Svevo's heroes all seem to be tormented by an intense lust for self-improvement, spiritual or social, for education, wisdom or learning to better them or their positions; however old, they still think themselves unprepared for the serious business of living. [...]

[...] The Jew whom Weininger describes consciously and Svevo perhaps unconsciously is indeed a victim of a psychological disease: living in a society that considers him different and often treats him exceptionally, he either tends to imagine himself more different than he really is, so that he lives up to the character attributed to him, or else he tries to "cross the line," to ignore difference in treatment and to pretend that he is not a Jew or that there "ain't no such thing" as a Jew. Thus pseudoassimilation and Zionism, and the ambivalence of the individual hesitating between these extremes, are all determined by society's evaluation of the Jew rather than by his being Jewish. And if Svevo reveals Jewish traits in his style or his characters, he is illustrating the environmental influence of Austrian society which achieved the same results in other Jewish writers, Kafka or Schnitzler, or in the Jewish characters of "aryan" writers such as Robert Musil, rather than the influence of any Jewish heredity.