowledgement

I want to thank the team at Austin Macauley Publishers who have taken a gamble on me, just an incognito madman, and my book.

Introduction

Today is Monday morning the 24 of May 2021. It is about 2:00 am and I can’t sleep. Yesterday, I went to a Free Palestine protest in the centre of High Wycombe with my Palestinian friend, Ghaleb (which means the Victorious One in Arabic).

I found it revolting… A bunch of bearded Pakistanis, a couple of women in black hijab, a Palestinian circumciser from the Ain El Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon selling flags and trinkets; a kid with a sweater that says Badr 313 on it in reference to the Battle of Badr in which the Prophet of Islam Mohammad and his few followers attacked the Caravans of Qureish his arch-enemy. The energy and the atmosphere was dark and repulsive and accentuated by cold rainy weather.

Maybe I am biased because I know from experience the ethos of these rallies. You see, dear reader, anti-Israel/pro Palestine protests from my home country used to raise signs which said things like ‘Israel is Absolute Evil’ and ‘America is The Greatest Devil’… These were not a protests of love but protests of hate. A British man came over and asked what is going on. I told him it is a pro-Palestine rally. He recoiled and said, Oh I got problems of my own. He is right. These Pakistanis and Palestinians came to live in the UK in peace and prosperity; why are they importing their problems and their hate here? My Palestinian friend, Ghaleb, thanked them for supporting his cause, but I could feel that there is a huge cultural divide between them.

They are doing it, the protest, for political reasons. Earlier today, I watched some videos on The Jewish Learning Institute (JLI) YouTube channel. One was by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, whom I deeply respect, which was about how Jews create equality through education, and another one was about Aaron and his brother, Moses, and how they loved and respected each other without any jealousies in between them like in the past cases of Jacob and Esau, Cain and Abel, Joseph and his brothers.

I keep telling my Palestinian friend, who is a Hezbollah and Hamas supporter and was happy when American troops pulled out of Afghanistan this year, these people (the Jews) are your half-brothers; you should love and respect them and make peace with them. There is tremendous opportunity for prosperity in the Middle East if we combine Jewish brains with Arab cash.

Muslims believe that the Jews will return to the Holy Land in the end days and then an army from the east will liberate Palestine of the Jews. If they are expecting Iran or Pakistan to liberate Palestine, I think they have a long time to wait. Personally, I believe no one belongs in the Holy Land if there is hate in their heart…

I was chatting later on today with a friend of mine, a Pathologist from the AUBMC (American University of Beirut Medical Centre), who tried for many years to make a living with his family in Lebanon and eventually gave up the Hell Hole that is Lebanon these days and returned to the USA. Why is Lebanon a hell hole and Israel a progressive, prosperous country?

The idea hit me. It is time to write my third book: The Other Cheek of Judaism as a sequel to The Other Cheek of Islam, my first book.

I do not purport to be an expert on Judaism or Jews but I am very curious and inquisitive, and my research for my book has led me to discover some amazing books like Genius and Anxiety, The Chosen People and IQ and The Wealth of Nations.

However, my desire to fight anti-Semitism has led me to writing this book because I have come into contact with anti-Semitism in my own circle of friends and family and I know from experience that they are wrong and that anti-Semitism is especially detrimental to those to hold on to it.

I grew up in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood of West Beirut, Mseitbeh, and many times I saw the Hezbollah hate banners and heard slogans shouted at the Jews, Israel and the USA. Over time, I realised that Israel is an amazing country; the Jews are amazing people and that it is time for me to defend The Jew.

Needless to mention, I lived in the USA for 8 years and I think the USA is a wonderful country too, although these days it is too polarised due to lack of true unifying leadership. I realised it is time for me to make a stand and call Arab and Muslim propaganda by its name: hate propaganda.

And it is time for me to recount the many amazing qualities and achievements of Jews that I have learned in my studies about Jewish culture, history, the Torah, Jewish writers, scientists, thinkers, musicians and artists as well as through my experience knowing some Jewish friends.

As for the anti-Semitism in some developed countries, it is truly shameful. I used to be a passionate believer in the philosophy of Nietzsche, creator of the concept of the Uber-Mensch which inspired the Nazis…back then I was an avid atheist and I despised religion and religious people. Here I am completing the circle with the anti-concept of the Megalopsychos (pronounced Megalo Psi-Khos). Those amazing Jews that are also believers in Ha-Shem (some Jews don’t dare to speak the name of God and hence, call Him The Name—Ha means The and Shem means Name in Aramaic and Hebrew).

