Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

Yellow Street by Veza Canetti

Austrian fiction

Original title  – Die gelbe Straße

Translator Ian Mitchell

Source – Personal copy

I have moved to Austria on my tour around the world for this year’s Women in Translation Month, and I am a writer whose husband was more famous than her. Veza Canetti is the wife of the Nobel winner Elias Canetti, a writer whose books I have loved. She had published the odd story here and there in her lifetime with pseudonyms as he stories were considered left-wing and satirical at the time. She had also translated Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys, a writer I want to read. I have that book by him on my TBR. What this collection of tales by her did was capture the street she grew up on in Vienna, a working-class Jewish street. In a way, this is a testament to a place that, shortly after she wrote the stories, was no longer there.In post-war Vienna, we head down the darker and less known side of the city in the thirties!

One day, as Runkel was being pushed across the street in her perambulator, she was overcome by such despair over her wretched life that she wanted nothing more than for a heavy lorry, a cattle truck, a thousand-kilo road-roller or a tram with three trailers to run over her horrible body and crush it. So she gave the maid Rosa, who for years had looked after her, nursed her, carried her from her pram into her flat, from the flat to the pram, quite meaningless signals, distracted, nervous signals, as to how she was to cross the street, she confused her with angry interjections to such an extent that there was indeed a collision, with a motor-cycle that came racing past.

Only, this motor-cycle mangled not Runkel but the serving-maid Rosa, for, at literally the last moment of her life, this loyal soul pushed the pram containing the cripple abruptly forward, shielded it with her own body and so brought about her own death. Runkel, however, lay on the ground, with both her arms broken, for the twelfth time in her life she had suffered broken limbs, usually it was her legs. which hung down short and lifeless like those of a jumping jack.

The opening story

The book is a collection of five stories that are all set around the people who live and work in Yellow Street, a jews street full of poverty, the working-class disabled and people down on their luck for various reasons. So we have the disabled Frau Runkel in a wheelchair with her arms broken, a broken woman, a vision of absolute despair, wishing for the end of her life, which has a tragic twist involving Rosa, a Maid. The Herr Vik, a tobacconist who has an almost autistic routine in his life, a feeling of OCD in his tale of a man drawn by routines. He is the last story; these two people bookend a series of stories of a poor Jewish neighbourhood in the 1930s in Vienna.

Herr Vik, his jaws working busily, hurries along Yellow Street, getting very agitated over the bales of leather being unloaded and the crowds of people that are in his way today; Herr Vik can no longer go out without his walking stick, so filthy has the street been made by dogs, and Herr Vik is busy shoving just such a yellow mess out of his path when up runs Hedi with a yellow book and a collecting-tin.

Hedi knows Herr Vik, because her mother does the cleaning for him. Herr Vik rushes past her, but Hedi is not going to be easily deterred. ‘Herr Vik! Herr VIk!’ she calls and holds out her little book to him. With a jolt, Herr VIk stops, takes the yellow book, reads it very carefully, gives it back to Hedi and rushes off again.

He hurries along, and the farther he runs, the greater becomes his annoyance, for more and more people get in his way; the whole street is mad today, they’re all mad today, but they won’t get anywhere with him, nobody’s going to deprive him of his freedom. And he forces his way through, laying about him, so that people move aside in alarm. Outside the Café Planet he comes to a halt, then bolts inside.

Herr Vik made an impression on me

This book captures the underbellyof Vienna we rarely see , I think these are the same characters many yer later Thomas Bernhard woukd write about in his book the cheap eater those just getting by or not getting by at all like the disable Frau Rinkel in the first story the cloud of wehat happens in the thirties althopugh never really mention seeps into the tales and the down oan out folks the flotsam and Jetsom of the city we never really seen in other books. She captures the streets she grew up on and also moved away from those she left behind, as shown in these five short stories. She has a compassionate look at these individuals, and one feels these were people she would have seen. I felt this especially with Herr Vik a man who then would seem odd with his quirks and routines, but now would be maybe seen as neurodivergent. I am pleased someone chose to publish her work as she would just have been known as his Elias’s wife and occasional translator, not a writer with a sharp eye for the human condition and capturing a world that is sadly gone now. Have you read her book or any of the husbands or wives of other writers?