Understanding Joseph Roth

Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature

by Sidney Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld examines Roth's obsession with the question of belonging, tracing it to his boyhood in the Slavic-Jewish Austrian Crown land of Galicia. Illustrating how Roth's quest determined his most typical themes and gave rise to the Jewish-Slavic melancholy that permeates his narratives, Rosenfeld includes readings of the early novels. Through this fiction Roth quickly established his reputation as a literary chronicler of both the final years of the Habsburg monarchy and the lost world of East European Jewry. Rosenfeld describes Roth's flight from Berlin upon Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933, and his precarious existence as an exile. While copies of Roth's works went up in flames in Nazi book burnings, the novelist moved from one European city to another, living in hotels and writing at café tables. From the time of his exile until his death in Paris just months before the outbreak of the Second World War, Roth produced six novels, as well as shorter works of fiction and a steady flow of journalism denouncing the Third Reich. Rosenfeld's critical readings of the novels written during Roth's exile connect them with the novelist's prescient estimate of Hitler's intentions and his own longing for a sovereign Austria.

152 pages, Hardcover

First published February 28, 2001