- Person
- Joseph Roth
- Lived
- 1894–1939
- Field
- Novelist & journalist
- From
- Austrian
The story
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody in Galicia, a town near Lemberg where Jewish culture played an important role and Jews made up a large part of the population. He grew up there in modest circumstances near the border between Austria-Hungary and Russia, attended the local secondary school and went on to study in Lemberg and Vienna. Although he made his career in Vienna, Berlin and Paris, the Jewish towns of Eastern Europe stayed at the centre of his imagination.
In 1927 he published The Wandering Jews, an essay on the migration of Eastern European Jews westward after the First World War, which contrasted the lives of Eastern and Western Jews. In 1930 came Job, the novel about the devout Mendel Singer that made him famous as a novelist.
In the 1930s, often writing quickly under financial pressure, he set a number of further works in this world. Among them were the novel Tarabas (1934), the story The Bust of the Emperor (1935), Confession of a Murderer (1936), Weights and Measures (1937) and the story The Leviathan, published after his death in 1940. He also began a story of his own childhood, Strawberries, which he left unfinished. Together these books paint a detailed portrait of Jewish life and its neighbours in the borderlands of the old empire.
The Neue Deutsche Biographie counts Roth among the most important chroniclers of Eastern European Jewry, which was largely destroyed in the Holocaust, and says he gave it a lasting spiritual survival, portraying it lovingly, vividly and with longing in simple, factual language. Roth did not live to see that destruction: he died in Paris in May 1939.
Because the communities he described were almost entirely wiped out a few years later, his fiction has become one of the ways later generations can encounter them. Readers today meet the people of those towns not as statistics but as individuals with faith, doubts and hopes. Many of his books have been translated and filmed, carrying that vanished world to audiences far from the places where it once flourished.
Why it matters
Roth's fiction keeps alive the memory of Jewish communities that were wiped out, allowing new readers to encounter their world.
About Joseph Roth
Galician-born novelist and star reporter whose Radetzky March and Job mourned the lost Habsburg world and the Jewish life of the East, written from exile and despair.
More about Joseph Roth
- Almost all of Joseph Roth's novels were filmedNearly all of Joseph Roth's novels were adapted for film or television, including Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
- Joseph Roth's Radetzky March told an empire's fallJoseph Roth's 1932 novel Radetzky March traced the decline of Austria-Hungary through one family and went through five printings in a few months.
- Joseph Roth wrote against fascism from exileJoseph Roth warned against fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and, after 1933, wrote fiercely anti-fascist articles from exile in Paris.
- Joseph Roth helped fellow refugees in ParisIn exile in Paris after 1933, Joseph Roth helped aid refugees, including through the Entraide Autrichienne, while writing against Nazism.
- Joseph Roth's novel Job portrayed a simple Jewish manJoseph Roth’s 1930 novel Job, about Mendel Singer’s search for God, made him famous as a novelist and was filmed in Hollywood in 1936.
Sources
- Roth, Moses Joseph Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Joseph Roth Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.