Roth, Joseph

Average customer rating:

Wanted to like it more
Helpful hint
Three and a half stars
Superb novel, disappointing translation
Not Enough Stars for This One

The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Granta Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

ASIN: 1862076057

Amazon.com

Joseph Roth's 1932 novel, The Radetzky March, starts with an accident that creates a dynasty. When an infantry lieutenant steps in front of a bullet intended for the young Franz Joseph, the Austro-Hungarian emperor rewards him with wealth, promotion, and a knighthood. Almost overnight, Joseph Trotta is "severed" from his ancestors, and his family is transformed from unremarkable soldiers and peasants living in the outer reaches of the empire to barons and high-ranking officials living near the imperial palace. As long as Franz Joseph is the Kaiser, their status is secure. But when Trotta happens upon a schoolbook account of the event that exaggerates his heroism, he is shaken: <blockquote> He had been driven from the paradise of simple faith in Emperor and Virtue, Truth, and Justice, and, now fettered in silence and endurance, he may have realized that the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness. </blockquote> As World War I approaches and the monarchy's limitations become apparent, Trotta's son and grandson become even further removed from this paradise. They continue to follow the codes of honor and duty, though such behavioral guides become pointless, even burdensome, in a world shorn of simple faith in an emperor. Trotta's grandson Carl Joseph finds his military career overwhelmed by bad horsemanship, alcohol dependency, frivolous roulette and baccarat debts, and misguided love affairs--the kinds of flaws, he thinks, that are inevitable without the self-assurance and practical knowledge that he would have gained had he earned (rather than inherited) his position. Not long ago, he thinks wistfully, his family lived as peasants "in dwarfed huts, making their wives fertile by night and their fields by day." It is here that the Trottas' demise is at its most poignant, as the focus of the narrative shifts from the loss of status to the far more devastating loss of purpose.

In both style and temperament, Roth's novel stands between the 19th and 20th centuries, and the three Trottas could be seen as part of a progression that stretches back to Tolstoy's Prince Andrei and looks ahead to the Mathieu of Sartre's Les Chemins de la Liberté trilogy. Although The Radetzky March illustrates why the monarchy was doomed, and isn't blind to the new nations and ideologies on the horizon, Roth is more interested in his characters' psychology than their politics. And their central difficulty--the bewildering meaninglessness that follows the dissolution of an ideal--has been a fundamental 20th-century dilemma. The Trottas are, in Roth's stunning phrase, "homesick for the Kaiser." One need only substitute "the Chairman" or "Marxism" or "God" to understand the novel's lasting resonance. --John Ponyicsanyi

Book Description

The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greatest achievement, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such, a universal story for our times.

Customer Reviews:

Wanted to like it more.......2006-09-12

I can't put my finger on why this book just seemed average to me. The writing is clear and easy to read. The descriptions are detailed, but not overly so. The characters are fully-fleshed and interesting. The plot is engrossing. So why didn't I like it more? I don't know. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I can't identify with life in a monarchy and I can't stomach the pampered, entitled lifestyle of people who don't deserve such wealth and leisure.

Regardless of all that, I did find it interesting that Roth depicted gambling addiction so accurately (or at least as I imagine it to be) long before anyone recognized it as such.

While I occasionally felt sorry for the characters, by the end I was just happy to be finished and that I would no longer have to linger in their world.

Helpful hint.......2006-03-29

I have little to add to the helpful reviews here but just wish to inform readers:

Michael Hoffman's superb translation is now available in the US - ASIN 1862076057 - and is the best translation of this wonderful work.

Three and a half stars.......2006-02-26

I would highly recommend this book if you are (like me) fascinated with the decline of the Habsburg dynasty during WWI, however I would not be as eager to do so if you were not. Roth's powers of description and detail are superb to say the least and this allows him to perfectly capture the pessimism and slow decline of Austria Hungary before the war, however his lack of effective dialog and heavy handed symbols and allusions really hurt this work from a pure literary perspective.
Roth's magnificent eye for setting and some truly amazing scenes depicting the emperor Franz Josef, and the state of the Austrian army make this a must read for those interested in the period

Superb novel, disappointing translation.......2005-05-19

For anyone interested in European society before 1914, "The Radetzky March" is a must-read. It is a masterful portrayal of one family's bonds to Austro-Hungarian Empire and the House of Habsburg over three generations.

