Tante Jolesch or The Decline of the West in Anecdotes. (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought. Translation Series)

This is Friedrich Torberg's tribute to the largely Jewish coffeehouse world that flourished in Vienna amidst the afterglow of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until its final collapse in 1938. Based on Torberg's personal memories of intellectuals and eccentrics of the time, including Egon Friedell, Fritz Grunbaum, Egon Erwin Kisch, Alfred Polgar and Franz Werfel, this work evokes the storytelling and humor prominent among Vienna's coffeehouse denizens.
These anecdotes allow one to journey into the lives of assimilated Jews before the Shoah, one that begins in the living room of Tante Jolesch, revolves around the coffeeehouse, and extends to summer resorts, sports matches, dinner parties, a psychiatric clinic in the care of Sigmund Freud, and the office of a US consular official in charge of granting visas to the United States. -- Torberg weaves together a literary monument to a group of people, a time, and a culture of which he saw himself as one of the last representatives.