Two Novellas: In the Sanatorium & Facing the Sea [Hardcover] Vogel, David

David Vogel spent years in Soviet labor camps before his execution in 1944, and these two novellas carry the weight of that darkness. *In the Sanatorium* follows a tubercular patient drifting through the routines of institutional life, where the boundary between recovery and decline blurs into absurdity. *Facing the Sea* tracks a failed writer wandering through pre-war Vienna, rootless and quietly unraveling. Vogel's prose is sparse, clinical, almost cruel in its detachment — he watches his characters the way you'd watch insects under glass. Written in Hebrew by a German-speaking Austrian Jew, these works sat untranslated for decades, and it shows: they feel like transmissions from a lost world. For readers drawn to Kafka's alienation or Walser's melancholy, this is the kind of book you carry around for weeks after finishing.