VIII INTRODUCTION The Oppermanns, though he had written it seven years earlier, captured the trauma and emotions of their hazardous escapes. It was an instance of art imitating life and life, in turn, imitating art, ••• In the novel, the Oppermann family, successful middle- elass German [ews who own a ehain of furniture stores, are robbed of their business, their hornes, and their money, as the Nazi laws take hold. Some escape to Switzerland, among them Lion's autobiographical literary hero, Gustav Opper- mann, who finds temporary haven in Lake Lugano. Back in Germany, some commit suicide, others are trapped. "Their homeland, their Gerrnany," Feuehtwanger writes, "had proved false to thern. For centuries they had feit seeure in that homeland and now everything was suddenly crurn- bling to bits ... neighbor spied on neighbor, son on father, friend on friend." Like: many German [ews, several of the characters in the book live in denial, refusing to see the danger that is soon to engulf them; others see the violence, the lies of the Nazis, and the misery of the [ews as they are tortured in concen- tration carnps-their faces and skulls battered, their limbs broken, their bodies starved, their lips thirsting for a drop of water. He did not eonsider The Opperrnanns his best work, though the historical novel won rave reviews when it was published around the world in 1933 and 1934, and again, rnany years later when it appeared in America as a feature film on public television. "It is his most prophetie book," Herman Graf, who first republished it in English in 1983, told me. "He wrote it in 1933 with Hitler just in power, yet it reads as if he had written

INTRODUCTION IX it in 1938, with all the details ofthe Nazi's later and most hor- rendous atrocities." Every book one writes carries within it a fragment of auto- biography. The Oppermanns mirrors a piece of Feuchtwanger's life in Germany. Born in Munich in 1884 to an Orthodox [ew- ish family, he rebelled against the orthodoxy of his handsome but cold and distant father and morose mother who rarely smiled. Timid, mocked by eight siblings for his diminutive stature, he soon surpassed thern a11 by his writing. Still in his teens, he began publishing plays and critical essays and at twenty-four, received a Ph.D . from the Univer- sity of Munich. He married Marta in 1912 and moved to the Riviera to write novels. Marta gave birth to a fragile little girl who died before she was one. Feuchtwanger was so depressed that he vowed they would never have another child. In 1925 he wrote [ea: Süss (retitled Power when it was pub- lished in the United Stares a year later) which made hirn an instant success in Europe and America. It was produced in England as a motion picture, and in 1939 was distorted by the Nazis into a violently anti-Semitic movie. Words, books, history-they were his life. Wherever he set- tled, he created a library, though he twice lost connection with his precious volumes. His Berlin library was destroyed when Nazi thugs broke into his apartment, stole his unfinished manuscript about the Roman historian, [osephus, and burned his books in a funereal pyre. He was forced to abandon his second library in Vichy France when he escaped with only the clothes on his back. In America, he created a third library with over 30,000 volumes in various languages. They are now at the University of Southern California and supported by the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Fund.