Unfortunately, as other reviewers have pointed out, Neugroschel's traslation is very disappointing. Some terms are only partially translated ("Rittmeister" becomes "Rittmaster" on p. 94), which is worse than no translation at all. The name of the Austrian parliament, the Reichsrat, is translated as "Imperial Council" (p. 135), but that seems overdone. Reichsrat is isn't the emperor's council, and the word "Reichsrat" is usually left untranslated as a proper noun (e.g. no one calls the Reichstag the "Imperial Diet"). Other Austrian terms, used in the late 19th century, are given Americanisms or neologisms.

If you can get your hands on it, read the British translation of "Radetzky March" (ISBN: 1862076057) published by Granta Books and translated by Michael Hofmann. Hofmann's translation is more sensitive to the feel of the time and more subtle. It is not perfect (Onufrij becomes Onufri, Frau Hirschwitz's Prussianisms are translated in chs. 2 and 3), but it is certainly better.

Not Enough Stars for This One.......2004-11-25

There can be very little more satisfying than discovering a new author. I had never heard of Joseph Roth until a friend recommended I read anything written by him. I picked up this title because it was the only one available in my local library.
What a stroke of luck!
This is a masterpiece of the highest order. There are no accidents in this beautifully crafted and written work of art. Every detail and scene is carefully calculated to present the complex life of the individual in the overall rush of history, as an empire decays and collapses and an entire value system fades away, along with the Emperor Franz Joseph and three generations of the Trotta family. The individual also lives and quickly dies within the eternal cycles of nature, so poignantly drawn by Roth.
I will never be able to do this work justice in just a brief review. I read the Everyman's Library edition, with a brilliant introduction by Alan Bance (which should absolutely be read AFTER reading the work, not before). That introduction does justice to every aspect of this masterpiece and pays tribute to Roth as a major literary figure.
This work alone puts Roth in the company of Flaubert, Mann, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Woolf, Kafka, and anyone else you can name. Bance points out that there's something of a sequel to this work in "The Emperor's Tomb," which I have read and also thoroughly enjoyed.
If you care at all about art and literature, please read "The Radetzky March." I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

Average customer rating:

A masterpiece of journalistic force and observation
Wake up call
Reintroduces an important observer to scholarship and the casual reader
What Journalism Can Be
Gorgeous

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
Joseph Roth , and Michael Hofmann
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

20th Century | World | History | Subjects | Books

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The Radetzky March
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ASIN: 0393325822

Book Description

"[Joseph Roth] is now recognized as one of the twentieth century's great writers."—Anthony Heilbut, Los Angeles Times Book Review)

The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for What I Saw, a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, What I Saw introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance" (Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review).

As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty—a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos.

What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic.

Customer Reviews:

A masterpiece of journalistic force and observation .......2007-03-15

Joseph Roth's Berlin after the Great War was a urban blend of the homeless, the displaced, Jews escaping from the East, "passengers with heavy loads," bourgeosie, bohemians and Reichstag politicians with their "reservoirs of asininity." His feuilletons, rich in colorful writing, unexpected phrases and observations, describe Berlin as alive, amusing, sad; a photo gallery of the dead including children who die without identification; their photographs "the only trace of themselves they bequeath to posterity." Its architecture giving up "the soft and vanishing treads of its past" through its stone. The dark symbolic burial of Weimer's Frederich Ebert in 1925, the last chapter entitled "the auto da fe of the mind" in which he decries the private silent censorship of the twenties of Jewish writers, whose theme was the city. One soon and rewardingly realizes that Roth is the true north for looking back at that Berlin and not Fosse's Berlin in "Cabaret, " a fin de siecle café society peopled by the likes of Liza Minelli and its cross dressing performers. Hoffman's translation and introduction are superb.

