David Herman
Joseph Roth: His Life and Works
David Herman - Joseph Roth: His Life and Works
- Thank you so much. Joseph Roth has had a fascinating career. He was one of the great writers of the 20th century, but perhaps, not as well known as some of his more famous contemporaries. And recently, I would say, in the last 20 to 30 years, he was quite dramatically rediscovered, and is now acknowledged, really, as one of the great German speaking writers of the 20th century. And I think, partly, because of his life, I think, that, perhaps, stood in his way. So I want to say, to begin, the first half of my talk will be more about his life and career, and the second half, more about the major themes in his work, and I will try and explain why he wasn’t better known in the English speaking world, and why he then suddenly, and very dramatically, became so well known. In December, 1933, Joseph Roth wrote in a letter, “Bear in mind that I’ve spent 20 years of my life starving, was in the war”, the First World War, “for four more, and was desperately up against it for another six”. “It’s only in the past three years that I can be said to have lived at all.” It’s an extraordinary letter, and unfortunately, rather too optimistic at the end, because three years later, in 1936, he wrote of himself in another letter, “Humiliated, disgraced, indebted, smiling through gritted teeth, a man who’s half madman, half corpse”. He was, indeed, in a terrible state. An alcoholic, in poor health, married to a chronic schizophrenic, a refugee struggling to make a living. He only had a few years to live. In 1939, he died of pneumonia, still only 44. But he had written over a dozen novels, many short stories, and thousands of articles, which established him as one of the great writers of the interwar years. Roth spent much of his life on the move. He was full of contradictions. His translator and champion, Michael Hoffmann, wrote, “Roth lives out of two suitcases”. “He’s a Jew in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a German in France.” “He is ‘Red Roth’, and a royal and Imperial Loyalist.” “He is an Eastern Jew and an Austrian.”
Joseph Roth, though not as famous internationally as Kafka or Thomas Mann, was amongst the most prolific and talented German language authors of the first half of the 20th century. His work, much of which was out of print, and almost completely forgotten only 30 years ago, has now been rediscovered, and he is hailed as one of the great modern masters. Yet, he remains a complex, elusive figure, whose fiction is only now being discovered in all its diversity by English speaking readers. So let me start with an outline of Roth’s life and time. He was born in 1894 on September the second, Moses Joseph Roth, in Brody in the very east of Galicia, 54 miles from Lviv, which, as we now know, is in Western Ukraine. “On the dusty edge of Eastern Europe”, as Dennis Marks wrote about him in his wonderful book about Roth. His name is an interesting thing, Moses Joseph Roth, and the following quote from one of his essays in the collection, “The Wondering Jews”, gives a bit of a flavour of Roth straight away. He’s writing about names. He says, “All Christians have sensible European names”. “Jewish names are mad in Jewish, nor is that all, they have two or three surnames.” “You never know what to call them!” Brody in Galicia, where he was born, is a really significant place in his life, not just because he was born there, but because the kind of town it was was to recur throughout his fiction.
“The little Jewish town”, Dennis Marks writes, “where he spent the first 18 years of his life appears under one fictitious name or another in 9 of his 15 novels.” “It is peopled with deserting soldiers, Hasidic Jews, dealers in drink and contraband, human traffickers, revolutionaries, prostitutes, and all the other flotsam which drifted across Western Ukraine during, and after, the Great War.” In 1880, Brody had 15 to 20,000 people, Jewish people, living there. 75% of the population were Jewish. Brody Jews, according to the 1900 edition of the English Baedeker, they wrote about Brody Jews, “They differ in their dress and the mode of wearing their hair from the other inhabitants who despise them”. There’s a wonderful book which came out recently about pogroms in Ukraine just after the First World War, 1918 to 1921, and the number of pogroms, and the brutality of the pogroms, only 30 or so years after Roth was born, are just breathtaking and astonishing. And so, unfortunately, it wasn’t just that the local Ukrainians despised Jews, they attacked them with brutal regularity. He had, what we might call, a provincial childhood. Brody was a Polish, Ruthenian, Jewish, Ukrainian backwater. He was born in the same generation as Hermann Hesse, Hermann Broch, who wrote the famous “Death of Virgil”, Kafka, Robert Musil, Walter Benjamin, and Bruno Schulz, Hans Fallada, who was also recently rediscovered, Ernst Toller, and Brecht. It was an extraordinary generation of writers to belong to. He was also part of an extraordinary generation who came from Galicia and Bukovina. Shmuel Agnon, who later became the first Israeli writer to win the Nobel Prize, who was born in 1888. Bruno Schulz, who was born in Galicia in 1892.
The poet, Itsik Manger, who was born in Czernovitz in 1901. Paul Celan, the famous, possibly, the greatest German language poet of the 20th century, was born in Czernovitz in 1920. Aharon Appelfeld, born in 1932, also in Czernovitz. His parents were both Galician Jews, Nahum and Miriam. He never met his father, who ran off very soon. “My mother”, he wrote in one of his letters, “was a Jewess of strong, earthy Slavic constitution.” “She had no money and no husband, because my father, who turned up one day and whisked her off to the West with him, probably with the sole purpose of siring me, left her in Katowice, and disappeared, never to be seen again.” “He must’ve been a strange man, an Austrian scallywag, a drinker, and a spend thrift.” “He died insane when I was 16.” “I never saw him.” “They were not exactly poor”, he wrote in another letter. “There were visits to the photographer, smart clothes, violin lessons, even a maid, at least some of the time.” And then he writes in another letter, “I came to Vienna early in my life, left it, came back, went West again, had no money, living on handouts from well-off relatives and from giving lessons.” “Started to study, was keen and ambitious, an odiously good boy, full of quiet malice and poison.” This phrase, “went West”, we’ve already come across it a couple of times from his letters, and that is the essential trajectory of his life. He was very conscious of being born in the East of Europe, on the very Eastern most borders of Europe, and his life story is partly a move to the West. He was educated at the local school in Brody. And after high school, moved to the University of Lemberg, now, Lviv, to begin his university studies. To give you a sense of the westward trajectory, so he moves from Galicia to Vienna.
Then, in 1920, he moves to Berlin, then to Frankfurt, again, further West, and then to Paris in the 1930s, where he spent his last years in exile. Indeed, between his arrival in Vienna in 1913 and his death, 26 years later, he returned to Galicia only three times on very brief visits. But crucially, the small border towns of Galicia, like Brody, where he was born, remain at the very heart of his literary imagination. So he settles in Vienna just before the First World War to study at the University of Vienna after leaving Lemberg, and the First World War becomes a key turning point, both for him and for his hometown. The Russian onslaught and burning of the city at the outbreak of the First World War was a decisive moment in the history of the town. In 1917, he quit his university cause, and volunteered to serve in the Imperial Habsburg Empire Army. And the Imperial Habsburg Army is a reminder that he was born in part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was technically regarded as Austrian, but he was really a citizen of the Habsburg Empire. And this experience in serving in the Army during the war had a major and long lasting influence on his life. “The most powerful experience of my life”, he wrote in a letter in 1932, “was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I’ve ever had, the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary.” “To this date, I’m a patriotic Austrian and love what is left of my homeland as a sort of relic.” It’s around this time that he suppresses his first name, Moses, and its place was taken by Joseph. So from then on, he was known as Joseph Roth. And in 1918, comes the second great event in his life, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire.
