A terminal alcoholic who drank himself to death in 1939 at age 44, Joseph Roth, whose ideas about Judaism were often complex and contradictory, has long been an object of fascination. With the publication of his letters, attention has redoubled on the novels and journalism of that passionately pugnacious Austrian-Jewish writer.
His work, and especially “Radetzky March,” which is a 1932 military opus steeped in nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a book-length reportage, “The Wandering Jews,” from 1927, about Eastern European Jewish migration, has benefited for decades from lucid commentators. Notable among them is the Italian Germanist Claudio Magris, whose 1971 “Far From Where?: Joseph Roth and East European Jewish Tradition” is still untranslated into English, although a French version did appear in 2009.
Using letters, as well as literary works, Magris locates the source of Roth’s permanent anguish in the double loss of the Jewish shtetl and an idealized Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Roth’s case, his shtetl was the Jewish community of Brody, Galicia, now in Western Ukraine, where a significant Jewish population would be murdered during World War II.
