There is a strange triality in Prague’s history — Czechs, Germans, Jews; Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism; rulers, nobles, peasants; Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque. Joseph Wechsberg penetrates Prague’s world to recapture an extraordinary cultural, spiritual, political, artistic and embattled past. Prague was the home of Kafka, Rilke, Neruda and Werfel, of “heretic” Jan Hus, of “Good King (and later Saint) Wenceslas”; the inspiration of Mozart; the mecca of alchemists, astronomers and adven...

“Opera is enjoyed only by those who know something about it. This is the idea behind this book... It was written for people who love opera and want to know a little more about its history and evolution, its lore and lure, and the people who create and re-create it.” — Joseph Wechsberg, Foreword to The OperaJoseph Wechsberg — musician and lifelong opera addict, claqueur, listener and critic — takes the reader on a journey through centuries of operatic histo...

There were, and still are, great restaurants all over Europe, but the greater part of Blue Trout and Black Truffles is devoted to the eatingplaces and vineyards of France. It is a vicarious experience to read about the culinary wonders of the notable establishments of another era that have become the last epicurean haven in this materialistic, mechanized world of fastfood chains and frozenfood dinners. Mr. Wechsberg reaches back to the twilight days of the Habsburg monarchy, when those spl...

The Vienna I Knew: Memories of a European Childhood by Joseph Wechsberg (80,000 words, 18 illustrations)Wechsberg’s memoir of pre-World War II mittel-Europa recounts with charm and irony life in the dying Habsburg Empire, family stories of wealth gained and lost, the subtleties of coffeehouse culture and the dynamics of Viennese society where one “is at the same time an actor, his own audience, and his own critic.”“[His] early childhood reads like an idyll […] so that while...

“This is a collection of casual articles about the seemingly forbidding subject of merchant banking and about some of the world’s most outstanding and venerable merchant bankers — Hambros, Barings, Warburg, in London; Mattioli in Milan; Abs in Frankfurt; Lehman Brothers in New York; and the Rothschilds in Paris and London... Joseph Wechsberg gives the history of each of these institutions, most of which remain family controlled, and he presents profiles of the men who are or have been thei...

Homecoming by Joseph Wechsberg (24,000 words, 24 illustrations)Published by Knopf in 1946 as an expanded version of a two-part New Yorker article.Joseph Wechsberg and his wife left Czechoslovakia for America in 1938. Sent with the US Army to liberate Europe from the Nazis, Wechsberg returns to Ostrava, the town where he grew up. Searching for his wife's parents, he discovers the devastation of World War II, hears first-hand accounts of its atrocities, witne...

“Simon Wiesenthal since the end of World War II has had one major aim in life — to track down as many as possible of the SS men who took part in the administration of the concentration and extermination camps run by the Third Reich... The writing of this book was actually done by the well-known journalist Joseph Wechsberg to whom Wiesenthal told his stories and who contributes a series of profiles of the narrator. It is a dramatic and knowledgeable account... [Wiesenthal’s is] a remarkable...