It marked the beginning of a pronounced sense of homelessness that was to feature regularly in his work. He wrote to his publisher on the 10th of June, 1930, “Nowhere, in no church record or parish register, is my name entered or the date of my birth”. “I feel at home in myself, but otherwise, I have no home.” And his homelessness, and the homelessness of many of his characters, is a key theme in his writing. In December, 1918, he returns to Vienna, and he starts his career as a journalist writing for “Der Neue Tag” in Vienna. And around this time in 1919, Galicia is annexed by Poland, because of the Treaty of Versailles, and Roth is made a Polish citizen, but he applies for Austrian citizenship. “At no time”, Dennis Marks writes, “at no point in his post-war adult life did he really inhabit the country, which, today, we call Austria”. “He was an Austrian in name only.” In June, 1920, he moves to Berlin, and becomes one of the best known and highest paid journalists in the Weimar Republic. His articles about Berlin, Paris, Russia, and other places seem to capture the energy and ambivalence of the Zeitgeist, a culture dazzled by competing ideologies, new technologies, and a new entertainment industry. He writes about film, for example. He writes about the Soviet Union, which he went to visit. And then in March, 1922, he makes, perhaps, the most disastrous decision of his entire life, which is that he marries Friederike Reichle, who was born in 1900. We’ll come back to that later. In 1924, he publishes his first two novels, “Hotel Savoy” and “Rebellion”. And in 1925, he moves for the first time to Paris, and he works in France, and never again resided permanently in Berlin. He becomes the France correspondent for the “Frankfurter Zeitung”, and he fell instantly in love with Paris. “Paris”, he wrote, “is the capital of the world”.
“Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European.” “Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos.” “The whole city”, he writes, “is a protest against Hindenburg, against Hindenburg, Prussia, boots and buttons.” “I don’t see the point of being a German writer”, he wrote in 1925. “Here, Paris, is like being on top of a tall tower.” “You look down from the summit of European civilization, and way down at the bottom in some sort of gulch is Germany.” Germany is a sort of fall guy in his letters. Although he made his living, initially, in Berlin as a journalist, he’s not a great fan of Berlin. He’s not a great fan of Germany. Habsburg Austria is always hugely important to him, Paris is hugely important to him, and those are the two main centres of his imagination, in a way. “My loathing for Germany”, he wrote in a letter on the 29th of November, 1925, “is growing all the time.” “I don’t have a publisher there.” “I don’t have readers.” “I don’t have recognition.” And then in April, 1925, he publishes two more novels. And in 1926, he’s dismissed as the Paris correspondent by the “Frankfurter Zeitung”, and he remains based in Paris, half out of protest, but demoted, casualized, cantankerous, and impatient to be done with newspapers. He begins to think of himself now as a novelist, not a journalist. It’s in 1926 that he spends a long period of travel in the USSR. “I’m quite unsentimental about the country”, he wrote in a letter, “and about the Soviet project”.
But then, just two months later, he writes, “There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia”. “For all my scepticism, I’m happy to be able to witness it.” Then, in 1927, in his letters, we get a very new and very dark note that is going to dominate his life, for the rest of his life, for the next 12 years. “I need money.” “I’m flat broke.” “I need money.” These are recurring words in his letters. It’s in 1927 that he publishes “Juden auf Wanderschaft”, “The Wandering Jews”, a book of essays about Jews in East Europe, and also, “Flight Without End”, which is published in Munich by the Kurt Wolff Verlag. And something else very important happens in 1927, on the 8th of September, to be precise. He writes his first letter to Stefan Zweig, the great Austrian novelist, critic, cultural figure. Two less similar people. It is absolutely impossible to imagine. I’ll talk about this in a bit more detail later. But Zweig plays a massive part in Roth’s life as a financial benefactor and supporter, and as a literary counterpoint, if you like, or a cultural counterpoint. Zweig, remember, is from Fin-de-siècle Vienna, what he called the “Golden Age of Security”, and Roth, obviously, is from rural, provincial Galicia. In 1928, there’s another subject which he refers to for the first time which also becomes a dominant, recurring image in all his letters. He refers to documents and passports, because, remember, he’s not living in his home country. It’s not even quite clear what his home country is any longer. It’s some time since he left Vienna. And technically, he should really be a Polish citizen, because he was born in Galicia, which is now part of Poland, and has been ever since the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. In 1929, he becomes increasingly agitated.
“I’m not stable in other respects either.” “Everything I own fits into three suitcases.” His wife becomes schizophrenic, and was put in asylums in Austria. She was killed as part of the Nazi Euthanasia Programme in 1940. Her illness threw Roth into a deep crisis, both emotionally and, of course, financially. “My wife has been very sick since August”, he writes in a letter in December, 1929. “Psychosis, hysteria, suicidal feelings, she’s barely alive.” In May, 1929, he meets Zweig for the first time at Zweig’s house in Salzburg. In 1930, he publishes one of his most famous novels, “Job”. And from 1930, Roth’s fiction became less concerned with contemporary society with which he’d become increasingly disillusioned. And during this period, his work frequently invoked a melancholic nostalgia for life in Imperial Central Europe before the First World War. He often portrayed the fate of homeless wanderers looking for a place to live, in particular, Jews and former citizens of the old Austria-Hungary, who, with the downfall of the monarchy, had lost their only possible heimat or true home. But even “Job” sells only eight and a half thousand copies. He’s not a successful writer. Excuse me. Certainly not compared with Thomas Mann or Stefan Zweig. His despair continues. “A 10 year marriage ending like this has the effect of 40.” “Eight books to date, over a thousand articles, 10 hours work a day, every day for 10 years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy, not even the chance of spending a month without financial worries.” Later that year, in 1930, he writes in a letter, “I have no money”. “I mean, really, no money, and I’m drinking.”
From around this time, he became an alcoholic. 1931, his despair continues. “My novel is going nowhere.” “I don’t have any income.” “I’m quite evidently insane.” “Terrible, in the most literal sense, indescribable things are happening in my life.” And then, in 1932, he publishes… Amidst all this mayhem in his private life, he’s an alcoholic, he has no money, his wife is schizophrenic and is in an asylum in Austria, in 1932, he publishes his master work, the “Radetzky March”, serialised in the “Frankfurter Zeitung”, and published as a novel in August of 1932. And yet, a month after its publication as a novel, he writes, “I, myself, am a wailing wall, if not a heap of rubble”. “You have no idea how dark it is inside me.” In 1933, January the 30th, 1933, the day Hitler became Reich Chancellor, Roth, a prominent, liberal, Jewish journalist, left Germany for the last time. He never set foot in Germany again. He would spend most of the next decade back in Paris, a city he loved. And the other great subject of his letters in the 1930s, apart from his drinking and his financial despair, is his relationship with Stefan Zweig, who becomes his patron, his financial saviour, and his main correspondent. Michael Hofmann, who translated and edited Roth’s letters, writes, “The very quick, and fiery, and aggressive Roth, and the obtuse, decent-minded, and squirming Zweig, are a fascinating and distressing study in contrary temperaments”. “Their relationship was further complicated by the fact that Roth was monetarily, one could almost say, physically dependent on Zweig, and handled his dependency predictably badly, with histrionic begging, intermittent gratitude, and shorter and shorter intervals of gratitude.” Roth’s criticism of Zweig’s work is quite interesting in this context, because despite his dependency on Zweig, he can’t hold back.
