This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Athanasius Pernath is a gem-cutter living in the Jewish quarter of Prague, in a warren of crooked alleys and courtyards where the houses seem to lean together and whisper. His memory has holes in it. He does not know why.
A stranger brings him a book to repair, the Ibbur, and after that nothing holds still. Pernath drifts through a city of pawnbrokers, murderers, and mystics: the ruthless Wassertrum, the beautiful and doomed Angelina, the archivist Hillel and his daughter Miriam. He is imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. He finds a room without a door that can only be entered from below.
And through it all runs the legend the quarter tells: that every thirty-three years a faceless figure walks the ghetto, and that everyone who meets it sees his own face.
First published in 1915, Gustav Meyrink's novel is the masterpiece of German-language occult fiction and one of the strangest, most hypnotic books of the twentieth century: part detective story, part kabbalistic vision, part portrait of a Prague that no longer exists. This unabridged audiobook edition presents the complete original text.
