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By Night Under the Stone Bridge, the last novel from Leo Perutz to appear in his lifetime, reveals this polymath Austrian at the height of his extraordinary powers as a fabulist who could clothe the bare bones of history in the often-fantastic robes of magical realism.

The novel first appeared as Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke: ein Roman aus den alten Prague in 1952, predating by seven years the posthumously published Leonardo's Judas. It was republished by the Viennese house of Zsolnay in 1988, then in Eric Mosbacher's translation under the imprint of Collins Harvill (London, 1989) and Arcade Publishing (New York, 1990).

With the republication in the early 1990s of The Marquis of Bolibar (1920), The Master of the Day of Judgment (1921), Little Apple (1928) and St. Peter's Snow (1933), as well as Leonardo's Judas, the last decade of the 20th century saw something of a Leo Perutz revival. It was as though he had risen from the grave, like one of his demon-driven characters. He would have been amused, I think, at this literary resurrection.

By Night Under the Stone Bridge, like Tales from the One Thousand and One Nights – and many fables since – is a frame narrative. Made up of 14 linked stories told from different points of view, the novel is set in Prague at the end of the 16th century.

One night in 1598, the crazy Emperor Rudolf II wakes with a shriek in his bedchamber in the Hradschin Castle. Simultaneously, in the Jewish ghetto, “the beautiful Esther, the wife of Mordechai Meisl,” dies in her Dreibrunnenplatz house just as the “Great Rabbi” of Prague plucks a rosemary plant, intertwined with a blood-red rose bush, from under the stone bridge over the Moldau River. The rosemary represents the Jewess Esther, the rose the Emperor Rudolf. The rabbi drops the white-flowered rosemary into the river, into the waters of futurity and infinity and of all time, sweeping it away and so lifting the plague that has afflicted the inhabitants of the ghetto.

“ To call Perutz a magical realist doesn't really do him justice”

By Night Under the Stone Bridge is a novel of great tenderness and savagery and beauty. Esther and Rudolf haunt one another's dreams (the emperor has glimpsed her while riding through the ghetto). Their affair is a kind of sexual metempsychosis, a transmigration of souls. When the emperor sends for the rabbi to tell him of this girl he must possess, the rabbi tells him, “That cannot be. ... She will not transgress against God's law. She is a Jewess, and will not become the beloved of any other man.”

The emperor threatens the rabbi: “If you disobey my command, and I get no loving response from her who is ever in my mind, I shall expel all the Jews from my kingdoms and territories as a disloyal people, that is my decision and will, so help me God.”

So the rabbi plants the “rose bush and a rosemary under the stone bridge … where they were hidden from men's eyes, and over both he spoke words of magic. And a red rose opened on the rose bush, and the rosemary flower nestled up to it. And every night the emperor's heart entered into the red rose and the Jewess's heart entered the rosemary flower.”

Everyone in the novel, the emperor and his subjects, must pay for this act of magical transgression. As well as the plague, war is visited on the Holy Roman Empire. If at the level of historical realism By Night Under the Stone Bridge chronicles the events leading up to the Austrian defeat of Bohemia at the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, it is impossible not to read the narrative as an allegorical representation of the Holocaust and of Perutz's own life.

Leo Perutz was born in Prague on Nov. 2, 1882, the eldest son of a textile buyer who took his family to Vienna in 1901. There, Leo would become a gifted mathematician (the Perutz equation is named after him), working as a statistician for an insurance company. (The comparison with Franz Kafka, employed as a claims adjustor for a Prague insurance company, is uncanny.) In Vienna, Perutz was a member of the Free Light Literary Association and contributed to pulp magazines. He published his first novel, The Third Bullet (Der dritte Kugel), in 1915, after being shot in the lung while serving in the Austro-Hungarian army on the eastern front. In 1938, after the Anschluss, Perutz fled to Haifa, eventually settling in Tel Aviv. In the postwar years, he returned repeatedly to Austria, dying there in the spa town of Bad Ischl in 1957.

To call Perutz a magical realist doesn't really do him justice. Angels and demons, the faithful and the faithless, the loveless and the lovelorn throng his novels, which at one moment have a carnival air and at another are heavy with doom. (The Wandering Jew plays a key role in The Marquis of Bolibar, set among Spanish guerrillas under British orders in the Peninsular War.)

If Perutz's historical novels blend fantasy with an otherwise immiscible reality, his characters, as Austrian science-fiction anthologist Franz Rottensteiner has noted, “are frequently the victims of an implacable destiny, almost in the style of a Greek tragedy.” The late Karl Edward Wagner, an American fantasy/horror editor and writer, thought The Master of the Day of Judgment, a psychodrama set in pre-First World War Vienna, one of the best non-supernatural horror stories ever written. Jorge Luis Borges made Perutz a household name in Argentina, and writers as varied as Ian Fleming, Graham Greene and Italo Calvino have praised his work. However, I think it fair to say he is not nearly as well known in the English world as Kafka, or Isaac Bashevis Singer, another writer with whom he has been compared.

What makes him special is the delicacy of feeling he wove into the warp of the inexplicable, a lyricism often missing in other genre writers. In By Night Under the Stone Bridge, the Great Rabbi is visited by the angel Asael, the Book of Enoch's fallen angel who introduced forbidden secrets to humanity. “At the beginning of time,” the rabbi asks the angel, “did not the children of God go together in love with the children of men? Did they not wait for them at the springs and wells and kiss them in the shadow of the oaks and olive trees? And was not Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, lovely, have you ever seen her like?” The angel's thoughts, the narrative observes, “flew back through the ages to the very beginning of time.”

“‘Yes, Naamah, the sister of Tubal-cain, who forged clasps and gold chains, was lovely,' he said softly. ‘She was lovely and she was delightful. She was as lovely as a garden in spring when day is breaking. Yes, the daughter of Lamech and Zillah was lovely. ...'

“And as he remembered the beloved of his distant youth, two teardrops ran down the angel's cheeks. They were human tears.”

A chapter of Chris Scott's novel Antichthon is set in the Hradschin Castle with Emperor Rudolf II, alchemist and con man Edward Kelley and his “familiar,” the Archangel Michael.