y 307 PROOFTEXTS 33 (2013): 307–332. Copyright © 2013 by Prooftexts Ltd.. David Vogel’s Lost Hebrew Novel, Viennese Romance LILACH NETHANEL his article provides background about the manuscript of a Hebrew novel by David Vogel that was found in Gnazim archive in Tel-Aviv in 2010. his manuscript was later edited by Youval Shimoni and me, and published under the title Roman Vinay ( Viennese Romance) in 2012. he irst part of this essay describes the composition of the manuscript as it was found and deciphered, before the work was edited. Its second and principal part refers to two speciic passages in the manuscript that shed new light on Vogel’s perspectives toward the national component of Hebrew literature of his time. he study of this manuscript ofers new data for evaluating Vogel’s work, and enables us to reexamine some of the assumptions about his place in the traditions of modernist Hebrew writings. R udolf Gurdweill, the main character in David Vogel’s irst publ ished novel, Married Life (1929–30), is a Jewish writer living in Vienna. 1 Vogel himself experienced the conditions of a Jewish immigrant living and writing in a multicultural European capital, as he lived in Vienna for several years preceding the publication of Married Life. Chapter four of the novel characterizes Gurdwei- ll’s circumstances as a writer: It occurred to him to empty the ink from one ink-pot to another: a completely superluous labor. His hands were stained with ink and he went to scrub them clean. hen he cut the sheets of paper into short pages and arranged them in exaggeratedly neat piles. He took care not to let any page project and made sure that the edges were as even as the pages in a bound book. All this took up no more than twenty minutes. He remembered that his old manuscripts needed tidying up too. He had