Asylum

A recently discovered account of an Austrian Jewish writer’s flight,persecutionand clandestine life in wartime France. As arts editor for one of Vienna’s principal newspapersMoriz Scheyer knew many of the city’s foremost artistsand was an important literary journalist. The occupation of the Nazis forced him from both job and home. In 1943while hiding in FranceScheyer began drafting what was to become this book. Tracing events from the Anschluss in Viennathrough life in Paris and unoccupied Franceincluding a period in a French concentration campcontact with the Resistanceand clandestine life in a convent caring for mentally disabled womenhe gives an extraordinarily vivid account of the events and experience of persecution. After Scheyer’s death in 1949his stepsondisliking the book’s anti-German rhetoricdestroyed the manuscript. Or thought he did. Recentlya carbon copy was found in the family’s attic by P.N. SingerScheyer’s step-grandsonwho has translated and provided an epilogue.