The MENORA - "The Buried Candelabrum" was first published in Vienna in 1937, a time when the persecution of Jews by the Nazis was escalating. The book allows us to appreciate in the most accurate way the characteristics of the rich and complex talent of its author, as we find in it simultaneously the narrator, the historian, and the philosopher. It is a wonderful depiction of the eternal wandering of the Jewish people.
Its plot is inspired by the Jewish legend of the seven-branched candelabrum. It narrates the adventure of the menorah in the Temple of Solomon, its abduction by Titus, its theft in Rome by the Vandals, and its recovery by the soldiers of Justinian with the general Belisarius.
A boy, a young Jew, an eyewitness to the plunder of Rome in 455 and the theft of the candelabrum, lived until old age and went to Byzantium to retrieve the sacred menorah from Emperor Justinian.
Based on its history, Zweig creates a powerful drama, with beautiful references to the decadent Rome, in which the Jewish legend becomes fictional without losing its symbolic power: the eternal pain and eternal hope of the Jewish people.

The edition is accompanied by an epilogue by P.K. Tsoukas with quotes from Zweig's letters over three decades, regarding Judaism, Jewish tradition, and Zionism, with which the author disagreed on many points.