He can’t control or refrain from saying what he honestly thinks of Zweig’s work, which is not much. He was not a fan of Zweig’s writing. Zweig, by contrast, comes across as a kind of raisonner, the force of reason. Sane, decent, full of advice, even pleading with Roth to change his ways. He privately referred to Roth’s financial affairs as Augean, as in the Augean Stables, full of an almost bottomless amount of filth. “God, I have nothing”, Roth wrote at Zweig in July, 1933. “I can’t go on!” “Eight people are depending on me.” “No one helps me.” And then comes the rise of Nazis, and he’s fled Nazi Germany, but he starts writing more and more letters privately about Nazi Germany. “We are heading for a great catastrophe”, he wrote in February, 1933, a month after Hitler came to power. “We are headed for a new war.” “The barbarians have taken over.” “Do not deceive yourself.” “Hell reigns.” The following month, March, 1933, “The world has gone mad, and there’s no point in common sense anymore”. He writes to Zweig in April, 1933, “Our books are impossible for the Third Reich.” “Our life’s work has been for nothing.” Within five months, he writes, in May, 1933, “There will be no publisher, no book seller, no author of our kind”. And yet, curiously, he’s double-edged about Jews and his own Jewishness. “The Jews are ducking behind Hitler’s back”, he writes in a letter in February, ‘33. “It’s the Jews who have introduced socialism and catastrophe into European culture.”
“The Jews have unleashed the plebs”, he writes in 1935. “A Zionist is a national socialist, a national socialist is a Zionist”, he writes also in 1935. And in the same letter, he writes, “But what I want to do is protect Europe and humanity, both from the Nazis and from the Hitler Zionists”. “I don’t care about protecting the Jews.” What he does return to again and again, both in his fiction and in his private letters, is his Austrian identity. “I’m an old Austrian officer”, he wrote in a letter in April, 1933. “I love Austria.” “I view it as cowardice not to use this moment to say, 'The Habsburgs must return’!” “I want the monarchy back.” “I stood in the field for nine months for the Habsburgs”, he writes, in May, 1933. “No swastika merchant can claim that.” “I have a right to my fatherland.” “If Austria-Hungary had survived, then I’d be a major in Witkovitz, and could write without an advance.” In July, 1935, he writes, “I will do all in my feeble powers to bring about a Habsburg return.” “The Habsburgs will return.” Another part of his complicated identity begins to emerge at this time, which is his Catholic identity. Suddenly, in 1933, he starts writing about Austria-Hungary, the Habsburgs, and his Catholicism. “To a Catholic myself”, he writes, “like myself”, in August, 1933. And then in 1935, “I believe in a Catholic empire, German and Roman, and I’m near to becoming an Orthodox, even a militant Catholic”. Bear in mind, he’s a Jew from Galicia, with Jewish parents. He was called Moses. So where exactly his Catholic identity comes from, I’m not quite clear. And then, of course, there’s a complicated question of the politics of the literary immigration, as one might might call it. He’s anti-left. Where can German speaking writers be published, is a key question. Where is home, is a key question for a refugee. And is it possible to have a voice in Germany for a refugee?
Is there any hope in Germany for a refugee? “Our books are impossible for the Third Reich”, he writes to Zweig in April, 1933. “The book sellers will turn us away.” “The SA stormtroopers will smash the display windows.” “There’s no compromising with these people.” “It is pointless to hope.” “The national renewal will go to the extremes of madness.” “Don’t, for God’s sake, imagine you can address these people in any form!” “You can do it later.” “There are no manners when dealing with these apes.” But he continues to publish his novels, two more in 1934. Now, his work is published in the Netherlands, where there are German language publishers. But from 1936, his health continues to deteriorate. “I spent three days in bed, literally, with my feet up.” “I drank a pint of milk a day to detoxify my system.” “The swelling has gone down.” “Today, I’m able to walk and sit down without my legs swelling up again.” “I can’t keep food down.” Then later, in 1936, “I’m very feeble and barely able to walk”. “If I don’t vomit spleen and blood, then my eyes are inflamed or my feet are swollen.” “Palpitations, heart pain, shocking migraines, teeth falling out.” Then in 1938, he writes one of his greatest novels, “The Emperor’s Tomb”. It was the last novel he wrote, and the last he actually saw in print. In 1939, on May the 27th, he died in Paris, his beloved Paris. In 1940, his wife was killed in the Nazi Euthanasia Programme. So what do we make of the themes of his work? That is a brief account of his life and his biography.
One key theme, and a really important one, in thinking about both his life and his work, is the mix of centre and periphery. Roth is what we might call centrifugal. He watches the empire, the Austrian Empire, fall apart from its distant margins, and this is absolutely central to Roth’s work, and to his identity, and marks him out in a very different way from his friend and contemporary, Stefan Zweig, and also, another great Austrian contemporary, Robert Musil, who really both saw the world in their writing, and in their sense of their own identity, from Vienna, from the centre of the empire. Whereas, Roth, from his childhood onwards, always had this sense of himself as someone on the margins of the empire. Musil had little interest. Zweig had little interest in Austria- Hungary’s remote provinces. In the first two thirds of “The Man Without Qualities” Musil’s master work, there’s scarcely a paragraph that takes place outside Vienna. There’s only one Jewish character in the entire book. Nothing could really be further from Roth’s fractured kingdom of the displaced. Few of his principle characters are native Germans. They have surnames like Pum, and Dan, and Pansin, and Tunda. They live in Shmerinka, Zuchnow, Koropta, and Zlotogrod. They don’t come from Vienna. Roth’s centrifugal temperament means that he observes great events, like the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, from the edge of the world, and reflects them in the arbitrary fate of insignificant nations and individuals. So Musil and Zweig on the one hand, Roth on the other, could be describing completely different empires a thousand miles apart. Bearing in mind, that Brody is just 50 miles or so from Lviv, which is now in the Ukraine.
You can see… Well, Ukraine, which you… So you can see that that’s a long way from Vienna, literally, but perhaps even more, metaphorically. The other related issue is the sense of nostalgia, the death of 19th century Europe, in particular, the Austrian Empire. And this nostalgia, for a doomed Austrian civilization, is the theme of his master work, the “Radetzky March”. Adam Kirsch, one of our greatest current literary critics, when he wrote about Roth, wrote, “This nostalgia for a doomed Austrian civilization is the theme of the ‘Radetzky March’, which belongs with ‘The Magic Mountain’ by Thomas Mann, and ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ by Proust, in the group of great novels that chronicle the death of 19th century Europe”. It’s not just the death, of course. It’s also the sense of falling apart. If you think of the wonderful beginning to Zweig’s memoir, “The World of Yesterday”, the opening chapter, the “Age of Security”, which he sometimes refers to as the “Golden Age of Security”, Roth’s imagination, if you like, is dominated by a sense of breakdown, loss, a world falling apart, because of three crucial historical blows, the First World War, the end of the Habsburg Empire, and the rise of Nazism. He writes of Tunda in his novel, “Flight Without End”, “He has been stranded three times, first, by the war itself”, the First World War that is, “then by the hollowing out of European society, which followed the peace, and finally, by the betrayal of the revolutionary ideals, which had, earlier, promised to replace the failed and defeated empires of Germany and Russia”. And, of course, there are the famous words of Count Chojnicki in the “Radetzky March”, right towards the end of the great novel, where he says to the people gathered around him, “As we speak, it’s falling apart”. “It’s already fallen apart.”