There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world I told Ghaleb, my Palestinian friend, once how many Nobel prizes have they contributed? Just twelve or 0.8% (See Appendix 1 at the end of the book for a comparative pie chart). I counted a couple of them to him: Abdus Salam in Physics, Najib Mahfouz in Literature and Ahmed Zewail from Egypt in Chemistry whose daughter, Amani, I met while doing research in UCLA.

Abdus Salam is not even considered Muslim in Pakistan because he is from the Ahmadiyyah sect. Najib Mahfouz got stabbed in the back by the fanatic now banned Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmad Zewail lives in Los Angeles. How many Nobel prizes have the Jews contributed to the world, I asked Ghaleb: TWO HUNDRED. His knackered comment was that the Nobel Prize is politicised…

In the same centre of High Wycombe, I have met Salafist Muslims who came to the UK as refugees, live in council homes and receive benefits, who call Christians and Jews Kuffar (Infidels) and refuse to work. These people are revolting to me…

The Jews, when they got dispersed in the diaspora of Europe and the world, worked hard and integrated in the respective societies that they made their homes in. And when Anti-Semitic policies prevented them from high positions in government, they turned their chosen crafts into an art just like the money changers of Venice gave rise to the greatest Jewish bankers in the history of banking like the Lehman Brothers, and the Rothschilds.

My favourite scientists whose biographies I used to read as a teenager to get inspiration turned out to be all Jewish: HC Brown, the greatest organic chemist of all time; Niels Bohr, Einstein, Pauli, Heisenberg, Hertz, Huber, Max Plank, etc. etc. I compiled a list of the greatest Jewish scientists of all time on my website AMALID.ORG. Chaim Soutine, one of my favourite Russian painters, is Jewish.

So is Rothko, so is Chagal, so is Auerbach, whom Konstantin Konstantinov, Anastas’ son, told me about and we saw his work in the Tate Modern in London. The late Anastas Konstantinov is one of the greatest modern Bulgarian painters. Itzhak Perlman, one of the greatest violinists of all time, is Jewish. Throughout 2021 and 2020, I watched a lot of Jewish movies and documentaries on Netflix: Shtisel, Unorthodox and The Longest Song.

I began to realise more and more that these are amazing people to be loved and cherished not demonised. This year, I also read Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Fascinating book that instead of painting the Jews as evil, which it intended to do, made me realise they are fascinating, accomplished, ingenious people that are masters of strategy. I hope to visit Israel soon and instead of this being a theoretical defence and extolment of The Jews, I hope to make some more real Jewish Israeli friends.

The first part of this book I will dedicate to talking about the Greatest Jews of Our Time and throughout history as an anti-dote to hate and anti-Semitism. I have borrowed freely from Wikipedia, so do not accuse me of plagiarism. Information for me is cheap regurgitation, what matters is hidden meaning and wisdom.

One must learn how to read between the lines. One must see the big picture. The Koran and Torah and Bible are words, what matters is meaning. God is One and God is Love…

These days, my research into the fascinating religion of Judaism has uncovered some very interesting facts: over the Bank Holiday weekend at the end of May 2021, I had a chat with Ghaleb, my Palestinian friend, and he told me the Koran story about how Abraham supposedly destroyed the idols worshipped back in the day in Ur and how he was thrown in a fiery furnace and the fire did not burn him.

Out of curiosity, I googled ‘Koran stories copied from Jewish sources’, and lo and behold, I found a very interesting information which references the following stories to their Jewish sources (Talmud, Targum and Mishna): the Abraham story about the idols and him being thrown into the fire; the story about the Queen of Sheba (with such juicy details as her having hairy legs); the story of Cain and Abel and how the slaying of a single life is equivalent to the slaying of all mankind.

Another Koranic story which is copied from Christian lore is the story of the Seven Sleepers, otherwise known as the Sleepers of Ephesus and Companions of the Cave: it is a medieval legend about a group of youths who hid inside a cave outside the city of Ephesus around AD 250, to escape one of the Roman persecutions of Christians and emerged some 300 years later. Still another one is the story of Moses and his servant, Al Khidr, in Chapter (18) sūrat l-Kahf (The Cave) 65–82.

