About The Book

These six plays represent the best and most humorous of Brecht’s shorter works. The Jewish Wife is from the Fear and Misery in the Third Reich cycle of one-act plays, which, along with In Search of Justice and The Informer, chronicles the hardships of life in Nazi Germany. The Exception and the Rule, one of Brecht’s most popular short works, grimly depicts the consequences of the mutually dependent–yet inevitably inequitable–relationship between the privileged and the poor; it is included here with The Measures Taken and The Elephant Calf. Though all of these “tales of horror,” as Eric Bentley calls them, have tragic undertones, they are also infused with the farcical absurdities and comic irony so characteristic of Brecht’s work.