And he speaks about, at the time, they’ve just heard of the news of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and they know that war is about to come and sweep everything in their world away. And then, of course, there is Galicia, the setting for much of his best writing. Although, he returned to Vienna. He went to Vienna before the First World War, and returns there after the First World War. And from there on, after his time in Vienna, it’s as if his family, and Brody, his hometown, an Galicia had never existed. What he writes about in his letters is Austria, the Habsburgs, Catholicism, Germany, and how much he hates German militarism and Germany altogether, and, of course, his beloved Paris. It’s as if Galicia doesn’t exist in his letters, but absolutely haunts his literary imagination. He doesn’t go back there. Three brief visits between leaving for Vienna in 1913 and his death 26 years later. But his fiction is constantly drawn back to his homeland. It first appears in one of his earliest novels, “Hotel Savoy”, in 1924. And similar border towns, like Brody, recur in his fiction. It’s as if the idea, not just of the small town, but of the border, is terribly important to him. So for example, there’s the fictitious Galician town of Shmerinka in “Flight Without End”. There’s a long chapter on a typical shtetl in “The Wandering Jews”. There’s Zuchnow in “Job”. There’s an unnamed garrison town in the “Radetzky March” with its central marketplace, hotel, and railway station. His small towns always have exactly the same geography, always have exactly the same crucial landmarks. They all have a marketplace, they all have a hotel, they all have a railway station, and they usually have an Army garrison.
There’s Szwaby in “Weights and Measures”, Koropta, described as Russian, but actually Ruthenian in “Tarabas”, Lopatyny in “The Bust of the Emperor”, and Zlotogrod in “Weights and Measures”. And he writes a book, a travel book, called “Journeys Through Galicia”. And throughout the 1930s, almost every work has Galician links of some kind or another. All these Brody lookalikes share the same landmarks. It’s as if he has a sort of geographical imagination, if you like. A central crossroads with a market square, a tavern managed by a Jew, usually, a hotel with a cafe, where the officers drink, and a station buffet, where they lunch. And at one end of the town is a barracks, and at the other is a cemetery. You could draw a map of a Roth town. Then there’s the question of, how German was he? He writes in German, but he’s not really a German writer. I suppose you could say, you could compare him in that respect to Kafka, who is Czech-Jewish, but writes in German. Paul Celan, Jewish, from Czernovitz, but became the greatest German language poet of the 20th century. So 20th century literature, German 20th century literature, great German 20th century literature, is partly, largely created by these extraordinary hybrid figures who are not, themselves, actually German, but by force of circumstance, right in German. Dennis Marks writes in his wonderful book, “Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth”… It’s a very short book, but 130 pages, but it’s an absolutely fascinating read. And he writes, “Whilst his language is German, but his subject matter is often Slavic, sometimes Jewish, and always extra-territorial”. What he means by extra-territorial is this sense of displacement, of a refugee or an exile. But even before he’s technically a refugee, and technically, homeless, because he doesn’t have citizenship anywhere, even before then, there is this sense of homelessness, of without a fatherland.
The word fatherland is very important for him, obviously, in part, because he has no father, but also, because he has no fatherland, despite having served in the Habsburg Army. “In his displaced sensibility”, Marks writes, “he’s a true son of the borderland”. “Wherever he sets his narrative, in Germany, Austria, France, or Russia, he speaks in the accent of Galicia.” And as I say, he’s one of the great German writers from outside Germany. I should add, in addition to Celan and Kafka, also, Robert Walser, and Elias Canetti, who was actually born in Bulgaria. So this issue of home and homelessness is fantastically important, both in the life and in the work. “Without a name, without importance, without rank, without money, and without occupation, homeless, and stateless”, this could, of course, be Joseph Roth. It’s actually Roth writing about his character, Tunda, in “Flight without End”. And in a way, this is part of the reason he so worships the Habsburg Empire, because it was an empire, as opposed to the nationalism of the new post-Versailles nations, like Poland, which took away his Galicia. “I hate nationalism and nation states”, says Count Morstin in “The Bust of the Emperor”. “My old home, the monarchy alone” was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers.“ "This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered.” Homelessness is central to Roth’s imaginative world. His early political fiction is packed with border-crossing transients, returning prisoners of war, spies, mercenaries, and criminals who keep crossing borders. This is why the border towns are so important, because they keep going across borders, partly for their living as smugglers, or because of their situation in their lives as transients, or as refugees, or exiles, returning prisoners of war. And then there’s the question related to that of papers, passports, and documents.
Brody became part of Poland in 1919 as part of the Treaty of Versailles, as I said, and Roth takes Austrian citizenship. And the presence or absence of papers is a light motif throughout his work in a way that it just wouldn’t be for a writer more established in his own citizenship. “Do I have my passport?” “Do I exist without it?”, says Gabriel Dan in “Hotel Savoy”. The smuggler, Kapturak, appears in five of Roth’s novels, always fabricating official papers. His Galicians, his Ruthenians, his Ukrainians, and Bukovinian are constantly seeking new identities to support new lives in new nations. And sometimes, they end up getting robbed or cheated of their official documents. The one constant in their lives is the need for a reliable set of papers. So the narrative of his novel, “Rebellion”, for example, revolves around the central character, Andreas Pum, and his loss of a work permit, “A human life nowadays”, Roth wrote in his preface to the second edition of “The Wandering Jews” in 1937, “A human life nowadays hangs from a passport, as it once used to hang by the fabled thread”. So as Dennis Marks writes in his book, “The deeper meaning of extra territoriality in Roth’s work is not merely the loss of homeland, but the total loss of the self which that homeland once expressed”. “The novel ends neither in tragedy, nor triumph, but in a pervasive emptiness.” He has no homeland in the sense that Galicia is now part of Poland. The Habsburg empire, which was, for him, what Austria was, no longer exists. He’s not allowed in Germany. He’s not allowed to publish in Germany, in German. And he’s now an exile in Paris. Michael Hoffmann once said at Jewish Book Week, described Roth as a hotel patriot. And he spent, as many people of that generation did, much of his life living in small, shabby hotels, and pensions.
