Everything we forget about our own lives was really condemned to oblivion by an inner instinct long ago. - Stefan Zweig

It is easy to lose oneself in this text. The Impossible Exile is well written and avoids annotation all the while projecting perosnal experiences into isolated threads. The author explores the three principal locations of Zweig's post-Anschluss exile: England, the US and Brazil. Prochnik details the broader context of the wartime European refugee, the obstacles and the reception. The letters and memoirs of Brecht, Bruno Walter, Hermann Broch and others are mined. That is a delightful touch on such a sorrowful subject. Interspersed are photographs of Zweig, his second wife Lotte and the locales of their means of escape.

There is a measure of literary criticism of Zweig's work, especially his autobiography. Such is fine but it is the study of the dispossessed's plight which make this such an engrossing endeavor.
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This is one of the finest biographies I have read. The author did a splendid job of bringing Zweig and the times to life by incorporating some of his own Jewish family's history of exile during the same period in history. ( )

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher as part of the Goodreads First Read program.
In the early 20th century, Vienna, with its music, art, philosophy, literature, and architecture, was a center of modernist culture. An amazing number of thinkers gathered at Vienna’s famous coffeehouses.

Stephen Zweig was a part of this scene as a best-selling author of fiction and biography and mentor to younger authors. All this was turned upside down for the Viennese intellectuals and businessmen- especially Jews like Zweig- with the rise of Hitler. Zweig went into exile, first to England and the south of France, then to New York, and finally to Brazil in a tragic downhill spiral of a man who’s homeland was forever lost to him.

In The Impossible Exile, George Prochnik eloquently traces Zweig struggles with living away from Vienna and the intellectual scene that no longer existed. Prochnik draws on his own family’s experience in exile from Austria to give a broad picture of what Zweig left behind. While this book concentrates on Zweig’s life in exile, there is enough background material about his family and early life to make the reader, even one unfamiliar with Zweig, understand just how lost he was in exile and what lead to the final tragedy in Brazil.

An excellent read that brings to attention to this sometimes forgotten author and to the more general problem of people living in exile.

My only problem with this book was that it has no index. This was an advanced review copy; perhaps the finished edition has one. Non-fiction is enhanced by indexing, particularly a book like this that jumps around a bit in its chronology. I want to go back and see what it said about Freud or Marx, or the part about the house Zweig had in Salzburg without having to flip through the entire book. I withdrew a half a star for lack of index, otherwise I'd give it five. ( )