Franzos, KARL EMIL

Franzos, KARL EMIL, author, was born in 1848 in Russian Podolia, the son of a Jewish doctor, and passed his earliest years in the Polish-Jewish village of Czortekow in Galicia (the Barnow of his novels). Left an orphan at an early age, he was educated at the German gymnasium at Czernowitz, and studied jurisprudence at Vienna and Graz, but afterwards settled as a journalist in Vienna. Among his principal works is Aus Halbasien: Kulturbilder aus Galizien, der Bukowina, Südrussland und Rumänien (1876), in which the varied surroundings of his boyhood are gathered into one masterly picture, and which has been translated into most European languages; it is continued in Vom Don zur Donau (1878); and Das Ghetto des Ostens (1883). His novels include Junge Liebe, two tales (1878; 4th ed. 1884); Die Juden von Barnow (3d ed. enlarged, 1880; Eng. trans., The Jews of Barnow, 1882); Moschkow von Parma (1880); Ein Kampf ums Recht (1881; Eng. trans., For the Right, 1887); Der Präsident (1884); Die Reise nach dem Schicksal (1885); Tragische Novellen (1886); Judith Trachtenberg (1890; 4th ed. 1893); Der Gott des alten Doktors (1892); and Der Wahrheits-sucher (1894). Franzos' tales present pictures strong, truthful, and pathetic of life among the Polish and Galician Jews.