Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 to Jewish parents in Eastern Galicia (present-day Ukraine). He studied philosophy and German philology in Lemberg and Vienna. In 1916, he enlisted in the Austrian army and participated in World War I. During the interwar period, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, where he lived for twelve years (after 1920). As early as 1922, he was among the first to identify and denounce Hitler. Being Jewish himself, he was highly critical of the compromising stance of the Jewish community. His first novel, "The Spider's Web," was published in 1923 in serial form in an Austrian newspaper and achieved considerable success. In 1926, he spent four months in the Soviet Union, where he began writing the novels "Flight Without End" and "The Silent Prophet." In 1932, he confided to a friend: "We must leave. They will burn our books and we will be the target... We must leave so that only our books are consigned to the flames." On January 30, 1933, the day Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, Roth permanently emigrated to Paris, where he spent the last years of his life in poverty and alcoholism until his death in 1939. He left behind an extensive and varied body of work: thirteen novels, eight major narratives, three volumes of essays and reports, and countless articles. His most notable novels include "Hotel Savoy" (1924), "Flight Without End" (1927), "The Radetzky March" (1932), and "The Emperor's Tomb" (1938). In his swan song, "The Legend of the Holy Drinker" (1939), Roth, without being autobiographical, presents a vivid, sweet, yet simultaneously tragic tale of absolute surrender to passion.