And again and again, in his letters and in his work, he returns to the question of his Austrian identity. “I’m an old Austrian identity.” “I love Austria”, he wrote to Zweig. “So far as I’m concerned, I stood in the field for nine months for the Habsburgs.” That line, “No swastika merchant can claim that I have a right to my fatherland”. Jews by contrast, are absent, largely. Although, more than a third of his master work, the “Radetzky March”, is set in the empire’s most Jewish province, Galician Jews, who made up more than 30% of the region’s population in 1914, are largely absent. However, in his later work, generally, they play a much more significant role, particularly those written during his Parisian exile. “Job” and “Leviathan” are both set in Galician shtetls at the end of the 19th century. He, himself, was never a child of the shtetl, although, he was born into a Jewish family, and lived largely among Jews until his mid-20s. Even in his youth, he stood outside Orthodox Jewish life. His mother tongue crucially was Hochdeutsch. His possessive mother brought her son up to be a German Jew, or more accurately, an Austro-German Jew, rather than a Galiciana. And in “The Wondering Jews”, he never once reveals his own Jewish identity, nor does he sentimentalise the life of the little Jewish villages on the Russo-Polish-Austrian frontier. The primary role of the Jews in his fiction is to suffer. Almost all of his Jewish characters live in deep poverty. There are only two prosperous Jews in his entire output. And then there are the outsiders, other kinds of outsiders, not just Jews, but society’s waifs and strays with whom he’s so identified. His cast is composed of third-rate vaudeville artists, petty traders, low-grade lottery speculators, stateless returning soldiers, and former prisoners of war. He is an outsider and a non-joiner.
He doesn’t really belong to Galicia. He refuses Polish citizenship. Although he was Jewish, he was an anti-Zionist, and was not remotely interested in Jewish religion, and could be virulently antisemitic. He wrote in German, but despised Germany before 1933, and especially, after 1933. And he was against all the collective identities of interwar Europe, fascism, communism, Weimar social democracy. His socialist phase, when he was called Der rote Roth, was restless and short-lived. He had a vague flirtation, peculiar flirtation, with Catholicism. So it’s really the Habsburg Army and the Habsburg Empire where he places his identity. And then there is his rage, which comes across loud and clear in his letters. Michael Hofmann wrote that, “Roth was a man whose element was turbulence”. This, unusually, for Hoffman, rather, under-states the case. By 1933, Roth could barely control his anger. His wife’s illness, his growing battle with debt and drink, and his recent displacement forced him to exile, just a few months before some of these letters, were all too much. The miracle is that he was still writing, not just writing for money. These were the years of his best work. But the tone in his letters gets wilder and crazier. “And I tell you now”, he writes to the ever-patient Zweig, “with the justification of a condemned friend, that you are unfair to me”. “Unfair” in italics. “Unfair” in block capitals. “This solidarity among messrs publishers in London”, he tells Zweig, “is a work of the antichrist”. It gets worse. “I’m not sorry for Ossietzky in a concentration camp.” “Think of the damage he would do if he was still at large?” “A non-Jew”, he wrote, “who does what Goebbels says is a poor son of a bitch, but a Jew, a publisher in Vienna who turns me down, is vile scum.” “It makes me sick with fury”, he writes. “This isn’t fury.” “This is close to madness.” Zweig keeps writing long, reasonable letters back, and more important, gives Roth money to keep him afloat. He is the rasserenare to Roth’s misanthrope. “All around me”, writes Roth, “are traitors and worms”. Let me end with two photographs.
Most British reviews of Roth’s letters when they were published used a black and white photo of Roth in suit and tie, sitting in front of a railway carriage come cattle truck. He’s on his own, head bowed, lost in thought. In a recent biography of Zweig, there’s a photo of Zweig at the main railway station in Salzburg, smartly dressed in suit and tie, also wearing a hat, with his first wife, both in conversation with the man. The photo is filled with people. It perfectly captures the image of Zweig as smart, sociable, gregarious, with his wife, just as the photo of Roth captures the sense of a loner, always in transit, never arriving. These two men, both among the great writers of the first half of the 20th century, saw their world fall apart. It is no coincidence that the world of Central and East Europe only came back together in the late 1980s and ‘90s, after the end of the Cold War. And the collapse of communism, Michael Hoffmann described it as, “coming out of the deep freeze of history”. It was just to that moment that Zweig and Roth, and the other great figures of the lost Central European Jewish generation, Antal Szerb from Hungary, David Vogel, Bruno Schulz, started to be translated and received their due recognition. The canon of 20th century literature shifted. The map of 20th century literature, European literature, shifted. Places like Galicia, Bukovina, Ukraine, Belarus, Czernowitz, Odesa, and Berdychiv suddenly appeared. You couldn’t call yourself… I mean, if you read the great critics of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, F. R. Leavis, T. S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling, they don’t write about these places. These places, apart from one essay by Trilling,, a famous essay about “Red Cavalry”, Isaac Babel’s famous short stories, these places simply didn’t exist. Remember Neville Chamberlain’s dismissive remarks about Czechoslovakia, “A far away country that nobody knows anything about or cares anything about”. You could easily consider yourself a literate person if you knew your classics, you knew your French, you knew your English great poetry and novels, and perhaps, a bit of American literature.
Now, I think, to call yourself properly literature in the sense of knowing about European history, you would now have to know about writers and poets who came from Bukovina, and Galicia. Not just Roth, but Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld, great, great writers from Central and East Europe, many of them Jewish. But these books I’ve referred to don’t just confirm the importance of these writers. They also raise many fascinating questions about homelessness, about dislocation and loss, about Jewishness and identity, and the fascinating absences at the heart of their writing. They remind us, above all, why, for two generations of European refugees, the suitcase is their enduring symbol. And in the last few years, there has been a fascinating revival of interest in these great interwar, Jewish, Central and East European writers. Kafka, of course, didn’t need a revival. He has always been regarded as one of the great modern masters, and was very quickly translated into English. Roth died in May, 1939, a few months before the Second World War.
The borderlands he wrote about, the small border towns of Jewish Galicia, were to be destroyed within a few years of his death. 250 out of 10,000 Jews survived in his hometown after the Second World War. For years after the war, he was almost forgotten as a writer, and then he was rediscovered in the last years of the 20th century, and is now remembered as one of the great Jewish and Central European writers of the 20th century, one of the great chroniclers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also, of the lost world of the Jewish borderlands of Galicia. So thank you very much for listening so patiently. There are some questions, which some of you have kindly sent in. So if you don’t mind me, I will read some of these. Some are about a previous talk, actually, on Stefan Zweig. So I will try and find a way of moving down. Sorry, bear with me one second.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: Arlene Goldberg writes, “Where exactly was Galicia as compared to present European countries?”
A: Wow, now, there is a question! The answer is, I’m afraid, a little bit complicated, and not straightforward. It’s easiest to locate by saying that it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Back in the late 18th century, there were three partitions, Poland, old Poland, was divided between Prussia, Austria, and Russia, or the Austrian Empire, the Habsburg Empire. And Galicia was part of the Austrian Empire. And it’s quite a large area that would now include, essentially, the borderland between Poland, Eastern Poland, and Western Ukraine. So what was Lemberg, and then later, when it was part of Poland was called Lvov, and now that it’s part of Ukraine is called Lviv, is is part of Galicia. And the area that he was was just, just west of the, what was then, the Russian border in the 1890s. So it’s really the borderlands between Poland, Southern Poland, Western Ukraine, and is most easy to define as part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. And one thing that is very interesting, Arlene, if I may, is that, in recent years, not only has there been a fascinating rediscovery of many of the writers from that part of Europe, but there’s also been a really extraordinary resurgence of interest in the history of these areas. The great Holocaust historian, Omer Bartov, has written a trilogy of history books about the history of Galicia, for example. So places like Galicia, Bukovina, Ruthenia, Ukraine, suddenly, are becoming the subjects of very interesting historical inquiry, long before the recent invasion, or the first invasion of Ukraine, 2014, let alone, now. So that, for example, there’s a wonderful book by Steven Zipperstein, Steven J. Zipperstein, from Stanford, about the pogrom at Kishinev, the famous pogrom at Kishinev in 1903. There is a wonderful book, as I mentioned earlier, about the pogroms in Ukraine between 1918 and 1921, just after the First World War. The history of Poland has been completely rewritten. The history of Ukraine. You know, we forget that a lot of the great English speaking histories of the Soviet Union barely mention Ukraine, despite the famine in the 1930s, despite the Nazi invasion and the massive slaughter. And it’s really only in the last 20, 25 years that historians like Timothy J. Snyder in his wonderful book, “Bloodlands”, or Anne Applebaum, in her book, the “Red Famine”, or this book about the pogroms in Ukraine just after the First World War, have started to really put the history of Ukraine, not on the margins of Soviet or Russian history, or of East European history, but right in the centre. And the same is now beginning to happen with Galicia as well. I hope that answers your question.