There are many negative stereotypes of Jews being greedy, miserly, racist, materialistic, sickly, seeking world domination, evil, closed, stiff-necked, hypochondriac, that they used to sacrifice young Christian babies in their rituals etc. etc. This book seeks to dispel these stereotypes by presenting the ‘Other Cheek’ of Judaism, that is, the beauty of Judaism and the amazing contributions of Jews to society throughout ancient and modern history.

There are also unfortunately many anti-Semitic publications still in circulation, such as The Talmud Unmasked, The International Jew and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which I aim to discredit.

I want to insert here a beautiful quote from the book Genius and Anxiety by Norman Lebrecht.

Five Jews shaped history:

Moses said The Law (Torah) is everything.

Jesus taught that Love is everything.

Marx said Money is everything.

Freud said Sex is everything.

Einstein said everything is Relative.

I dare add a sixth point: Jews shaped popular world culture through popular music and Hollywood. A seventh one is that Jews by virtue of being rebellious, in the person of Lev Bronstein, a Jew, they invented Communism. They also participated in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the USA.

The Megalopsychia part of the title of the book, which I added in retrospect, is inspired by the Aristotelian concept of Megalopsychos or a person with a great soul. Megalopsychia is greatness of soul or magnanimity as he sets forth in his Nicomachean Ethics. Using Aristotle’s terms, there is debate over whether the Megalopsychos is a practikos or a theoretikos.

Let us look at some of the greatest Jews that have ever lived and decide for ourselves. After my exposé of the accomplishments of the Jewish people, I turn to some philosophical chapters in which I try to capture the Jewish spirit, their Raison d’être, their Ethos. Here I would like to quote Rabbi Dr Nathan Lopes Cardozo who puts this beautifully:

To understand what it means to be a Jew one must surpass these studies and understand their stifling implications. To be a Jew is to be a messenger, to be God-intoxicated and to teach mankind the art of spiritual transformation. To be a Jew means to be dissatisfied with just being civilised, a nice person or a good person. That is not good enough.

One needs to surpass being good. Rather, being a Jew means touching on emotions we have never cherished before and to be surprised by our souls. To be a Jew is to live a holy life with an exalted mission. To be God’s stake in human history, to quote Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and live accordingly.

Finally, I would like to say that after I had neared the completion of this book, I felt more and more convinced that Christianity and Judaism and Islam are basically one religion and that the split that happened was basically political and the differences are superficial and just semantics. One of the last book chapters titled, ‘How the Theological Chasm between Christianity and Judaism Was Created and Stoked by Politicians’, was an eye opener for me.

You see, I learned this year that passages in the Old Testament or the Torah that highlight the ‘good news’ as the Gospel is known (Evangelios in Greek), made me realise that Jesus the Christ was not preaching anything new; he was fulfilling the Torah as He himself asserted He was doing. The dispute as to whether Jesus was the Messiah or not, the Son of God or the Son of Man becomes a superficial one, a matter of opinion, semantics and dirty politics…

So this book came full circle for me. I kicked off my writing career with my first published book, The Other Cheek of Islam, went on to write my second book For Love of the Sacred Awe, and here I am, coming to the conclusion that Christianity after all is nothing but embellished Judaism. My mission to unite all three religions becomes more and more pertinent. I hope you help me spread Rumi’s vision:

All Religions, One Praise…

Sincerely,

Rami Elias Kremesti M.Sc., CSci, CEnv, CWEM

2 December 2021

High Wycombe,

Buckinghamshire,

United Kingdom

Part I

Contributions of Jews to World Literature, Science, Law, Technology, Philosophy, Peace, Economics, Arts, Culture, Film, Business, Religion, Feminism, Environmentalism, Human Rights and more.

Contributions of Jews to

World Literature and Poetry

In the field of Literature, there are 16 Jewish Nobel prize winners; 14% of the world total, 38% of the US total. Below are some of the Jewish Megalopsychos (Pronounced Psi-Khos) in the field of literature.

Boris Pasternak

Winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature from the Soviet Union: the prize was received for his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition. Author of the famous novel Dr Zhivago.

