- Person
- Elias Canetti
- Lived
- 1905–1994
- Field
- Literature
- From
- Bulgarian-born British
The story
Elias Canetti hesitated for years before writing an autobiography, unsure whether such a book was worth writing. When he finally began, living in Zurich in the 1970s, the result became the work many readers love most. The first volume, Die gerettete Zunge, appeared in 1977 and in English in 1979 as The Tongue Set Free. It covers his childhood and youth up to 1921.
It opens in Ruse, a busy Danube port of many peoples: an 1883 census counted Bulgarians, Turks, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Romanians, Germans and others. His father's family, merchants who had come from Adrianople in the Ottoman Empire, took their name from Cañete, a village in Spain. His mother's family, the Ardittis, were among the founders of Ruse's Jewish community and traced their line to physicians at the court of Aragon in the fourteenth century. At home the family spoke Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish of the exiles of 1492. His parents, who had met in Vienna, used German as a private language the children could not understand.
The book follows the family to Manchester in 1911 and records the shock of his father's sudden death in 1912. It describes how his mother, determined that her son should share her love of German literature, drilled the language into him at speed, and the years of shared reading that followed in Vienna and in Zurich, where he went to school from 1916 to 1921.
The memoir preserves the vanished world of Balkan Sephardic Jewry with vivid detail, humour and affection, from family quarrels and festivals to the proud lineage his mother's relatives traced back to medieval Spain. Although protests in 1943 halted the deportation of Jews from Bulgaria's pre-war territory, the great majority of the country's Jews left for Israel after the war, and the Ladino-speaking life Canetti remembered largely disappeared from Ruse.
The Tongue Set Free was a public success and led to two further volumes. Today Ruse honours its most famous son: the International Elias Canetti Society is based in the city and holds an annual literary festival there.
Why it matters
The Tongue Set Free keeps alive the rich Jewish culture of the Balkans for readers who could otherwise never know it, and shows how a child of many languages became a writer.
About Elias Canetti
Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jew from Bulgaria who wrote in German, author of Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power and a celebrated memoir trilogy; Nobel Prize in Literature, 1981.
More about Elias Canetti
- Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé became a modernist classicElias Canetti's only novel, Die Blendung (1935), known in English as Auto-da-Fé, came to be recognised as a major work of European modernism.
- Elias Canetti sketched 50 characters in EarwitnessIn Earwitness: Fifty Characters (1974), Elias Canetti revived the ancient art of the character sketch with fifty brief, comic portraits of human types.
- Elias Canetti wrote Kafka's Other TrialIn Kafka's Other Trial (1969), Elias Canetti used Franz Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer to illuminate the inner life behind The Trial.
- Canetti's memoirs portrayed Vienna between the warsElias Canetti's later memoirs, The Torch in My Ear (1980) and The Play of the Eyes (1985), portray the intellectual life of Vienna and Frankfurt before the Second World War.
- Elias Canetti wrote The Voices of MarrakeshElias Canetti's The Voices of Marrakesh, a short book of impressions from a 1954 journey to Morocco, became a classic of travel writing.
- Elias Canetti spent 30 years writing Crowds and PowerElias Canetti's Crowds and Power (1960), the fruit of decades of thought, is a much-cited study of how crowds form and how rulers wield power.
- Elias Canetti's notebooks became The Human ProvinceElias Canetti kept notebooks of reflections for decades; a selection from 1942 to 1972 was published as The Human Province.
Sources
- Elias Canetti Wikipedia
- Elias Canetti Jewish Virtual Library
- History of the Jews in Bulgaria Wikipedia
- Ruse, Bulgaria Wikipedia
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