Joseph Roth (1894-1939) is a German-language author who has acquired a certain audience in our country, or a legend, to put it better. The first of the editors, editors or translators to include his titles in the Spanish bibliography must have been Juan José del Solar – who in the 1980s translated several of Roth’s titles by Bruguera, among them the essential Marsha Radetzky, now republished in Catalan by Bruguera. Progress2024 – Carlos Barral – who could have been the promoter of the edition in Anagrama de The Legend of the Holy Mustache (And Others for the Cause, 1981) and translation Tripoli (1983) in his own publishing house, and shortly afterwards Jaume Valcorba, who began editing Roth’s own texts, a little later and continuously, in Acantilado, until today.
The man Joseph Roth and his literature are part of a constellation like Kafka, Stefan Zweig, Bruno Schulz, Alfred Polgar, Franz Werfel, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil and others. Almost all of them are authors of German expressionism, and almost all of them are Jews, citizens of a vast and indefinite state, the Austrian Empire, into which they were born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most of them saw this empire—a geographical, political, linguistic and religious monster—disappear after the Great War. A few, like Zweig, survived to feel shame again in the aftermath of the Second World War. It cannot be said that in such a situation, with all the tensions he experienced, including those related to national law, the writer felt trapped by any religion or any ideology. Another thing is the relative security that the Prussian or German state could offer to a writer like Thomas Mann, more compact and secure in its power and its borders, as it appeared throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Joseph Roth was born in Brody, a once prosperous, then impoverished, area in the heart of one of the most “exotic” regions of the empire, Galicia, historically contested by several neighboring powers, and today partly a western region of Ukraine. The area was populated by a large number of Jews who were partly able to establish a business in a town, however small, but who remained on many occasions in the city. com.shtetl The villages of birth where they lived poorly. Roth had an uncle who protected him, who studied, and in time was able to travel around the world: in addition to the novels he published with difficulty, Roth devoted himself to journalism with great success, and came to be more highly regarded in this regard. his office, than many of his colleagues. When he could “return to his hometown”, he emigrated to Paris, where he died in 1939.
This irregular life of Joseph Roth – Kafka’s life was also irregular, but in an “introspective” way, without leaving his fixed address in Prague – is what the reader will read in a beautiful novel in Catalan: Wandering Jewstranslated by Pilar Estelrich (Martorell, Adesiara, 2024). Both in this book and in another new one as well, Cabinet of Curiositiesedited and translated by Berta Vias Maho (Madrid, Ladera Norte, 2024), the reader will discover one of the most characteristic features of Roth’s literary world: the desire to give life to the little things of everyday life, the love of small things. Circumstances and insignificance, and the intense curiosity for details that go unnoticed by almost everyone. Rare and curious things – two words that often go together – are not in fact rare because of themselves, but because a very curious gaze enters them with great generosity, transforming them with that gaze into something exceptional. (The poetics of Villa Matas’s literature is exactly the same: he is told that things happen to him, or that he encounters very strange things, and for this reason he can formulate and define his own world; but this is not the case: he finds himself in the same “facilitation” as Joseph Roth before any phenomenon: he observes a trivial thing with precision, elevates it to a completely respectable consideration, and then a page of “strange” literature is born from it as the most natural thing in the world.)
This is why, at times, one who reads Joseph Roth’s works finds them not far removed from the later works of Walter Benjamin, no matter how much the Austrian author may be disliked – as the introduction says – thinker“Thinking Artists.” (Even a retrospective by Benjamin Komm.) Childhood in Berlin circa 1900 It has a lot to do with the small size height that Ruth loves so much.)
a Wandering Jews We shall discover that the author did not complain of belonging to an ancient race that had been wandering for centuries throughout the continent; he was almost happy to find himself in a marginal, eccentric, or accidental position. In the Treasury of Wonders DWe will discover that this mistake led Ruth to stop, at every moment, at some incidents of human existence which, if we contemplate them well, gave more security than the homeland. Thus the number ofOstgoodThe Jew from the East, presented to us in the generalizable case of Joseph Roth as the antithesis not only of the German bourgeois who is completely settled in himself and in a secure social and political orbit (Thomas Mann, again), but also as the opposite of the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie of his time, assimilated or integrated. Two readings, then, are complementary.
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