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It’s Up To Us! Collected Works of Jura Soyfer Jura Soyfer, born in Kharkov, Ukraine in 1912, came to Vienna at the age of eight with his Jewish parents who fled from the Bolshevik Revolution. He became a fervent Socialist in ‘Red Vienna of the Twenties’. Yet despite Tandler’s pioneering work in public health, Otto Gléckel’s school reforms, and Hugo Breitner’s financial policies that faciliated extensive housing provision, Austria was not a country of tolerance. Subsequent events were decisive for the young Soyfer. He wrote satirical verse for the Social Democratic Cabaret and the ‘Arbeiter-Zeitung’ and became a politically active and outspoken social critic, a loyal spokesman for the underdog and an implacable prophet of the impending disasters of nacism. Soyfer had been arrested and was freed by an political amnesty. On March 13, 1938 he was captured as he was trying to escape on skis across the Swiss border. He was incarcerated in Dachau where he wrote his famous ‘Dachau-Song’ set to music by his fellow prisoner Herbert Zipper. He was transferred to Buchenwald and died of typhoid on February 16, 1939. The bitter irony was that his release had been approved only a few days before. Stella Rotenberg, in her own reminiscences “Ungewissen Ursprungs’, recalls meeting Jura Soyfer when she was fifteen years old while on a summer holiday in a Schüler-Studentenkolonie in the Steiermark, and hearing him say: ‘... Auf deutsch heiße ich Georg Schreiber; Jura ist Georg und Soyfer ist hebräisch für Schreiber.’ She confirms his tragic fate and how she was told later that the SA officer at the customs control point arrested him because they found on him some provisions wrapped in a leaflet of the ‘Revolutionary Socialists’. How did all his writings survive? Only his poems and short prose were published during his short lifetime. Otto Tausig, editor of the first Soyfer edition after the war, describes in his preface how fragments of his writings, hidden between shirts or the pages of the books were miraculously found in the suitcases of persons haphazardly driven into exile. Soyfer’s girlfriend, Helli Ultmann, had preserved the plays, parts of the novel, reviews and letters in her New York exile. Two chapters of the novel had been published by John Lehmann in English translation. But post-war Austria was not an environment conductive to a lasting revival of Soyfers work, and it was not until the seventies that interest in his work from the younger generation has increased. The Jura Soyfer Theatre was formed in 1980 and a Soyfer Society in 1988, and now his plays widely translated and enjoy unbroken stage production. This brief background only proves how long overdue this collection of Soyfer’s work is. Jt’s Up To Us! was published in 1996 by Ariadne Press, USA, edited and translated by Horst Jarka, professor of German at the University of Montana. It contains all of Soyfer’s major works together with selections from his political and short prose. It has an excellent Preface by Harry Zohn, Professor at Brandeis University, Massachusetts, whose praise for Horst Jarka I wholeheartedly endorse. He refers to him as a ...’tireless champion ... whose skilful editing and accurate, idiomatic and frequently ingenious translations have now produced an „English Soyfer“ of undeniable power and poignance.’ Professor Guck (Robert Klein-Lörk) warnt die Welt vor dem „Weltuntergang“ (in der Uraufführung von Jura Soyfers Stück). Bild entnommen aus: Bil Spira: Die Legende vom Zeichner. Wien 1997. Jarka has dedicated himself to gathering together the works of Soyfer and has already edited and subsequently revised ‘Das Gesamtwerk’; ‘Sturmzeit. Briefe 1931 - 1939"; and ‘Jura Soyfer. Leben-Werk-Zeit’. New texts appear in this latest collection which he presents in English translation for the first time. Jarka has obviously taken immense care and ingenuity in translating these texts. Soyfer’s castigating style, verbal puns and hilarious situations must have posed enormous problems to the translator. The satire is multi-faceted, brimming over with energy, surreal imagery and acid comment and the way Jarka directs the language very much to an American, rather than an English, reader is done with great effect. Soyfer’s dynamic style, sharp wit and uncompromisingly truthful and humane comment are admirably captured in the gritty, pacy momentum of the American language. Reminiscent of 1930s New York, or present day Brooklyn, it retains the charm and credible flavour of Soyfer’s early influences such us Karl Kraus, Die Fackel magazine, and Johann Nestroy, coupled with the biting clarity of Brecht and the poetic lightness and pathos of Charlie Chaplin, thereby creating a translation that does full justice to themes which still have painful and urgent relevance today. Horst Jarka also supplies the reader with 35 black and white illustrations including many photos of the original stage productions, and an admirable Afterword covering valuable biographical and historical background as well as literary criticism on the texts themselves. There is an extensive glossary and linguistic references and historical personages and terms most helpful to an English reader, and a bibliography of works pubes in German and English. No one can read this book without being profoundly affected. It is a literary bombshell to English speaking readers as yet unaquainted with Soyfer’s writing, and it is to Horst Jarka’s great credit that he has achieved such a comprehensive and compelling translation. The title ‘It’s Up To Us!’ is taken from one of the plays. ‘Trip to Paradise’, in which despair ends in a renewal of faith in human freedom and in man’s ability to change things. Soyfer is like Professor Peep in another play ‘The End of the World’ — a Cassandra, a visionary, who is either ignored or kicked around by the powers that be, as he tries to warn those around him of the impending doom. His plays are powerful parables which deal with themes of alienation, social injustices, betrayal of the little man by State and the Money Market, and indifference and apathy in the face of courage and conviction. His prose pieces demonstrate the brilliance and versatility of his talent, but it is his unfinished novel, ‘Thus Died A Party’, that stands out as his main literary work, and which is probably one of the most remarkable prose works written in Austria during the 1930s. The diagnosis of political processes and the characterisation of individuals is outstanding in its honesty and clarity in showing the decline of the Socialist Democratic Party in 1934. And yet it transcends the merely historic dimension as it describes the disintegration of a mass party due to inner weakness — a phenomenon relevant today and witnessed in more than one political camp. It is heartening to know that Jura Soyfer’s work has such a growing public interest which recognises that his themes have a validity and relevance today. Political literature badly needs a Soyfer now, but alas no party is morally or numerically strong enough to support such a writer or heed his prophecies. In the words of Harry Zohn „,... this dynamic advocate for a dispossessed generation has emerged in his full stature as a major political and social satirist whose writings not only illuminate a dark chapter in European history but can inspire all of us to combat the multivarious repressive and dehumanising forces of our age.“ Jeanette Koch (London) It’s Up To Us! Collected Works of Jura Soyfer. Selected and translated by Horst Jarka. Riverside (California): Ariadne Press 1996. 593 pp, 35 Illustrations. 51