Wake up call.......2006-12-27

One of the things that Joseph Roth saw, after the scales fell from his eyes, can still be seen in 2006. In 1933, having fled to Paris, he wrote: "Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this shameful capitulation)."

What a change from the Roth of 1924, wandering around Berlin during an election and complaining that the Germans did not take politics seriously: "They (the political parties) work with the heavy and pathetic weaponry of ethics -- made in Germany. No flames lick the walls."

Flames would lick the walls soon enough, and now, today, they lick the walls of the city were Roth, a Jew, fled later.

But he was a very young man in 1924, very much like the young man in Remarque`s "All Quiet on the Western Front" (not yet written) who had left a play called "Saul" in his desk when he went to war.

A romantic trying to make sense of an unromantic world.

I was disappointed in "What I Saw," not because it is not good, it is. But it is not nearly as good as the reviews had led me to think.

Part of that is the change in taste. Roth wrote feuilletons, whose impact he himself meant to be "charming," for the newspapers. Today, we would call them columns, and the modern taste is for hammer blows, not charm.

Hammer blows seem more apt for Weimar Berlin, too. Roth went slumming, and what he found at the six-day bicycle races, at the shelter for homeless men and families, in the dives was horrible enough. He treats it in a light, standoffish, feuilletonic manner. The tone is little different when he visits the tony Admiral Baths, where the comfortably off soak out an excess of booze, or simply find a warm refuge on a cold night when the traveler cannot find a hotel room.

Roth seems disengaged. Until at last, in exile, in the tailpiece to this collection from a much larger body of Berlin newspaper work, he has to come to terms with his position as an outcaste, a German Jew who had once thought to be a German -- tout court, at the French say.

There were, despite the apparent cluelessness of the party election managers, Germans in Berlin at the time who were deeply engaged. Roth visits the Reichstag opening, the Victory (to Prussianism) tower, the house of the murdered Rathenau. Disengagement everywhere.

Those, indeed, were places where Germans were disengaged. If Roth had poked his head into some other places, he would have had a harder time maintaining a light, insouciant tone.

Reintroduces an important observer to scholarship and the casual reader.......2005-07-30

Joseph Roth was a journalist and novelist of great talent, but where he shines is in his short pieces, which he published in many dailies in Germany, Austria and France throughout the decline of the fragile Weimar Republic. His collected pieces, seemingly casual and chatty observations on everything from the Berlin high-rise craze to the Jewish quarter and its inhabitants, form an accretion I can't quite explain. Brilliant little sentences--almost throwaway comments on the passing scene--build to a picture so much richer than if he'd "explained" the unease and its causes. After all, when Roth wrote these feuilletons (sp??), the "scene" was all around him and other Berliners. And sometimes, his observations are scathing and frightened, as in his gorgeous anger in "An Auto-de-Fée of the Mind"---and we feel the National Socialist noose tighten. Roth wrote (and published) that particular piece from the relative safety of Paris. It would not be safe for long. I'm thankful this new collection has been published, or I would have gone to my grave without being introduced to one of Berlin's most astute watchers.

What Journalism Can Be.......2003-04-21

Joseph Roth was a master journalist from Vienna who moved to Berlin on 1920 to investigate and report first hand on what he feared was a doomed megapolis. WHAT I SAW: REPORTS FROM BERLIN 1920-1933 is one of the most refreshingly original books to grace our shores in years. Roth was concerned with newspaper writing but he was also a poet of rare distinction and courage. These 'feuilletons' or short essays on observations reveal insights into the Berlin from the fall of the Weimar Republic to the rise of the Nazi reqime. Calling these small essays 'readers for walkers' Roth wanders the streets and mass transportation of Berlin, looking into the backyards of common day people, the Jewish neighborhoods/ghettoes, the photographs in the police files of the unknown dead victims found in the gutters, the high wired clubs of decadent diversions, buildings of history and of future, and all the while he maintains a beautiful descriptive, poetic style while keeping his eyes wide open to the pathetic prophecy of the doom of the great city of Berlin. His words: 'The story of how absolutism and corruption, tyranny and speculation, the knout and shabby real estate dealings, cruelty and greed, the pretense of tough law-abidingness and blathering wheeler-dealer stood shoulder to shoulder, digging foundations and building streets, and of how ignorance, poor taste, disaster, bad intentions and the occassional very happy accident have come together in building the capital of the German Reich...' are balanced on other pages of describing the beauty of the sky above Berlin, the pathos of the lonely and neglected poor people on the trains, and the wonder of the vaguely temporary air that surrounded the bulding of a city after The Great War.

