Free Jarmila by Ernst Weiß

unbeknown to him, to plant the seed that became the late work
Jarmila.
In mid-October, 1936, Weiss wrote a letter to his “dear friend” as he likedto address Zweig, thanking him for the two volumes of novellas,
Kaleidoskop
(Kaleidoscope) and
Die Kette
(The Necklace) “which had brought him immense pleasure” and had “shown him that the old world we love isn’t yet dead after all”. He added in reference to those works by Zweig, comforting himself in a way: “Although everything now is hurtling towards the abyss with spine-chilling speed I have not lost a kind of hope and confidence”.
    The story of Jarmila certainly conjures up this “old world we love” depicted in Zweig’s novellas: in a letter dated 16th June, 1937, Weiss told his writer-friend, who resided predominantly in London, all about it. He also informed Zweig he’d had to vacate his hotel room as the price had risen steeply, that he had moved in with friends, and that his expansive novel-in-progress,
Der
Verführer (The Seducer), was making slow progress. “In the meantime”—so his missive continues—“inspired by your volume of novellas I have written a story myself, about sixty typed pages.”
    It is not only out of reverence for Zweig, who was always ready to help and had been supporting him financially for quite some time, it is meant as genuine appreciation when Weiss measures his own new piece of prose against his friend’s talent for the novella:
    “It is the first time I recognised”, so the letter goes, “what precision and subtlety and inner control this form requires and I admired you very much. May I send my piece along to you, not that there’s much likelihood it can be used in any way at the moment? It’s called
Jarmila
and, more or less ironically, it bears the subtitle: ‘A Love Story from Bohemia’.”
    In the writings of Ernst Weiss that survive there is no further specific reference to this tale. Unless of course it is the “unpublished novella” mentioned by the author in a letter dated 18th August, 1939, to his erstwhile fellow countryman from Prague, F C Weisskopf, at that time an émigré in the United States. If that is the case, and it would fit the bill on several counts, then Weiss had sent his tale with its Slavonic milieu to the exile magazine
The Word
published in Moscow. It was never printed there, however. At least the author received a fee for its omission which enabled him “to have ten days at the sea”, he told Weisskopf.
     
    More than sixty years after its creation, having proven true the writer’s supposition that “it couldn’t be used” during his period of exile,
Jarmila
is now published for the first time. 2 It certainly wasn’t chance that led Weiss to the surroundings depicted in the text, surroundings he also evoked in his shorter prose works at that time such as the fragment
Sered
which is set in Prague, and in the
Messe in Roudnice
(Mass in Roudnice). As well as relating particular incidents, the author was concerned with conveying atmospheric values of that “old world we loved” as he had referred to it to Stefan Zweig: a bulwark, as it were, against the “abyss”, the impending barbarism already obvious to shrewd onlookers.
    The qualities which Ernst Weiss so admired in the novellas of his friend Zweig—precision, subtlety and above all an internal unity—are also in evidence in his own story
Jarmila.
It can even be regarded as a model example of the novella genre: it has a central conflict, a tightly-executed plot, and a sharply-drawn climax and turning-point. According to particularly rigorous theory, an accomplished novella should have a “hawk”, a reference to a story in Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
a so-called “organizing focal point”, a clearly identifiable motif or a symbol of particular pertinence.
    In
Jarmila
the persistent central motif is, without doubt, the cheap nickel watch: the first person narrator purchases it in a Paris shop and its capriciousness