To this day, Zweig´s work is abundantly available in new editions across much of Europe. In France, his novellas are regularly reissued and almost invariably sprint up the best-seller lists all over again. Zweig´s books fill shop windows and airport carousels. He´s popular in Italy and Spain, and has his admirers in Germany and Austria. But in the English-speaking world, and the United States in particular, until just a few years ago Stefan Zweig had all but vanished. During the years I was growing up and studying literature, I never encountered a single work by Zweig. When I asked friends about him, I found almost no one who´d ever heard his name. As I starter to grasp just how widely he´d been read even in North America up through the early 1940s, the totality of his disappearance perplexed and intrigued me. What made Stefan Zweig fall quite so far out of sight?

What makes the good exile? Is there a calculable equation of inner fortitude, openness of mind, and external support networks that determines a refugee´s odds of survival? What did Thomas Mann, Carl Zuckmayer, and Zweig´s friend the conductor Bruno Walter flourish in the United States, while Zweig, Bertolt Brecht, and the dramatist Ernst Toller recoiled from almost every aspect of their New World experience?

"People think it has such a terrible effect on children when parents fight. Believe me, this is nothing compared to how stunting it is when they get along too well. Your grandparents loved each other so much when he was a child that Martin was abandoned."