Other's Paradise
Prague before World War I must have been the cradle of twentieth-century existential paranoia. There Kafka's--and Leppin's--imaginations burgeoned. "The Doors of Life," the longest story in this finally translated 1921 collection, concerns Veronika, living with six other women in an old house in Prague's Jewish quarter. She has borne and lost a child, and the father as well as her father were incarnations of the same man, as is the neighbor she eventually has an affair with, only to be thrown over and returned to the sequestered old house. "Doors of Life," indeed! The story's figurative doors give access from captivity to exploitation and recapture. Passion is a delusion, trapping in despair everyone who yields to it. Don't yield, and you are stifled by passionless bourgeois conformity, like the shoemaker of "Others' Paradise," who knows the world only as a succession of feet. Leppin (1878-1945), a civil servant revulsed by bourgeois life who reactively plunged into decadence, reads like the missing link between Baudelaire and the scalding satirical artist George Grosz.Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved