Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand — Franz Werfel

Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand is, in many ways, a prequel to what is known as Holocaust literature. It is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov. The evasions and self-deceptions of Werfel's characters, the various Austrian typesboth Jewish and non-Jewishand the pervading air of anti-Semitism perfectly capture interwar Austria in its poignant final days of toleration.