Vienna in the 1930s: The Yellow Street is the street of leather merchants and a cosmos of the Jewish world: the tobacco shop where tobacco and gossip are exchanged, the café where men "catch women," the soap shop, and the orphanage. With tender empathy and biting irony, Veza Canetti describes a world on the brink of collapse, just before the great catastrophe. "The Yellow Street speaks of the inviolability of man even in his greatest peril." Elias Canetti.