For The Right
Karl Emil Franzos, Julie Sutter, George Macdonald
Hardcover
(Harper & Brothers, Jan. 1, 1888)
Originally written in German, the setting of the novel is in the Carpathian Mountains...From the preface by George MacDonald: "It was indeed a bold undertaking when our author chose for his hero a man who could not read or write, who had no special inclination, no personal aptitude for social or public affairs, and would present him attempting the noblest impossibility, from a divine sense of wrong done to others than himself, and duty owed by him to all men and to God - a duty become his because he alone was left to do it. I have seldom, if ever, read a work of fiction that moved me with so much admiration."...Wikipedia: Karl Emil FRANZOS (1848-1904) was a popular German author of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. His works, both reportage and fiction, concentrate on the multi-ethnic corner of eastern Europe, now largely in Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires met. This area became so closely associated with his name that one critic called it âFranzos countryâ. A number of his books were translated into English. The Main Focus of his writing is the relationships between the different nationalities of the regionâPoles, Ukrainians, Russians, Germans and Jewsâand his sympathies clearly lie with the oppressed groups, in particular the Ukrainian peasants and shtetl Jews. He insisted that he was free from racial prejudice and that his attacks on particular nationalities were because they oppressed others. Franzos showed the attitudes of the 19th-century assimilated Jew in their best light. His conviction that Germanisation was the way forward was based on the idealistic strain in German culture and will have looked very different in his day to our post-Holocaust perspective. He believed, that literature should have an ethical purpose, but he managed to express that purpose through a range of vivid characters who still have the power to move the modern reader.