The Zionist's Wife: A Novel of Julie Herzl

He got a mountain. She didn't get a grave.Vienna, 1889. Julie Naschauer - twenty-one, rich, and the sharpest unemployed analyst in the Habsburg empire - marries the most beautiful failure in Vienna: a playwright named Theodor Herzl.Six years later, her husband comes home from the Dreyfus trial changed, and Julie spends the rest of her short life competing with a nation for her own husband. Her dowry funds the dream. Her children are raised by committees. Her rage enters his diaries as madness - and her nursing enters his final letter as "beyond all praise." When he dies at forty-four, the movement invents a devoted widow to mourn beside the prophet: it publishes statements in her name and an obituary calling her marriage happy. And when she follows him three years later, her ashes are lost on a train.This is her side. Footnoted. Every real date, letter, and event is cited at the bottom of the page - and every invention is confessed, with the note that becomes the book's refrain: "The record is silent here. This is what the silence sounds like."For readers of The Paris Wife, The Only Woman in the Room, and The Women - a fiercely intelligent, devastating novel of the woman history filed under "wife of."