ABSTRACT
It is incredible that Yellow Street took so long to be published. Written by Veza Canetti (1897-1963), the wife of the Nobel prizewinner Elias Canetti (1905-1994), the stories enjoyed great success when they first appeared in an important Austrian avant-garde newspaper of the 1920s and 1930s, the Arbeiter-Zeitung. These stunning evocations of Viennese life were rediscovered and collected into one volume only in 1989, the year of the first German edition of Die gelbe Straße. In subsequent years, most of Veza Canetti’s work has fortunately been similarly recovered and republished: her play Der Oger (1991); her short-prose collection, Geduld bringt Rosen (1992); her novel about the Nazi invasion of Austria, Die Schildkröten (1999); and her collection of stories and plays, Der Fund (2001). Die Schildkröten, which Veza wrote in 1939 just after the Jewish couple had fled to London, has been translated as The Tortoises.
