The author of such novels as Job, The Radetzky March, and The Emperor’s Tomb, Joseph Roth is widely considered one of the 20th-century’s greatest German-language writers. Roth was also a prolific and perceptive journalist and essayist—and the very first to report on the doings of Adolf Hitler. Frederic Raphael reviews a recent biography of Roth:
Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth is a thoroughly researched and enthralling biography of a writer long underrated, not least by those embarrassed by his louche life and lack of unambiguous allegiance to Jewishness, let alone Zionism. Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Galicia, where it was wise for Jews to keep their side-locked, black-brimmed heads down. . . . Clever Joseph’s prize-winning essay at school was called “On Opportunism and Compromise.” What more apt topic for an examinee set to become a forever unsettled journalist, travel writer, and novelist?
Cosmopolitan Vienna was the place to go and shine. Assimilation to German courtesies, accent, and language served to efface the uncompromising, Yiddish-speaking provincialism that Roth would later revisit with morbid rue. Keiron Pim, a young British biographer, defines him as “double throughout his life.” The charge of duality or duplicity has been leveled at so many Jews in so many contexts that it all but smacks of a collective accusation. Yet what better equipment for a writer? In the field of European literature, the fruit of Jewish irresolution has been a rich crop, dialogue its flower: Proust, Kafka, Arthur Schnitzler, Italo Svevo (Aron Hector Schmitz), Vasily Grossman, and many others.
A prolonged visit to the USSR in 1926 had collapsed Roth’s illusion, fostered by the brief eminence of Trotsky, that anti-Semitism could be purged by Communism. Having listened to the cliché-ridden discourse of young comrades incapable of forming a simple honest sentence after being trained never to think for themselves, he recurred to royalism, to the disdain of his accidental fellow-traveler Walter Benjamin. The sententious Benjamin would declare Roth displeasing to look at as he himself continued to lug his Red illusions all the way through the 1930s to his own suicidal terminus at Portbou, on the Franco-Spanish border, in early 1940.
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/frederic-raphael/joseph-roth-endless-flight/