Yellow Street, the a Novel in Five Scenes     by Veza Canetti, Translated by I Mitchell Original title: Die gelbe Straße Original language: German Published by New Directions Publishing Corporation Pub. Date: 1991 Format: Hardcover, 139 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.71 x 8.28 x 5.62 ISBN: 0811211592 List Price: $18.95 Buy online from Amazon.com for $18.95 Published by Halban Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Hardcover, 139 pages Not available for ordering

The Yellow Street contains five interconnected stories, all set in the same street, with the same characters reappearing, sometimes at the centre of the tale, sometimes on the periphery. These pieces first appeared in the socialist Arbeiter-Zeitung in Vienna in the 1930s, and are filled with the atmosphere of that prewar period.

The inhabitants of the street range from the middle-class — a rentier, a businessman, a ‘fine lady’ — through various shop-owners, to workers and servants. They are very much ordinary people, but their foibles and idiosyncrasies are exaggerated, or perhaps just more clearly revealed than we usually allow. Canetti has an ironic eye for human weaknesses, especially self-deception, and that gives The Yellow Street an underlying tone of humour, in spite of the misery and exploitation it often records.

Each section focuses on women as victims: the wife who is bullied and tricked out of her inheritance by her husband, maidservants desperate for work sent by the employment agency to dubious establishments where they are expected to prostitute themselves in various ways, including sexually. But Canetti is no blinkered socialist feminist, mechanically measuring society by an ideological yardstick. Victims and oppressors are both regarded with the same ironic eye. Women are, largely, the exploiters as well as the exploited (the men, it must be admitted, are a rather pathetic bunch), and most of the figures are realistically two-sided: full of goodwill when it is only a matter of expressing sympathy, but weak and backsliding when it comes to action.

In The Monster, the title figure is herself disadvantaged, a cripple known as Runkel, owner of two shops in the street, who has to rely on others to get about. In a fit of despair, she tries to commit suicide by engineering a road accident. It is, however, her maid who is killed, trying to protect her mistress. Runkel recovers to continue her life of domineering those dependent on her. Her newspaper and tobacconist’s shop is run by a young girl, Lina, who is everything Runkel is not: blonde, pretty, lively, helpful. She has increased trade considerably, not least because of the men she attracts, but not only because of that; the women also like her, she seems to be a kind of blond, blue-eyed doll to them. However, despite the increased profits she is making, Runkel uses the complaints of two men as an excuse to dismiss Lina. The whole street is up in arms and determined to do something about it. But when they each, individually, confront Runkel to demand she withdraw Lina’s notice, their indignation crumbles, and they find themselves automatically agreeing with the employer’s trenchantly expressed, but very vague ‘reasons’ for the dismissal. Lina herself is left as a sad, but rather limp victim; abandoned by others, she does nothing to fight for herself.

One victim who does do something for herself is Emma, the out-of-work maid who throws herself into the river so she can get looked after in the home for girls who have tried to commit suicide. It is typical of the strength of Canettis’s narration, that the effect of this is neither mawkishly sentimental, nor depressingly doleful, but comic, as Emma has to wait and wait for the right moment, when the policeman on traffic duty is likely to see her, before she can jump. Proof, if proof be needed, that socially committed writing can also amuse and entertain the reader.

‘She could not lie still, her bruises burned into her like fire. Then she noticed him edging towards her, She wanted to leap out of bed, but he seized her battered arms. She struggled with him, she thrashed around and bit him.

And that was how she conceived her second child.

Next morning, as she rose, the dark blood coursed through her face. She left the house before her husband. In the lawyer’s office she was so insistent that he had to be called from a case.

He examined the bruises, which reached as far as her neck, and the police report, in which everything was laid out.

«Yes, these are grounds for divorce with the husband as sole guilty party.» He took it all in with satisfaction. «So far everything seems in order. Your dowry is safe, you are bound to get it back. The child will of course be given into the custody of the mother, just one further question I must ask, dear lady, you must forgive me... After the quarrel, did intimacy take place?»

The young woman flushed deeply.

«Then I regret very much, dear lady, I cannot, in that case, implement the divorce.»’ p45-6