Roth is able to tell us so much history in so brief a space. Here are the beginnings of Isherwood's BERLIN STORIES, the birth of the style of the recent works of WG Sebald's books, and even the writings of Edmund White in THE FLANEUR. Would that our newspapers could find the space AND the talent to place such insightful observations in our poetically vapid journalism of today! This is a rare book of beautiful writing and we are indebted to translator Michael Hofmann not only for his lyrical English style, but also for his own insightful essay about the man who wrote these 'feuilletons'. A sad parting note is that Joseph Roth died in Paris in 1939 from the effects of his alcoholism. Such was the influence of Berlin on many artists of thetime.

Gorgeous.......2003-03-10

It's true, there's poetry on every page. Beautifully rendered portraits of a city and a culture. Roth's poetic imagination and powers of observation are only matched by his compassion. A must read-for anyone interested in the development of the 20th century human in Europe.

Average customer rating:

Absolutely incredible...

The Great Ball Game: A Muskogee Story
Joseph Bruchac
Manufacturer: Dial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

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Carousel: A Novel
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ASIN: 0803715390

Customer Reviews:

Absolutely incredible..........1999-09-22

One of the best, if not the best children's book I have ever read. Its an excellent text to help young people realize that no matter who they are, they have a place and a role to play in this world. I loved it.

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Hotel Savoy (Works of Joseph Roth)
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Overlook TP
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1585674478
Release Date: 2003-10-28

Book Description

Still bearing scars from the gulag, a freed POW traverses Russia to arrive at the Polish town of Lodz. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal cast of characters, each eagerly awaiting the return from America of a rich man named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself in 1932, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination.

The Emperor's Tomb (Works of Joseph Roth)

Average customer rating:

A Giant among Writers
Not A Sequel
Beckett previsited
Skeletal.
joseph roth's farewell to europe

The Emperor's Tomb (Works of Joseph Roth)
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Overlook TP
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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The Radetzky March
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Job: The Story of a Simple Man
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ASIN: 1585673277

Book Description

The Emperor's Tomb is a nostalgic, haunting elegy for the end of youth and the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A continuation of the saga of the von Trotta family from The Radetzky March, it is both a powerful and moving look at a decaying society and its journey through the War and its devastating aftermath, and the story of the erosion of one man's desperate faith in the virtues of a simple life.

Customer Reviews:

A Giant among Writers.......2004-04-13

Although this novel is not a real sequel to The Radetzky March, it takes place within the confines of the same period, the wasteful and waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it goes a step further and brings us to the sad, purposeless, lost days following the end of the empire, where all that remains as a symbol of past glory is Franz Joseph's tomb, outside of which stands a lackluster guard who, in effect, is guarding a memory that is fading away. And from these vacant days emerges an evil, the Third Reich, almost as a consequence of the indifference that the narrator, Trotta, exhibits. Trotta, like the empire, loses everything in the end: his friends, his mother, his wife, his son, and his country. He is the ultimate alienated modern man in search of meaning. He longs for the certainty of the past and cannot change or adapt to the present. And he is utterly lost in the face of overwhelming evil.
All of this is presented in exquisite prose and imagery that captures delicate emotional nuances and historical events. Joseph Roth accomplishes more in just a few pages than most writers do in a hundred. He was a great artist, a literary giant, whose genius I hope will be fully recognized in the coming years.

Not A Sequel.......2004-04-09

Roth's novel of Austria-Hungary in the years before the first world war, The Radetzsky March, is one of the best novels I've read recently. Though billed as a sequel to The Radetzky March, this novel is considerably different with only a handful of minor characters that overlap the two stories. It has its pleasures but they are of a different nature.

