Karl Emil Franzos (25 October 1848 - 28 January 1904) was a popular late-nineteenth-century Austrian novelist. His reportage and fiction focus on the multi-ethnic corner of Galicia, Podolia, and Bukovina, which is now primarily in western Ukraine, where the Habsburg and Russian empires collided. This place became so synonymous with his name that one critic dubbed it "Franzos country." Several of his writings were translated into English, and Gladstone is known to have been a fan. Karl Emil Franzos was born near the town of Czortków (Chortkiv) in the Austrian Kingdom of Galicia's eastern, Podolian area. His ancestors were Sephardi Spanish Jews who fled the Inquisition to Holland and eventually settled in Lorraine. In the 1770s, his great-grandfather founded a factory for one of his sons in East Galicia, which had been ruled by the Habsburg dynasty since Poland's First Partition in 1772. When the Austrian state ordered Jews to acquire surnames, his grandfather's name was changed to "Franzos" because of his French ancestry, despite the fact that he considered himself German. Heinrich (1808-1858), Franzos's father, was a well-known doctor in Czortków. Because there was no state called "Germany" at the time, his German identity was primarily linguistic and cultural in nature.