Trifles Make Perfection

by Joseph Wechsberg

"A Moravian by birth, a musician by avocation, a writer by choice, and a bon vivant almost by instinct, Joseph Wechsberg was among a generation of writers that included M. F. K. Fisher, A. J. Liebling, Waverly Root, and Ludwig Bemelmans. Many of them found a home for their work at The New Yorker and were given carte blanche to tackle any subject they found appealing."--BOOK JACKET. "Wechsberg was a connoisseur in the old Continental sense of the word, a man who valued perfection for its own sake, seeing its quest as worthy and its attainment as eminently possible. Born in 1907 into a wealthy, assimilated Jewish family, he saw his comfortable life threatened by World War I and then extinguished by Hitler's annexation of his native Czechoslovakia. He came to America with only a basic command of English but an impressive understanding of what was happening in Europe. His most powerful essays, describing the tragic political fragmentation of Europe at the end of World War II, are never str