Adele Cohen wrote, “A book mentioning the slaughter of the Jews in the Ukraine in 1918 to 1921, in fact, and help given by German Jewish communities worldwide, compiled by David Solly Sandler. I’m afraid I didn’t know about David Solly Sandler’s work. I do apologise. But this is, you know, part of the same trend, if that’s not too trivial a word to use, in historiography, in the writing of the, the history of 20th century Europe. Timothy Snyder used a phrase, well, he called his book, the "Bloodlands”, and that phrase has really caught on to describe those countries, Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic Republics, Poland, which were caught tragically between Hitler’s Nazism on the one hand to the West, and Stalin’s Stalinism to the east, and the massive bloodshed, the starvation of three and a half million Ukrainians starved to death by Stalin in the early 1930s, the purges by Stalin, the Holocaust, obviously. And, I suppose, the partition resulting from the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Nazi Germany and Stalin, Stalin’s Soviet Union of Poland, one part going to Nazi Germany, the eastern part going to the Soviet Union, at least until the Nazi innovation in June, 1941, is the most graphic sense of a country just torn to pieces by these two terrible, terrible tyrants. And so we’re beginning to get a much stronger sense of these parts of Europe, whose history had really been for too long, neglected. And part of the reason, just in case any of you are curious as to why this has happened, one of the crucial reasons, is that from 1989 to '91, with the fall of Soviet communism in Eastern Europe, and, of course, then in the Soviet Union, you get the archives opening up. And the second crucial and related point, is that you then get a generation of North American historians, primarily much more than British historians, who knew so many languages. People like Zipperstein, and Snyder, and Anne Applebaum. they speak German, and Polish, and Russian, and Ukrainian, and in some cases, Yiddish, and that’s an astonishing, gives an astonishing access to a historical record that otherwise would’ve vanished. I once had the great pleasure of hearing Timothy Snyder giving the annual Isaiah Berlin lecture in Berlin’s hometown, Riga and Latvia. And Snyder was giving his lecture, and he said at the beginning, he introduced himself in Latvian to begin with, and then he said that he was giving the same lecture, he was giving it in English in Riga, and he was going to give the same lecture in Polish in Warsaw the next day, and the day after that in German in Berlin. And that gives you a sense, I think, of the extraordinary linguistic range, and that allowed them to exploit and to use these archives, and that has transformed the history writing of Central and Eastern Europe. Forgive me for going on, but there we are.
Q: Ah, Bobby Staeger, I hope I’ve pronounced your surname correctly, “Didn’t both Zweig and Roth have a reverence and longing for Fin-de-siècle Europe, and its old world life and manners?”
A: Well, absolutely. Zweig, in his autobiography, “The World of Yesterday”, wrote very movingly and evocatively of the “Age of Security” of the world he’d grown up in in Vienna, which was both stable and secure, compared to the terrible world of the First World War, the inflation years after the First World War, and then Nazism. And Roth, I think, references… Well, perhaps, it isn’t the right word? Certainly, longing. It wasn’t so much its old world life and manners. It was, I think, the sense of a homeland or a fatherland, the only one, really, that he ever had, that he felt that he could identify with. And the “Radetzky March”, I think, is the novel, published in 1932, which gave fullest expression to that sense of longing for the old Habsburg Empire, and what it meant for him. And it is not at all surprising that the novel ends with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, partly, because Sarajevo fascinated him as another of these kind of provincial, almost border towns, but partly, also, because it meant the end of the Habsburg Empire, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So yes, that should have been, and perhaps was, to some extent, something that brought them together. I think the reason Zweig… I think it was essentially because Zweig was an Austrian, but also, was prepared to bankroll Roth, and to try and give him advice and give him support, advice about publishers, and so on. And if you look through the index of the letters, as edited and translated by Michael Hoffmann, one of the fascinating things is, I think there are 133 references to Stefan Zweig in the collection. No other writer is mentioned even as many as 20 times in the whole book.
Q: Dr. Estelle Phillips says, “What do you think will happen in the future with regard to biography and details of people’s lives now that emails and social technology have taken over from the gentle art of letter writing?” “Such internet information is ephemeral, and not likely to last indefinitely.”
A: I fear, Dr. Phillips, you may well be making a very valid and important point here. And I’m afraid you really have to ask somebody who’s much more familiar with the latest library technologies, who might have a more optimistic take on this. But I absolutely see what you’re saying. And Roth’s letters, which were only quite recently translated about 10 years ago or so, they really offer, and this is why I’ve quoted so liberally from them, because they really do give up absolutely fascinating insight into Roth’s inner-life in a way that the fiction does, to some extent, but I don’t think the fiction captures the rage, the dissent into madness, the alcoholism, the physical collapse in the same way as the letters do. And you also get a much richer sense, of course, of his relationship with Zweig, which became so important during those years in the 1930s. They were both German-speaking refugees, of course, and they both came to tragic ends. Roth, much younger, only at 44 when he died of pneumonia in Paris. Zweig committing suicide in Brazil.
Q: Ron Bick asks, “The words you read, 'it’s falling apart’, is that not how many of us feel now?” “The day Russia invaded Ukraine, I called a friend and asked, ‘Is this what the start of a World War feels like?’” “Too many things have been changing and feeling uncertain over the past 10 years, that I sometimes feel that way.” “Are things falling apart?”
A: Mr. Bick, I think you ask a very topical, pertinent, important question there, and I think, I’m sure, many of us feel that way. And if you think back to the optimism of the period of 1989 to ‘91 with the fall of communism, the end of the Cold War, it was an extraordinary moment of optimism, really. And I remember, as a television producer, going with Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian intellectual and writer, to Belgrade, just after NATO had bombed Belgrade, during the Kosovo War. We were making a programme for the BBC about the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, in fact. And what was really striking to me, as I walked through the streets of Belgrade, was, firstly, how friendly people were, considering that NATO had just been bombing their city, but secondly, the surgical strikes were surgical strikes. You compare the landscape of Belgrade after the NATO bombing with, say, Aleppo in Syria, or now, a number of cities, tragically, in Ukraine, those are like something from the Second World War, like a Polish city, or Rotterdam, or Berlin, Hamburg after the terrible bombing raids. It is a different world. And, you know, I’m sure you are absolutely right, Ron, if I may, that, you know, people are feeling very bleak and pessimistic after this invasion of Ukraine. And I think Roth’s letters, as a historical document, one of the fascinating things is, that they do give a sense of what it felt like to be a German Jewish refugee in Paris from 1933 to '39, watching the world you knew fall apart. And interestingly, that phrase from the “Radetzky”, towards the end of the “Radetzky March”, was published in 1932, so it was just before he had to leave Germany. Could not be published in Germany. Zweig had his books burned in Germany. Neither of them could be published in Germany. They were published in German, but by Dutch publishers. And then, of course, with the Second World War, that no longer became possible. So in both cases, these are two great writers. In both cases, you get a sense of the growing despair of these men as Nazism takes root, first of all, in Germany, and then increasingly in Austria, and then in Czechoslovakia, and then throughout most parts of Europe. And so Zweig keeps on the run. He goes from Austria to Britain, to Bath, to London, then to America, then tragically, to Brazil, where he commits suicide. Roth declines earlier. Doesn’t live to see the Second World War, but dies in exile in Paris.
