The Lady in Gold by Anne-Marie O'Connor Page A

Jews!” until someone punched him, knocking him out cold. According to the letter, he awoke at the Hotel Metropol with broken bones and missing teeth. “I won’t very soon forget the session of your city council,” “Twain” concluded brightly in the letter—which was edited by the newspaper’s
feuilleton
editor, the ZionistTheodor Herzl, Twain’s friend.
    Twain protested he had been the victim of a hoax. But the letter’s trademark humor suggested he had been in on the joke. Twain did in fact report on government, and he embellished his notes with satire. At one long-winded government meeting, Twain wrote in his notebook that a “tallow-chandler” had wandered in and accused Vienna’s leading anti-Semites, Lueger and Schönerer, of having Jewish great-grandmothers—plunging the chamber into an uproar. “Invented a new name tonight for [Schönerer’s] party: ‘The Louseboy’s Party,’ ” Twain scribbled to himself.
    Twain’s daughter Clara was studying piano with the young Russian Jewish composerOssip Gabrilowitsch, whose seductive manner and kisses would so beguile Adele Bauer’s friend Alma that she found herself falling in love with him, though she said a friend told her he was “ugly as a Russian Jew after a pogrom.” Ossip began an attentive courtship of Clara that made it clear Twain would gain a Jewish son-in-law.
    Twain and his family of “innocent wild Americans” rubbed shoulders with everyone from Johann Strauss to Emperor Franz Joseph. But anti-Semites focused their suspicions on his many social ties to Jews. Old Testament names like Samuel were customarily Jewish in Vienna, and anti-Semites began insisting “Mark Twain” was an attempt by Clemensto disguise his Jewish roots. The anti-Semitic press began to taunt him as “the Jew Mark Twain.” One cartoon showed Twain surrounded by greedy Jewish merchants caricatured as hook-nosed Shylocks.
    Twain was unfazed. His depression had lifted. He was writing a play with the Vienna playwrightSigmund Schlesinger, and the two men joked about a role forKatharina Schratt. Like the rest of Vienna, Twain was quoting
Fledermaus:
“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.”
    At his desk overlooking the Danube Canal, Twain finally began to write again. His new story, “The Mysterious Stranger,” was reminiscent of the Goethe Faust tale, beloved by the Viennese, of a man’s deal with the devil. “It was past midnight,” Twain wrote, when down on the Morzinplatz, he saw “a tall, handsome stranger, dressed in black.” With a “rush of wind, a crash of thunder, and a glare of lightning,” the Prince of Darkness appeared. He had “an intellectual face, and that subtle air of distinction which goes with ancient blood and high lineage.” Vienna “is my favorite city,” Satan told Twain. “I was its patron saint in the early times. I still have much influence here, and am greatly respected.”
    In less than two years, Twain had become intimately acquainted with Vienna’s most virulent demon.
    When Twain moved his closely watched spectacle from Austria in the fall of 1899, Adele had chosen her wedding date.
    Vienna, too, was at a threshold. In November 1899, Freud published
The Interpretation of Dreams,
his anatomy of the unconscious impulses driving individuals and society.It took six weeks for the first review to appear, a snide dismissal that epitomized the isolation suffered by emerging modernists who tried to express ideas that did not conform to hostile convention.
    On the brink of the twentieth century, Vienna was, in the words of one new writer,Karl Kraus, an “isolation cell in which one was allowed to scream.” But this isolation of genius was ending. The salons of the emerging “second society,” run by the small coterie of Jewish intellectual women, would open a