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Friderike Maria Zweig

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Autographs Start Price:NA Estimated At:800.00 - 1,000.00 USD
Friderike Maria Zweig

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Auction Date:2018 May 09 @ 18:00 (UTC-5 : EST/CDT)
Location:236 Commercial St., Suite 100, Boston, Massachusetts, 02109, United States
ALS - Autograph Letter Signed
ANS - Autograph Note Signed
AQS - Autograph Quotation Signed
AMQS - Autograph Musical Quotation Signed
DS - Document Signed
FDC - First Day Cover
Inscribed - “Personalized”
ISP - Inscribed Signed Photograph
LS - Letter Signed
SP - Signed Photograph
TLS - Typed Letter Signed
Collection of five handwritten letters from Friderike Zweig, the first wife of Austrian novelist and biographer Stefan Zweig, fourteen total pages, ranging in size from 3 x 4 to 7.25 x 10.25, dated between 1935 and 1952. The earliest letter, September 20, 1935, addressed to a Miss Strassman, a literary agent, in which Zweig expresses pleasure at their meeting, "My husband too was very fond of meeting you,” and notes that they have not received a book and requests assistance in procuring "the collection of 'Hausexemplare' which you saw in my husband's room…He just left me again for Paris and London…May I bother you still with something else: my daughter should like to publish her photos of Toscanini and other artists famous in U.S.A. in American magazines and we should be glad to have a help."

The other four letters were written in New York after Friderike Zweig's emigration and are addressed to Shea Tennenbaum [also spelled Tenenbaum], a Yiddish writer and journalist who was evidently an admirer of Stefan Zweig's work. Zweig's first letter to Tennenbaum, March 3, 1944, thanks him for sending his article, in Yiddish, about her husband: "I shall ask somebody to read it to me, and the gratefulness for your writing will make it easy to me to understand this reach [rich] and powerful language." She writes that she is enclosing another article about her ex-husband from the magazine Menorah, which she says is full of "lies" and offensive to Zweig's memory. The article, by a "Miss A.," is almost certainly Hannah Arendt's scathing 1943 review of Zweig's World of Yesterday, titled ‘Portrait of a Period,’ in which she attacked Zweig for remaining apolitical in the face of anti-Semitism. Friderike defends her husband passionately: "That he did not mix in politics just on opposite reason, namely his idea that he can damage the Jewish cause in speaking to [sic] loudly as a Jew…His whole work was to defend the rights of the humbles [sic] against some oppression and the devotion for greatness not in sake of fame…This woman—in the shadow of a grave—turns the words in the mouth of the most honorable man, in making him part of that, what he himself condemned.”

In her next letter, September 21, 1944, she thanks Tennenbaum for sending another article, in Yiddish, saying that she will ask a friend to read it and tell her what it says: "It will be a pleasure for me, to hear what you say.” On December 6, 1944, Zweig sends Tennenbaum a program for an American-European Friendship event on December 16, 1944, and writes an ANS on the reverse: "Please do come (without to pay admission) and bring Graciana along. I don’t know her address. Sincerely, Friderike Zweig." The final letter, December 1952, thanks Tennenbaum for his contribution to the festschrift for her 70th birthday: "I nearly could understand everything and will have a friend to tell me every word." Penned on the reverse of the second integral page is an autograph note to Tennenbaum from Harry Zohn, German-English translator, scholar of German literature, and editor of the festschrift, mentioning that he is sending him a copy. In overall fine condition. Accompanied by the original mailing envelopes for all but the 1935 letter, each hand-addressed by Zweig, who incorporates her signature in the return field for the 1952 letter, and a newspaper clipping from the New York Post reporting on Stefan Zweig's suicide in 1942.

Friderike, who was married to Stefan Zweig from 1920 to 1938, was herself a writer and translator. After their divorce, they remained good friends and were in close contact through letters, even after Zweig fled Europe for Brazil, where, with his second wife, he committed suicide in 1942. Friderike emigrated to the United States in 1940, where she founded the Writers Service Center, an organization to aid European refugees, and also chaired the American-European Friendship Association.