Certain differences leap out right away. First, this "novel" is considerably shorter than The Radetzky March. Second, this novel is written in the first person, from the point of view of Franz Ferdinand von Trotta. Third, the language is considerably more colloquial than the more formal structure Roth used in the previous novel. Everything contributes to what feels like a more casual experience than The Radetzky March.

Still, Roth has a lot to say about the experience of pre- and post-Great War Austrians. Von Trotta, the narrator of the story, is a pretentious young man hanging out in the coffee shops of Vienna completely unprepared for the experience of war he will soon face. He sees little fighting, however, as he is captured early and spends the bulk of the war as a prisoner in Russia. Returning to his wife (with whom he never consummated his marriage) and mother, he finds a world he no longer understands through which he must find his way.

I am always fascinated how so many things we only consider "modern" problems crop up in these old stories. The intriguing lesbianism Trotta's wife engages in during his absence is one example. The vanity and conning of Trotta's elderly mother is another. It amazes me how we can read a novel like this and see how little human nature changes over the decades.

Though my personal taste leans more towards the formalism of The Radetzky March and its deep examination of the relationships between fathers and sons, there is much to enjoy here. It certainly has a more modern flavor that will appeal to many readers as some of Roth's other novels may not. Roth's ability to find truth in character is also on good show here. I would recommend it highly.

Beckett previsited.......2003-06-06

Spanning the First World War, this short novel outlines the fall from grace of a minor Austro-Hungarian Noble, a scion of a once proud and heroic family.

It is quite a bleak book in many ways - and reminds me of the world Beckett creates in Waiting for Godot. There is an inevitability in the fall and no action could have prevented it.

The language used (at least in this translation) is minimal and strips to the bone images - making those that remain quite haunting. One which has remained with me for several days is the image of violets blooming from the bones of dead men.

Certainly a great, if troubling, book.

Skeletal........2001-03-27

The Radetzky March, which precedes this book, is a big, fully conceived novel of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with memorable and unique characters from the von Trotta family, vivid description, and narrative and thematic unity. The Emperor's Tomb, by contrast, is an incomplete outline, lifeless, cold, and mournful. Continuing the story of the Trotta family, this time concentrating on a branch of the family which did not receive a title or its privileges, Roth limply attempts to bring Austrian history from World War I up to 1938, the year of the book's publication.

In 1914 Franz Ferdinand Trotta is a young man with no real goals, other than pleasure. When the Emperor declares war, he becomes a soldier on the Eastern front and, very quickly, a prisoner of war sent to Siberia. Upon his eventual release and return to Vienna after the war, he finds the monarchy gone, the financial system in disarray, and his personal life in tatters. What remains--and never changes--is Trotta's lack of direction, his lack of purpose, and, most distressingly, his lack of motivation regarding his future.

Trotta's refusal to recognize that he can and must now assume power over his own life leaves the reader with a character for whom there can be no epiphany and no real climax. Trotta is a throw-back, insisting even twenty years after the war, "I still belong to a palpably vanished world, a world in which it seem[s] plain that a people exists to be ruled and that, therefore, if it wishes to continue being a people it cannot rule itself." Though the political situation in post-war Vienna, leading to the rise of Hitler, could have led to a chilling, dramatic story, Roth steers clear of this, choosing instead to memorialize the vanished past by giving us a character whose failure to adapt to change reflects some of the very characteristics which destroyed the empire he mourns....

joseph roth's farewell to europe.......2000-03-27

"the emperor's tomp" continues where "radezky march" left off. Unfortunately it is not one of joseph roth's best books, despite some very touching scenes, when he writes up to his usual standards. roth aimed to write a story of the austria before hitler, but it seems he lost it somewhere in the middle, and couldn't remember what he was doing. at the time he was writing this book roth was already a lost-to-the-world alcoholic, which shows. Still, the heart-wrenching sadness of some passages make it an interesting read. I wouldn't recomend it as a first introduction to roth's work though (better start with radezky march).

Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939

Average customer rating:

Incandescent

Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

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What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth
The Wandering Jews
Hotel Savoy (Works of Joseph Roth)
Right And Left

ASIN: 0393327167

Book Description

<B>The wisdom of a lost generation distilled in a bottle of Calvados.</B>

At one time an underground hero in the world of journalism, with prose on a par with Tolstoy and Kafka, Joseph Roth now looms large in the pantheon of European literature. Indeed, the last five years have seen a major Roth revival culminating in Report from a Parisian Paradise, a haunting epitaph by the greatest foreign correspondent of his age. An exile in Paris, Roth captured the essence of France in the 1920s and 1930s. From the port town of Marseille to the erotic hill country around Avignon, Report from a Parisian Paradise—superbly translated by Michael Hofmann—paints the sepia-tinted landscapes, enchanting people, and ruthless desperation of a country hurtling toward dissolution. Roth's book is not only a paean to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work of transcendent philosophical clarity. 6 illustrations.

Customer Reviews:

Incandescent.......2004-05-11

A true gift for anyone that loves writing, observation, and life, and an absolute gem for anyone that has ever been to or loved France. Heartbreakingly intelligent, perceptive, and compassionate writing from a master. Get this for yourself and all those you love (since you won't want to part with your copy).

Average customer rating:

Job
Great story telling
A Simple Man made Wise
Beautiful story
I couldn't stop crying or smiling

Job: The Story of a Simple Man
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Overlook TP
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1585673749

Book Description

A newly arrived immigrant to New York experiences a series of devastating misfortunes. Just as he begins to lose his faith in God, something comes along to restore his faith, a miracle that will have the reader rejoicing.

Customer Reviews:

Job.......2004-08-23

A book so beautifully wrought, so poetically driven,
so simple in its profound telling of sadness, despair and
redemption. Read this and be rewarded with the
memory of Mendel which, hopefully, will accompany
you all your years

Great story telling.......2003-10-17

Joseph Roth uses the style of Yiddish story telling to retell the ancient story of Job. This is a beautiful and poignant story in which all the characters are fully drawn and recognizable from our own lives. Since reading this book, I've gone on to read all Roth's works of fiction. I wish we had writers of his quality today.

A Simple Man made Wise.......2001-01-17

An extraordinarily moving story with the biblical Job at its heart - a man driven `to curse God' and ready to die, including his friends who come as comforters - but written in such a way as to capture the heart of the story and the imagination of the reader and, by concluding at the very point where you want it to go on, leaving you to complete the experience for yourself.

Beautiful story.......2000-12-01

Mendel Singer parallels the biblical Job. Roth's characters are warm and human. The best of all the fictional treatments of the Job story. I particularly appreciated his treatment of the most difficult part of the Book of Job, his final restoration.

I couldn't stop crying or smiling.......1998-02-27

It is so good to see that people haven't changed in almost 100 years. What moved people then, still moves us today. Life has come full circle. It is among the wisest books about human nature and life's bare essentials.

Three Novellas: THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER, FALLMERAYER THE STATIONMASTER AND THE BUST OF TH (Works of Joseph Roth)

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Solid and moving European prose of another era

Three Novellas: THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER, FALLMERAYER THE STATIONMASTER AND THE BUST OF TH (Works of Joseph Roth)
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Overlook TP
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1585674486
Release Date: 2003-10-28

Book Description

The Legend of the Holy Drinker" tells the haunting story of a dissolute vagrant who is uplifted for a short time by a series of miracles. Written in the final days of Roth's life, it is a novella of sparkling lucidity and humanity. "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" and "The Bust of the Emperor" are Roth's most acclaimed works of shorter fiction.

Customer Reviews:

Solid and moving European prose of another era.......2006-06-04

The translations of Roth's stories offered in this slim volume are all the more extraordinary in that they allow the reader to walk next to the stories' narrators as they describe their settings and characters. Whether it is the simple peasants who don't comprehend the end of an empire in their sleepy little village, a clochard with a debt, or a simple stationmaster who longs for love and life, Roth holds these simple characters up as icons of a time and world that struggles with the progress of politics, morals, and perspectives. I recommend these stories for the beauty of the language and the beauty of Roth's gift of storytelling.

