IN 1941, SHORTLY AFTER HIS ESCAPE from Europe and arrival on American soil, Franz Werfel began to write the play for which he would be best remembered. While in Lourdes, France, Werfel had met a Jewish-Polish businessman by the name of Jacobowicz who had recounted to him the story of his flight from the Nazis. Werfel’s own experience as a refugee in France, combined with Jacobowicz’s comically tragic escapades, provided the dramatic impetus for Jacobowsky und der Oberst, a lighthearted play about the invasion of France by Nazi Germany, rich in tongue-in-cheek humor and comic relief. The play’s two main characters, who travel together with the German army on their heels, are an odd couple indeed: Both refugees, albeit with diametrically opposed views on just about anything. Whereas the rabble-rousing, self-aggrandizing Polish Colonel Stjerbinsky misses no opportunity to insult his fellow traveler—without whom he clearly wouldn’t survive a day—the resourceful and self-effacing Jacobowsky never fails to find conciliatory words whose irony is too fine for the colonel to notice.

Their differences are cemented by the colonel’s repeated diatribes against Jacobowsky as a Jew, which propel Stjerbinsky to turn every trait in the amiable Jacobowsky into a confirmation of the purportedly hostile and unmanly Jewish character:

Against the strength of the perennial Jewish stereotype, even Jacobowsky’s generosity and sheer humanity prove powerless. His otherness as a Jew among gentiles is inescapable, as its imposed negative charge remains consistent wherever he goes. Not even the interventions of Marianne, the refugee who accompanies them as a thinly veiled allegory of battered France, can safeguard him from anti-Semitic attacks.

What makes matters worse for Jacobowsky is that he is now an “official” outsider whose carte d’identité confirms his wandering existence.