On Monday, the distinguished literary critic Marjorie Perloff died at the age of ninety-two. Born Gabriele Mintz to Jewish parents in Vienna, she and her family fled to Switzerland and then the U.S. after the Nazi takeover. Her 2016 book Edge of Irony deals with six great Austrian modernist writers—five of whom were born Jews. In this 2019 interview, Jeremy Sigler spoke to Perloff about this book and her own childhood:
JS: Moments of your book are comedic, but all in all, it’s very upsetting.
MP: Why?
JS: Because it deals with anti-Semitism. And the struggles of so many writers, some who were themselves Jewish and yet blatantly anti-Semitic. It’s all very troubling. One day (before World War I) they were living in a fairly liberal, and very Jewish society, and then came this unprecedented backlash into Nazism.
MP: Well, the Jews like Karl Kraus certainly flourished in the pre-World War I period. But even in the early 20s, as Joseph Roth shows in many of his short stories, there were already swastikas everywhere and the brochures of summer resorts had already made it clear that Jews were not to be admitted. . . .
I keep hearing today about this or that microaggression. And I want to respond, “You know what’s worse than a microaggression? A macroaggression.”
Read more on Tablet: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/marjorie-perloff