An Austro-Hungarian Cauldron

I started reading Michael André Bernstein’s Conspirators with a sense of anticipation. Promise is intrinsic to a complex tale composed by a highly literate writer of evident erudition and historical sense, a tale that is set in a familiar milieu and exciting times, and is offered in the context of a thriller, complete with love and intrigue (to borrow the title of Schiller’s classic). I thought that I was ready to immerse myself in the world of a provincial town in Eastern Europe on the eve of the Great War: the world of Austrian-Polish aristocrats and early Zionists; of Hans Rotenburg, the wealthy man’s son, representing the radical chic of his period; of the messianic rabbi, Moses Brugger; of the thinking man’s spy, Jacob Tausk, and the rest of the intricately textured, eccentric characters whose story seemed a rich and tasty brew simmering in the cauldron of the old Austro-Hungarian empire, my own ancestral domain.

But immersion was first delayed, then...