Pasternak was born in Moscow on 10 February 1890 into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. His father was the Post-Impressionist painter, Leonid Pasternak, professor at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture. His mother was Rosa Kaufman, a concert pianist and the daughter of Odessa industrialist, Isadore Kaufman, and his wife.

Pasternak had a younger brother, Alex, and two sisters, Lydia and Josephine. The family claimed descent on the paternal line from Isaac Abarbanel, the famous 15th century Sephardic Jewish philosopher, Bible commentator, and treasurer of Portugal. Pasternak famously wrote that soul inspiration is the road to better days:

It is not revolutions and upheavals that clear the road to better days, but revelations, and lavishness of someone’s soul inspired, and ablaze.

Henri Bergson

1927 Nobel Prize Laureate in Literature from France; in recognition of his rich and vitalising ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented. He and Einstein had a fateful conversation that took place on 6 April 1922 about the nature of time. Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces.

His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterise his thought as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason.

Criticising Kant’s theory of knowledge exposed in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his conception of truth—Bergson attempted to redefine the relations between science and metaphysics, intelligence and intuition, and insisted on the necessity of increasing thought’s possibility through the use of intuition, which, according to him, alone approached a knowledge of the absolute and of real life, understood as pure duration.

Einstein and Bergson were both Jewish.

Elie Wiesel

Writer and Nobel Prize Laureate (Peace 1986); (b. Eliezer Wiesel 30 September 1928–2 July 2016). Wiesel is the world’s most famous Holocaust survivor, having written 57 books and won a Nobel Prize. In April 2010, Wiesel took out full-page ads in US newspapers defending the Jewish rights to Jerusalem, and later dined with President Obama in an attempt to defuse the tension they caused.

In 2007, Wiesel was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize’s Lifetime Achievement Award. That same year, the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity issued a letter condemning Armenian genocide denial; a letter that was signed by 53 Nobel laureates including Wiesel. Wiesel has repeatedly called Turkey’s 90-year-old campaign to downplay its actions during the Armenian genocide a double killing.

Elias Canetti

A Bulgarian Jewish writer (born 25 July 1905, Ruse, Bulgaria; died 14 August 1994; Zürich, Switzerland), and was a German-language novelist and playwright whose works explore the emotions of crowds, the psychopathology of power, and the position of the individual at odds with the society around him. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981.

Canetti was descended from Spanish Sephardic Jews. He wrote in German, his third language, his first two being Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and English. He learned the latter when his parents settled in England. After his father’s death in 1913, he moved with his mother to Vienna. Educated in Zürich, Frankfurt, and Vienna, Canetti received a doctorate in chemistry at the University of Vienna in 1929.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

(21 November 1903–24 July 1991) Was a Polish-American writer in Yiddish, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. The Polish form of his birth name was Icek Hersz Zynger. I have read one of his books, Satan in Goray; it is beautiful. Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1903 to a Jewish family in Leoncin village near Warsaw, Poland. His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj.

Imre Kertész

(9 November 1929–31 March 2016) Was a Hungarian author and recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Literature, for writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history. He was the first Hungarian to win the Nobel in Literature. His works deal with themes of the Holocaust (he was a survivor of a German concentration camp), dictatorship and personal freedom.

He died on 31 March 2016, aged 86, at his home in Budapest after suffering from Parkinson’s disease for several years.

Yehuda Amichai

(born Ludwig Pfeuffer;‎3 May 1924–22 September 2000) Was an Israeli poet and author, one of the first to write in colloquial Hebrew.

Amichai was awarded the 1957 Shlonsky Prize, the 1969 Brenner Prize, 1976 Bialik Prize, and 1982 Israel Prize. He also won international poetry prizes and was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yehuda Amichai was born in Würzburg, Germany, to an orthodox Jewish family, and was raised speaking both Hebrew and German. His German name was Ludwig Pfeuffer.

Amichai immigrated with his family at the age of 12 to Petah Tikva in Mandate Palestine in 1935, moving to Jerusalem in 1935. He attended Ma’aleh, a religious high school in Jerusalem. He was a member of the Palmach, the strike force of the Haganah, the defence force of the Jewish community in Mandate Palestine. As a young man he volunteered and fought in World War II as a soldier in the British Army, and in the Negev on the southern front in the 1947–1949 Palestine war.