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the legend of a holy drinker

The Legend of the Holy Drinker
Joseph Roth
Manufacturer: Granta Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 1862074712

Customer Reviews:

the legend of a holy drinker.......2000-05-03

a small masterpiece that could not get its due recognition in the literary world.but this is a star created by a genius (a literary genius of rare and exceptional creative ability).so much of life so much of spirit so much of the realities of naked life these forty odd pages that are enough to experience the life in its totality-its soft and beautiful oasis that everybody runs behind.it is on this oasis that life is building up.no work is comparable with this one that emphasis the importance of the dream in life.there is a lot to understand from these forty pages .magical realism is a real realism here.the foundations of individual life is surely made with dreams.magic of dreams in life..only a genius of very very exceptional calibre can create an "andreas"(main charecter) who is so much down to earth and life and who goes thru a series of miracles.the book is about 70 years old but the fragrance is still fresh and will be fresh ever.a real writer is a plesure to read and experience.rarely we can see a philosophical novel written in so simple words.the mixing of reality and dream so that we are unable to differentiate what is what;but we know this is life.our life.my life.if we are reading for the first time we regretfully close the book that we found the book,the writer rather late.powerful,touching and delightful little gem of a novel.....dream land anyway is a reality...more real than the real...the tale or legend of andrea is not thrust upon the reader but left lingering in the mind...every reader will not forget this book by a genius.everybody will get somthing from this book..

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The Fears of 1937 Were Realized Sooner than Roth Thought
The Ostjüde Writes Back
an elegy of love and tears, shame and foreboding
A fine book

The Wandering Jews
Joseph Roth , and Elie Wiesel
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Europe | History | Subjects | Books

General | World | History | Subjects | Books

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
The Radetzky March
Job: The Story of a Simple Man
The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth
The Emperor's Tomb (Works of Joseph Roth)

ASIN: 039332270X

Amazon.com

As a journalist, Joseph Roth's greatest strength, and perhaps his greatest weakness, was his self-professed love for his subjects. Roth, who is best known for his novels (particularly The Radetzky March), was the star journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the early 1920s, when he began writing stories that led to The Wandering Jews. This book, newly translated by Michael Hofmann, is a masterpiece of literary journalism whose political prescience (regarding tensions between Eastern and Western Jews and the too-easy consolations of assimilation) is grounded in eclectic character studies (of, for instance, Parisian elites, a carnival performer from Radziwillow, a dock worker in Odessa). In an age of idea-driven journalism, when stories are often tailored to prove a writer's pre-existing thesis, Roth's lovingly inductive reasoning is refreshing. And his aphoristic insights are as spontaneous as they are circumspect. ("When a catastrophe occurs, people on hand are shocked into helpfulness.") The statement that best summarizes Roth's belief about the unalterable fate of the Jews also epitomizes the polished spontaneity of his style: Roth writes that wandering is "a tribulation that is appropriate to all Jews, and to all others besides. Lest we forget that nothing in this world endures, not even a home; and that our life is short, shorter even than the life of the elephant, the crocodile, and the crow. Even the parrots outlive us." --Michael Joseph Gross

Book Description

The classic portrait of a vanished people. Every few decades a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Wiesel's Night or Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. But in 1927, years before these works were written, Joseph Roth (1894-1939) composed The Wandering Jews. In these stunning dispatches written when Roth was a correspondent in Berlin during the whirlwind period of Weimar Germany, he warned of the false comforts of Jewish assimilation, laid bare the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, and at times prophesied the horrors posed by Nazism. The Wandering Jews remains as vital today as when it was first published.

Customer Reviews:

The Fears of 1937 Were Realized Sooner than Roth Thought.......2007-01-09

This book was a paen by a 'civilized (read westernized)' Jew on the cusp of WW2 and the holocaust. Roth travelled in most of post-WW1 Eastern Europe to learn the plight of his Jewish compatriots. In the original edition (written in 1926) he speaks of Eastern European Jews (mostly those of Galicia and the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires) being able to find freedom of conscience and a world without anti-semitism by moving to the West. Unfortunately, by the West he meant Germany.