Q: Adrian Banks asks a very interesting question. “Are most of his books, most of Roth’s books, still in print?”
A: Well, it’s a very good question, because I think they’ve always been in print in German, but some of them, just a few, were translated before the war, and then in the 1940s and '50s, but only a few, and not usually by mainstream publishers. And what then happened? Well, two things happened from the 1990s. Michael Hoffmann, who is, himself, Austrian, and is a published poet by Faber & Faber, and he became fascinated with Roth’s work, and he has translated pretty much all of Roth’s novels, and his letters, and many of his short stories, and indeed, some of his selected journalism. And they have been published by Grant Books, by, I mean, all kinds of mainstream publishers, and republished in new translations. “The Coral Merchant”, and other stories, was just published late last year by Pushkin Press, who’ve done so much to translate and make available the work of so many of these great Central European and East European writers, including, also, Stefan Zweig, who, they’ve published a lot of his, republished and retranslated a lot of his stories and work. So, yes, they’re readily available in paperback. I do recommend the letters. I can’t remember, I’m afraid, off the top of my head the name of the publishers. Edited and translated by Michael Hoffmann. Something like 500 pages, the letters. I think still only in hardback, probably. I would also recommend Dennis Marks’ book, “Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth”, which is published by Notting Hill Editions in hardback, and cost 12 pounds when I bought it. And it’s only 130 pages. It’s a fascinating account of Roth’s life, and what you might call, what he calls his psycho-geography. And I’ve lent very heavily both on his book and on Michael Hoffmann’s writing about Joseph Roth.
Q: Arona Blackman writes, “Wasn’t the Nazi Euthanasia Programme, euthanasia/murder, like the ethnic murder of the Holocaust?”
A: Absolutely, it was murder. There’s no doubt about it. You’re absolutely right. It was murder, and it was both the psychiatrically ill, the mentally ill, and people with physical disabilities who were handicapped. And that became, you know… A lot of the technologies used later for larger mass killings, were started at places, psychiatric hospitals, like Hadamar. And there is a growing and very interesting historiography about the role of psychiatrists and doctors in euthanasia under the Nazis.
Ellie Strauss, “Thank you for this fascinating insight into Roth”. Thank you very much. “I read his books in German, but so long ago that it might be worth rereading.” I would absolutely recommend that. “I have seen translations, but they don’t seem to have the same sharp edge depth.” “I really appreciate your knowledge and talent for communicating these portraits.” Thank you. And she says, “P.S., I’m a German English translator, live in both languages”. How wonderful. I do so envy you to be able to speak German and English both so fluently. I’m sorry you feel that way about Michael Hoffmann’s translations. I’m not a fluent German speaker, like yourself, so I can’t really, I can’t comment. My only response, I suppose, would be to say, that they have at least made so much of Roth’s work newly available for new audiences, which has been a wonderful thing. The second thing I would say is, I know what you mean, Stefan Zweig’s, “The World of Tomorrow”, his memoir about growing up in Austria, Hungary, and his life in Vienna. I still prefer the first English translation from, I think, 1947, to Anthea Bell’s more recent translation for Pushkin Press. It may well be that hers is, technically, better as a translation from German into English. And she was certainly a renowned and acclaim translator. However, I just prefer the English in the 1947 translation. I just find it… I don’t know whether it’s truer to the German original, but it just seems, to me, a better read. So I’d be very interested to know, Ellie, what you make of that, if you’ve read those two books?
Q: And Lilly Lewy, I hope I’ve pronounced your surname correctly, L-E-W-Y, asks, “How did those letters survive?” “Did Zweig keep the originals addressed to him, or did Roth keep carbon copies?” “Same, of course, for the other correspondence.”
A: That is a very, very good question. I would guess that, certainly, the early letters, that Zweig would’ve kept the originals. Whether once he was on the move and more itinerant, whether what happened to his papers as he moved to England, and America, and then finally, Brazil, I doubt he did, but perhaps he left them with friends in England? I don’t know what the story was, and I’m afraid it’s a while since I’ve read Michael Hoffmann’s introduction to the letters, which, well, I’m sure he addresses this point. Roth, I’m sure, did not keep copies of the letters. And even if he did, I mean, I don’t know how anybody would’ve tracked them down when he died in Paris in ‘39, because you would’ve had the German occupation less than a year later. To be honest, I don’t know the answer to that. It’s a very good question, very interesting question. I would have to look again at Michael Hoffmann’s introduction to the letters, and see if he deals with those issues. Some very kind messages from Amy Birnbaum and Uta Von Joseph. Thank you so much.
Q: And thank you, Joseph Rice, who kindly asked, “Have I written a biography of Roth?”
A: And no, I haven’t, because I’m not… I don’t speak German, nor read or write in German. There are one or two biographies of Roth but I think Dennis Marks’ short book is actually the best of of all.
David Garfield, “My father-in-law was born in Eastern Hungary, just south of Hurst, in 1906”. “When he left for America in 1921, it was Czech, and now, is in Western Ukraine.” Well, of course, so many of these areas, these borderland areas, changed their names, changed the language in which they spoke. Emeric Pressburger, as is in Powell and Pressburger, the great script writer, who came as a refugee to Britain, and made his career, his third film career, he started in Berlin, and then in Paris, and then in London. But he was born in Romania, and the part of Romania he was in then became part of Hungary after the First World War. And so, suddenly, his whole world changed. And, of course, Czernowitz, which was one of the great literary cultural centres, certainly, in terms of Yiddish culture, of the Austria-Hungarian Empire, is now Chernivtsi, which I’m sure I’ve mispronounced, in Ukraine. So has a different name, and is in a different country. And it has changed country several times in between as well. So, you know, these are extraordinary things which affect people’s lives and their identities so much. And in Roth’s case, is crucial to understanding his identity and his work.
Myrna Ross, “Valerie Schatzker wrote ‘Oil Barrons of Galicia’, a fascinating history”. Thank you very much for the recommendation. It does sound fascinating.
Debbie Meise, “‘In the Midst of Civilised Europe’ by Jeffrey Veidlinger just published about the pogroms in Ukraine”. That’s the title, that’s the author. One of these extraordinary American polyglot historians. And it’s a fascinating, fascinating read.
