Introduction

This passage is from ‘Death of an Indian’, the final story in Part one of The Weeping Wood, published in English in 1943 by the German Jewish émigré writer Vicki Baum. An author of international acclaim, particularly for her best–selling Menschen im Hotel – translated into English as Grand Hotel in 1930 and made into the Hollywood classic starring Greta Garbo just two years later – Baum had fled to the USA from Germany in 1932 where she continued her literary career in English. Although Baum, a prolific writer, once mockingly described herself as ‘a first–rate second–rate author’, in the introduction to The Weeping Wood she attempts to re–establish her intellectual credentials. Quoting Thomas Mann (who had once presided over a literary competition won by Baum), she reflects on her book's style and form and, in particular, its generic instability. The Weeping Wood, Baum explains, is a ‘panoramic novel’ with rubber as its protagonist, containing ‘as much fact as it contains play and make–believe; […] the happenings in this book take place on two different planes – the one factual, the other fictitious’ (p. vii).