In the epilogue of the 1937 edition (which he wrote from self-exile in Paris) he takes the "New Germany" to task for the treatment of the Jews. He make major points as to the failure of the League of Nations to protect the Versailles Treaty 'national minorities' and specifically the treatment of DPs (displaced persons, people literally without a country). He makes the point that animals are protected in most countries better than Jews and DPs.

He is prescient when he speaks of an 'impending disaster' and seems to presage 'donor burnout'. He tells how right after a calamity, everyone seems to want to pitch in, but after awhile, except for a few philantropists, everyone pretty much wants to go back to their own lives.
This book is among the strongest statements made prior to WW2 of the approaching calamity, not just for Jews but all of Europe.

The Ostjüde Writes Back.......2005-10-12

Joseph Roth's "The Wandering Jews" is one of the best written and most important books about East European Jews ever published. At a time of growing anti-Semitism (the first edition was written in 1926 and an update was published in Paris in 1937) and an immigration crisis affecting Germany as countless refugees poured into Berlin from the East, Roth--himself a Jew from Galicia, the easternmost part of the former Austrian empire--creates a sympathetic yet clearsighted portrait of contemporary Jewish life. In the process he effectively responds to all the stereotypes and libels heaped on East European Jews. For the contemporary reader, however, what is most affecting about this portrait is Roth's ability to convey a panorama of Jewish life on the brink of destruction. Though no one (except maybe Hitler) could have predicted, even in 1937, the extent of the devastation that would be visited on European Jewry, Roth's writing in this book serves as an indelible and moving memorial to a civilization that would soon disappear forever. It must therefore count among the first books in what would now be called "Holocaust literature," and one of the most meaningful works of protest literature--protest against the stereotypes that reduced Jews to objects of scorn and contempt; protest against the violence that would ensue from these stereotypes--of all time. Michael Hofmann's understated and articulate translation of this poignant, heartbreaking little book is a tremendous service for English-language readers. It fills in a vital space in the emerging image of Joesph Roth, a writer finally receiving his due in the precincts of European modernism, and it should be read by everyone interested in good writing and the problems of 20th century history.

an elegy of love and tears, shame and foreboding.......2005-08-03

Again and again--with one neat phrase--Roth puts anxieties into words that it took others whole books to communicate, and then, only vaguely. Not even the magnificent Kafka comes close to a tidy phrase of self-condemnation such as this, referring to the deracinated Western Jew, with his "secret perversities, his cringing before the law, his well-bred hat held in his anxious hand". This statement took my breath away. So did many others in this short book throbbing with love, fear, and sadness. Roth was himself a Jew, one of the thousands who had served his "adopted 'country' " in the Great War (as so many other Jews did for so many other countries) only to have reality--eternal victimhood, eternal wandering--thrust him away, from Vienna, to Berlin, and then to Paris. Like so many educated Western Jews, he looked back to the shtetl with admiration for its nurturing of an authentic self (coupled with a faint relief at not having to live there). This tension--and its guilt-feelings--are so tidily explained in Roth, and his predictions made in the 1930's so chilling--that I jumped almost with relief on his touting the Soviet Union as a better place for Jews. Ah...but an afterward to the second edition contains Roth's warning that things in the USSR have changed, and perhaps his enthusiasm was misplaced...

Then, reader, I cried uncle. Joseph Roth was perfect. Anger and love mix with poetry and humility. He neither rolls in the mud of guilt, nor clutches an ideology through all contrary evidence. Instead, he sings Kaddish for a people gone, a people authentic and pure and of, as Kafka said, "the prayer shawl, now flying away from us..."

A fine book.......2001-07-16

This book, like a more recent one by WG Sebald, The Emigrants, gives a speaking, stunningly well-written account of what it was like to be a Jew in central Europe in the first half of the 20th century. But it is a book that would fascinate anybody, even a deracinated Irishman like me.

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