Jean Gaffen, who might be Jean Gaffon, but I hope, either way, I’ve got the name right somewhere along the line, “Excellent film about the starvation of the Ukrainians by , ‘Mr. Jones’, based on the true story of a journalist”. Absolutely! I still haven’t seen it, I’m ashamed to say. I’ve heard wonderful things about it, and I hope to track it down on Netflix, or Amazon Prime, or somewhere else one of these days.
But thank you so much for that recommendation, David Garfield, about his father, “He spoke Yiddish Hungarian and Goyish, meaning Ukrainian”.
Q: Bobby Stager, “It sounds as though Roth was acutely antisocial, which makes me wonder if he ever fraternised with the other writers in his environs, or was Zweig the only one?”
A: No, he wasn’t the only one. There’s a fascinating book, and I can’t remember the name of the author now, a German author, though, called a summer… It’s either called “A Summer in Ostend”, or it’s about a summer in Ostend, where Roth, Zweig, and several other famous writers of the time are all staying in Ostend at the same time, just before the Second World War, possibly 1938? Maybe? Yes, maybe 1938. Anyway, so he wasn’t quite as much of a loner, perhaps, as I’ve suggested. But Zweig is really the only one that he writes to regularly, and who becomes a sort of very close friend, because he was so bloody difficult, I think, is the honest explanation, the only explanation. He was a very, very difficult, angry man, driven to rage by so many aspects of his life situation, his disastrous marriage to a schizophrenic, his perilous finances, being exiled from Germany, unable to publish in Germany, unable to… You know, I mean, just his life was in desperate, desperate straits, and let’s be generous and assume that’s the reason for his terrible anger, what made him so difficult.
Q: Carol Vingrow writes, “I see that Philip Roth had family that came from Lemberg, but I presume that there were many different branches, because I don’t find a family connection”. “Is that correct?”
A: Yes, it is correct. There is no connection, despite the surname between… No biographical connection with Philip Roth and Joseph Roth. By the way, just on the subject of Philip Roth, this year is the 50th anniversary of his first visit to Prague, which proved such an important turning point in his life and his writing. He became the editor of the other Europe series published by Penguin, which introduced so many of us to the great Central and East European writers for the first time, like Bruno Schulz, and many others.
Judith Demetrio, “Galicia was Northeast Romania”. “Bukovina has monasteries from 1500 done by Romanian kings.” “The borders there are in continuous flux.” That’s a wonderful way of putting that, Judith, if I may call you Judith? Yes, in continuous flux, indeed. And perhaps, we’d be foolishly optimistic if we think that the borders have stopped changing now, as we can see with Ukraine, for example. You know, the Crimea, and now two provinces in Eastern Ukraine, have been reabsorbed, brutally conquered, applicable by Russia.
So thank you very much to Sharon Fingleson and to Nannette Spain for your very kind comments. She thought it was about Philip Roth, my talk, so I hope you weren’t too disappointed. I would love to give a talk about Philip Roth on another occasion, and I’ve written a lot about Philip Roth over the years.
Gene Hervitz, thank you, also, for your kind words. “I agree about feeling uncomfortable in Vienna.” “I found Berlin much more open.” Yes, I think Berlin is. I mean, the kind of Berlin that Roth was writing about, Joseph Roth that is, was writing about was, of course, the old militarism, militarist Prussia that he so hated and resented.
Stephen Fruman, thank you. “Might be worth reading Volker Weidermann’s "Summer Before the Dark: Zweig and Roth, Ostend 1936”. “And Peter Owen has published some of Roth’s work.” Absolutely right, because Peter Owen, of course, was a German Jewish refugee from Nuremberg. Although a small publisher, he published… He was one of the first to publish Roth in translation, and one of the first to publish Hermann Hesse in translation. I’m pretty sure I’m right in thinking that he translated “Siddhartha” for the first time in English, and that helped finance his publishing company. And Volker Weidermann’s “Summer Before the Dark”, thank you so much, Stephen, for reminding me of the author and the title, and I cannot recommend that book too highly. It’s an absolutely fascinating read about that group in Ostend in 1936.
Ellie Strauss, “Regarding your comment about earlier translations, they’re generally truer to the original”. “The German language has changed enormously, integrating so many Anglicisms and Americanisms, and it’s often hard to maintain the old German usage, and that applies to many of my other languages, French, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, and even Swiss German”. If I was wearing a hat, Ellie, I would take it off to you. That is absolutely formidable, you know so many languages, and thank you very much for your very interesting point.
Helen Smith, thank you for your very kind words. “I enjoyed the Marks’ book, too, but my publisher wouldn’t forgive me if I don’t mention that I’ve just completed the first full English biography of Roth, which will be titled ‘Endless Flight’”, wonderful title, “‘The life of Joseph Roth’, published by Grant Books this October.” Well that is fantastic! Helen, congratulations. I cannot wait to read it. Grant Books, as you obviously know, have published a lot of important editions of Roth in translation here, and…
Oh, right, Helen. Another message from Helen Smith, “Sorry, this has come up under my University of East Anglia colleague’s name, Helen Smith, whose Zoom account I sometimes share”. My name is Karen Pim, not Helen Smith. So Karen Pim. I’m just going to make a note of this right now before I forget your name and the title. “Endless Flight” is such a good title. It’s absolutely the right title to capture his life. Grant, October. Wonderful, can’t wait! Thank you so much for letting me know about that, and I hope other listeners will be as interested as I am. Arthur Fleiss, “It’s called ‘Ostend 1936’, ‘Sommer der Freundschaft’ in German by Volker Weidermann”. Thank you, so now we’ve got both the English and the German titles, and it’s a fantastic book. And thank you for your kind words, Arthur.
Elizabeth James, “‘The Summer Before the Dark’ is by Volker Weidermann about Zweig and Roth on Ostend”. Thank you.
And Lorna, thank you for your kind words.
Ellie Strauss, “I learned from a historian that Ukraine made a huge land grab after World War II that included parts of Hungary, Poland, et cetera, and that Crimea was not originally part of Ukraine”. I don’t know my Ukrainian or Crimean history well enough to know the relation, historically, between Crimea and Ukraine, I’m ashamed to say. And, of course, there were huge land grabs after both World Wars, and huge population movements as well, so that places like Galicia, Bukovina, you know, were sort of moved around after both World Wars. And, indeed, there were ferocious wars and conflicts after the First World War, for example, between Ukraine, Poland, and the new Bolshevik regime. And Isaac Babel’s “Red Cavalry”, and best of all, Isaac Babel’s “Notebook” about the campaign in 1920 when the Cossacks, when he travelled with the Cossacks, as they invaded the shtetls of that whole area, are absolutely extraordinary reading, and I will be referring to those in a forthcoming talk.
Fina and Raphael Ironovich say, “Crimea was given inverted commerce to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev”. Thank you very much for that. Thank you Yvonne S. for your kind words.
[Judi] That looks like that’s it, David.
Sorry.
Fabulous! Sorry, we’ve gone onto just after nine o'clock.
[David] Oh, my goodness! I’m so sorry to keep you all.
Fabulous!
Thank you for all the wonderful questions.
[Judi] Thank you so much, and thank you to everybody who stayed with us the extra half an hour. Thank you so much, David. And we’ll see you again soon.
Can’t wait. Thank you all so much.
Take care.
Take care, bye-bye.
You’re welcome. Bye-bye.