Judith Trachtenberg: A Novel

Judith Trachtenberg – is a novel, which was published in 1891 and written by Karl Emil Franzos. He was a popular Austrian writer of the late 19th century. His work, both reporting and artistic, is concentrated in the multinational corner of Galicia, Podolia and Bukovina, now mainly in Western Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met. The area was so closely associated with his name that one critic called it "Franzos country". The novel is a moral picture in which the love of a beautiful Jewess Judith for the Christian Count Agenor is shown in the difficult and prejudiced position of the Jewish and Christian population in Eastern Europe in Austria in the 19th century. Forced by his class arrogance, Count Judith cannot marry and builds his relationship with her on the basis of lies and deceit. Judith, too, has to flee from her ossified traditional environment to be ignored. In the end, it becomes clear that there can be no common future happy for both of them.