Below I am quoting one of his most beautiful poems:

A Child is Something Else

BY YEHUDA AMICHAI

A child is something else again. Wakes up

in the afternoon and in an instant he’s full of words,

in an instant he’s humming, in an instant warm,

Instant light, instant darkness.

A child is Job. They’ve already placed their bets on him

but he doesn’t know it. He scratches his body

for pleasure. Nothing hurts yet.

They’re training him to be a polite Job,

to say Thank you when the Lord has given,

to say You’re welcome when the Lord has taken away.

A child is vengeance.

A child is a missile into the coming generations.

I launched him: I’m still trembling.

A child is something else again: on a rainy spring day

Glimpsing the Garden of Eden through the fence,

Kissing him in his sleep,

Hearing footsteps in the wet pine needles.

A child delivers you from death.

Child, Garden, Rain, Fate.

Marcel Proust

Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust (10 July 1871–18 November 1922) was a French novelist, critic, and essayist who wrote the monumental novel À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier rendered as Remembrance of Things Past), published in seven parts between 1913 and 1927. He is considered by critics and writers to be one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

Proust was born on 10 July 1871, shortly after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War and at the very beginning of the Third Republic. He was born in the Paris Borough of Auteuil (the south-western sector of the then-rustic 16th arrondissement) at the home of his great-uncle on 10 July 1871, two months after the Treaty of Frankfurt formally ended the Franco-Prussian War.

His birth took place during the violence that surrounded the suppression of the Paris Commune, and his childhood corresponded with the consolidation of the French Third Republic. Much of In Search of Lost Time concerns the vast changes, most particularly the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the middle classes that occurred in France during the Third Republic and the fin de siècle.

Proust’s father, Adrien Proust, was a prominent pathologist and epidemiologist, studying cholera in Europe and Asia. He wrote numerous articles and books on medicine and hygiene. Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clémence (Weil), was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family from Alsace. Literate and well-read, she demonstrated a well-developed sense of humour in her letters, and her command of English was sufficient to help with her son’s translations of John Ruskin.

Proust was raised in his father’s Catholic faith. He was baptised (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d’Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he never formally practised that faith. He later became an atheist and was something of a mystic.

Franz Kafka

(3 July 1883–3 June 1924) Was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature.

His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include, Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle). The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe situations like those found in his writing.

Kafka was born into a middle-class, German-speaking Jewish family in Prague, the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia; then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today the capital of the Czech Republic. He trained as a lawyer and after completing his legal education was employed full-time by an insurance company, forcing him to relegate writing to his spare time.

Over the course of his life, Kafka wrote hundreds of letters to family and close friends, including his father, with whom he had a strained and formal relationship. He became engaged to several women but never married. He died in 1924 at the age of 40 from tuberculosis.

Few of Kafka’s works were published during his lifetime: the story collections Betrachtung (Contemplation) and Ein Landarzt (A Country Doctor), and individual stories (such as Die Verwandlung) were published in literary magazines but received little public attention.

In his will, Kafka instructed his executor and friend, Max Brod, to destroy his unfinished works, including his novels Der Process, Das Schloss and Der Verschollene (translated as both Amerika and The Man Who Disappeared), but Brod ignored these instructions. His work has influenced a vast range of writers, critics, artists, and philosophers during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Kafka famous quote:

He who is terribly afraid of dying it’s because he hasn’t yet lived.

Stefan Zweig

(28 November 1881–22 February 1942) Was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most widely translated and most popular writers in the world.

Zweig was raised in Vienna, Austria-Hungary. He wrote historical studies of famous literary figures, such as Honouré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky in Drei Meister (1920; Three Masters), and decisive historical events in Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928; published in English in 1940 as The Tide of Fortune: Twelve Historical Miniatures). He wrote biographies of Joseph Fouché (1929), Mary Stuart (1935) and Marie Antoinette (Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman, 1932), among others.

Zweig’s best-known fiction includes Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922), Amok (1922), Fear (1925), Confusion of Feelings (1927), Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927), the psychological novel Ungeduld des Herzens (Beware of Pity, 1939), and The Royal Game (1941).

In 1934, as a result of the Nazi Party’s rise in Germany, Zweig emigrated to England and then, in 1940,