With Gentle Fingers

The peripatetic Hebrew novelist, short-story writer, and poet David Fogel (Vogel) was born in Satanov (now Sataniv, Ukraine), lived in Vilna and L’viv in his youth, and settled in Vienna in 1916. He left for Paris in 1925 and then in 1929 sailed to Palestine but left a year later. He returned to Paris in 1932 after stays in Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin. Though he worked primarily as a poet, Fogel also wrote compelling and intricate prose, most notably the Hebrew psychological novel Married Life. Written between 1929 and 1939 and republished from manuscripts in 1986, it recounts the pathological love affair between a Jew and a well-born non-Jew in post-World War I Vienna. One of the few significant Hebrew writers to remain in Europe in the interwar era, as the Hebrew literary center shifted decisively to Palestine’s Yishuv (the Jewish settlement), Fogel also maintained an idiosyncratic voice that in its introspective, pessimistic, and Decadence-infused sensibility fell largely on deaf ears in the Hebrew literary sphere. It was only later, from the 1950s on, that Fogel’s poetry and, later, his prose drew renewed attention in Israeli literary life. The Nazis arrested and murdered Fogel in 1944.