RUTHFULLY YOURS

Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver offer a boisterous, colorful history of New York’s Catskill Mountains, but like the tummlers of yesteryear, once they depart, it’s hard to remember what the noise was about. The Catskills have always been at the edge of the American experience—a hinterland of New York City. Unlike William Cronon’s classic Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which examined how 19th-century Chicago transformed the Midwest’s ecology and economy, The Catskills offers loosely linked stories where the Big Apple is forever popping up to take over the narrative.

As the authors note, only in the last two centuries have people even called the Catskills a single mountain range. Despite heroic efforts to unify the story, the book is really about three regions: the Hudson Valley, at the center of American history and culture from 1750-1850; the remote, central Catskills, forever wild by statute and the primary source of New York City’s water supply; and the southern Catskills, famed for their 20th-century Jewish resorts.

The problems with the Catskills-as-autonomous-region start at the beginning. The Hudson River was a water highway in both the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, but the theater’s key events took place far south, in Manhattan, and far north, in the region’s Lake George-Lake Champlain extension. The authors somehow discern George Washington’s tactical genius from his string of New York military disasters in 1776, but it hardly matters: Washington never fought in the Catskills.

They turn to Washington Irving’s short stories, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” which satirize the vanishing Dutch world of the Hudson Valley and the disconcerting changes in postrevolutionary society. Irving was actually a New York City and Europe-based writer—though like his antihero Ichabod Crane, he later resided in the Hudson Valley on the opposite bank from the Catskills. Fortunately, two of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, which similarly contrast the vanishing Native American culture with that of the European-descended frontiersmen, are actually set in the Catskills.

The Hudson River School painters also contrasted the vanishing rural world with the booming 19th-century economy. Even as the Hudson Valley bustled with tanneries, factories, and bluestone quarries providing the paving for New York City’s sidewalks, painter Thomas Cole and his fellow Romantics found the sublime in Katterskill Falls, setting nature’s untamed magnificence against civilization’s distant encroachments. Lacking an eye for art—or, perhaps, adequate search skills in Google Images—Silverman and Silver contrast the Hudson River School painters with the allegedly “cold” landscapes of England’s J. M. W. Turner, which were far more melodramatic exemplars of Romanticism.

In choosing to take up this story in the summer of 1936, Weidermann finds a moment of relative calm and normality in the émigrés’ lives.On 3 July 1936, a Czechoslovakian Jewish journalist named Stefan Lux entered the general assembly of the League of Nations in Geneva, shouted “C’est le dernier coup”, and shot himself with a revolver. Lux wanted his suicide to be a warning cry against anti-Semitism and Nazi militarism. But if he thought that even such a public sacrifice would serve as the “final blow” against fascism, he was tragically mistaken. Two years after Lux’s death came the dismemberment of his country in the Munich Agreement and the Germany-wide pogrom known as Kristallnacht. The following year
brought the Second World War and the beginnings of the Holocaust. All that Lux’s death accomplished was to confirm the very powerlessness it was meant to protest. Nor did he even win the posthumous thanks of posterity, given that today his name and his deed are practically unknown.

Lux features in an offstage cameo role in the non-fiction chamber drama that is Summer Before the Dark. The German journalist Volker Weidermann has devoted this short, elegiac book to the German émigré writers, most of them Jews, who congregated in Ostend in the summer of 1936, mainly because they had no place better to go. At the centre of this unhappy cenacle were two writers who shared Lux’s fate. Stefan Zweig’s journeys took him all the way to Petrópolis, Brazil, before he gave up hope and took an overdose of barbiturates (with his wife, Lotte) in 1942. Joseph Roth’s death also deserves to be called a suicide: he died in Paris in May 1939 after years of acute alcoholism. (His final crisis was precipitated by yet another suicide, that of Ernst Toller, the communist playwright, who had killed himself in New York City a few days earlier.)

The effects of exile on Zweig and Roth had been immediate and dramatic. When Hitler came to power in 1933, each man was at the peak of his literary career, though that success took very different forms. Roth was a long-time star correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and had just written the novel that was his masterpiece, The Rad­etzky March. Zweig, who lived in splendour in Salzburg, Austria, was a writer of sensational novellas and digestible works on the history of ideas, books that were immensely popular in Germany and beyond. Their close friendship endured despite the evident differences in their temperament – Zweig was a moderate bourgeois, Roth a romantic bohemian – and, trickier still, in their abilities: Roth was a writer of genius, while Zweig knew he had only talent.