Joseph Roth’s Letters Reveal a Great Forgotten Writer

Feb 10, 2012 The Daily Beast

The great Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth has undergone a slow rediscovery, but a new collection of his letters reveals him to be an urgent, necessary, and heartbreaking prophet, says Anthony Heilbut.

If you want a high literary experience, to be rocked between emotional extremes by a writer with perfect pitch in any realm, you won’t do better than this collection of letters by an impoverished alcoholic, who died with two bedraggled suitcases to his name. The excellence of Joseph Roth was never in doubt. During the 1920s, he had been the most highly paid journalist in Germany, and he remains the greatest of that tribe since Dickens. When his novel Job appeared in 1930, The New York Times said correctly that “there seldom has appeared a book in which each word is burdened so heavily with music and meaning” (and it was a mediocre translation!). When The Radetzky March appeared two years later, the paper said, again correctly, that it could be the model of a historical novel. Yet when he died—of pneumonia, in a Paris charity ward, his body wracked with delirium tremens—the paper of record spent more time on his decline, “once well-to-do … he has lived in increasingly distressed circumstances in the last few years.” But even his dying was epochal—everything about this amazing writer resonates.

In 1933 when Hitler, whom he had warned against for years, took office, Roth told his friend Stefan Zweig that “the word has died, men bark like dogs.” In the darkest of times, “there’s a handful who know, and they know everything.” He was among that handful, and dedicated himself all the more to the word, even in its death agony. He writes the most engaging prose imaginable, observing everything with intense precision, filtered through what he sometimes called the “Jews’ dialectical intelligence,” and other times, the French “dialectical heart.” His range of empathy surpasses any of his peers—Mann, Musil, or Kafka. Yet he could also be furious, capable of murderous thoughts and rhetoric, the jolliest of men and the saddest (“I have no home ... wherever I am unhappy is my home”). He was also hyper-alert—“anything and everything is able to provoke me”—because he needed to be. Joseph Roth’s posture—and that included his outrageous alcoholism: he personified what Berlin Jews called “Herr Besofsky” (from besoffen, to drink)—was geared to survival.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters Edited and translated by Michael Hofmann 512 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $39.95.


Full piece at The Daily Beast.