Book Beginnings: The Vienna Writers Circle by J.C. Maetis

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading Challenge and TBR 23 in 23 Challenge on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Lublin, Poland, April 1942

I’d never been so thirsty, my mouth so dry. My lips were cracked and sore, my tongue swollen and sticking to the roof of my mouth whenever I tried to swallow—which I’d given up on several hours ago. No saliva. So all that now passed through the sandpaper tunnel of my mouth was my own shallow, labored breathing.

Last week I featured Ben Bova’s 2010 historical novel The Hittite. The week before it was Fatima Mernissi’s 1994 memoir Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. This week it’s J.C. Maetis’s 2023 historical novel The Vienna Writers Circle. 

Even though I’m up to my eyeballs in library books I found myself in the mood last week for some historical fiction. To feed my addiction I helped myself to a rather promising selection at my small town public library. Needing something representing Austria for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge one of the novels I grabbed was The Vienna Writers Circle. Hopefully this newly-published work of historical fiction will make enjoyable follow-up reading to Bernard Wasserstein’s On the Eve: The Jews of Europe Before the Second World War. Here’s what Amazon has to say about J.C. Maetis’s recent novel.

Spring, 1938: Café Mozart in the heart of Vienna is beloved by its clientele, including cousins Mathias Kraemer and Johannes Namal. The two writers are as close as brothers. They are also members of Freud’s Circle—a unique group of the famed psychiatrist’s friends and acquaintances who once gathered regularly at the bright and airy café to talk about books and ideas over coffee and pastries. But dark days are looming.

With Hitler’s annexation of Austria, Nazi edicts governing daily life become stricter and more punitive. Now Hitler has demanded that the “hidden Jews” of Vienna be tracked down, and Freud’s Circle has been targeted. The SS aims to use old group photos to identify Jewish intellectuals and subversives. With the vise tightening around them, Mathias and Johannes’s only option appears to be hiding in plain sight, using assumed names and identities to evade detection, aware that discovery would mean consignment to a camp or execution.