Customer Reviews (1)

Birth of a nation. And of a writer
The wisdom of the winners of WW1 gave the world a new nation: Austria. When it was born, it was called, inofficially, `Deutschoesterreich', i.e. German Austria. In line with the new ideology, or illusion, of the `nation', it was meant to give a country to the German speaking people of the old Austria, which was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian double monarchy, and had never been a `country', not to speak of a `nation'. And anyway, much to the sorrow of later years, not all 'Germans' of the old Austria lived within the borders of the new one. That gave excuses for some of the excesses of central European power games of later years.

The new country had a lot of problems, what with economic recession, with the start of a new system (the monarchy was finished, democracy started from scratch), with new borders (the current Austria, the 2nd republic, is not entirely identical with the borders of the first attempt at it.)

That was the world in which a Jew from the former Polish provinces of Kakania tried to make a career as a journalist and writer. Joseph Roth had returned from WW1 (where he had been a reluctant volunteer) and he was lucky to find employment at a better paper, which was however too good for the market and went under in under 2 years. But Roth had made himself a first name and he moved on to Berlin then. His most famous novel Radetzkymarsch is often misunderstood as nostalgic about monarchy. Not so, Roth was a strong anti-monarchist and leftist.

Roth wrote his first articles as Josephus. (Not sure that allusion to a historical colleague made too much sense, frankly speaking.) He was lucky to be accepted as an unknown youngster among a group of well known writers like Alfred Polgar, who became his mentor. (You can read about the time and place and some of the names in Clive James' great book Cultural Amnesia.)

So, Josephus wrote about daily life in Vienna in 1919/20: the black markets, the coffee houses, the unemployed, the immigrants from the East ... Out of this experience would grow one of his great early novels: Rebellion. Also, the beginnings of his great essay about Jewish Migration can be seen here.

His style was developing: the short sarcastic observations full of surprising pictures and word combinations. I find much similarity between Josephus and his Berlin colleague Kurt Tucholsky, who would suffer a similar fate in the 1930s: exile and early death.

The book is just a selection, it is not a complete collection of his Vienna articles. That makes me wonder if I should buy the 6 volume collected works...
Other collections of his journalism have been published with texts on Berlin and Paris, and with travels, e.g. to the Soviet Union.
I have to post the review of the German collection here, as there seems to be no special English version of the Vienna texts, which is a pity. The German title of the collection translates as 'Coffeehouse Spring'.

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Product Description
'I have killed and yet I consider myself to be a good man.' So begins the tale of former Russian secret agent Golubchik, holding court after hours in a tiny Russian restaurant on Paris's left bank. As he recounts his tale to a rapt audience they find themselves drawn into his futile quest to claim the noble name of his father, his destructive love affair with a beautiful model and his hatred for his half-brother, the rightful Prince. Confession of a Murderer spans rural Russia, cosmopolitan St Petersburg and pre-First World War Paris and alternately fascinates and horrifies the reader with its wild story of collaboration, deception and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution. ... Read more

Product Description
Joseph Roth has been described as "one of the greatest writers in German of this century" (The Times). With tragic foresight, Right and Left, first published in 1929, evokes the nightlife, corruption, political unrest, and economic tyranny of Berlin in the twenties, the same territory covered trenchantly in Roth’s reportage, recently published as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33.

After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father’s banking empire. Increasingly beset by skyrocketing inflation, and dismayed by his brother’s infatuation with the brownshirts, Bernheim turns to an outsider for help—a profiteering Russian émigré whose advice proves alternately advantageous and disastrous. Too late to change his fate, he realizes he has been decieved by a master in the craft of manipulation. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Choose the Other Edition ...
... the same translation by Michael Hofmann, but combined with Roth's last masterpiece, "The Legend of the Holy Drinker".

Here's the review I wrote of "Right and Left" in that other edition:

""The English title - Right and Left - of Joseph Roth's 1929 novel 'Rechts und Links' almost automatically suggests a clash between furious Fascism and surly Bolshevism, but such is not the case in this oddly-inconclusive narrative. Roth's subject is the precarious middle -- the haplessly middling Middle Class of Middle Europe amid the false peace between the two World Wars. The three principal characters are also stuck in the middle between Jewish and 'German' identities, being of 'mixed' blood.

Two brothers, Paul and Theodore Bernheim, with a German father and a guardedly Jewish mother, are the anti-protagonists of the novel. Dashing Paul is full of arrogant mediocrity, with a middling measure of charm and the luck of a bottle thrown in the sea with a note in it; it WILL wash ashore somewhere, but the message turns out to be blank. Snarly Theodore is full of mediocre arrogance compounded with raging sibling-envy and self-hatred; half Jewish, he first clings to Brown Shirt anti-semitic nationalism for an identity fix, then finds himself suborned as a journalist-provocateur for a 'liberal' newspaper. The closeted owner of the newspaper is Nikolai Brandeis, a stateless immigrant who has by his own account already lived the lives of three different people. Brandeis is not so much unscrupulous as aloof from scruples; for such a man, getting rich is simply a choice. He is also, metaphorically, the stroller on the beach who snatches Bottle Paul from the waves and reads the blank page.

Brandeis arrives on the scene at the end of Part One of this three-part book, and his appearance rescues both the brothers and the reader from drift. Brandeis is a fascinating character, and interesting characters make interesting reading. It's a literary weakness of this novel that it starts so slowly, that it spends more time than necessary establishing the mediocrity of the brothers. Yes, of course, middling characters must be given middling flaws and suffer middling crises, but for the first time in my experience of reading Joseph Roth I found that I doubted whether he knew where his novel was going next. I'd almost admitted boredom when Brandeis materialized. Brandeis is effectively The Wandering Jew of European imagination, an 'immortal' outsider who re-invents himself at will. All three chief characters are immensely convincing, by the way, and that in itself is enough to rescue 'Right and Left' from novelistic mediocrity. Don't expect to empathize with anyone in this book -- or if you do, take a quick look in the mirror and despair for your life! Roth's treatment of the milieu is bitterly satirical, not unlike that of Sinclair Lewis writing about Main Street America in the same decade. It may be another weakness of the novel that Roth so obviously despises his creatures of imagination, but then how could one not despise such human hollowness? Roth's ruthless sallies of satire are amusing without being funny, but how can one laugh at an entire society slouching toward fascism, as the author perceived so presciently?

This is a long way from Roth's most readable book. There are passages of fierce insight and vivid originality, but there are also pages that Roth might have pruned. Accounts of Roth's personal life suggest that he wrote in extreme haste, with distractions on all sides. I'd certainly not recommend 'Right and Left' for a first encounter with Roth, but for a proven fan like me there is enough substance in the book to justify the reading time and the five-star rating. For a history-minded student of Roth's Europe, the book offers evidence of what William Butler Yeats must have meant when he declared that 'the Center does not hold.' ""

And here's what I wrote elsewhere about The Holy Drinker:

It's the Last Installment of the "Legenda Aurea", the Medieval 'Lives of the Saints'This 40-page story, not even long enough to be called a novella, was Joseph Roth's last work, written in his last unhealthy and despairing year of life. Roth died in exile and anomy, in Paris in 1939, at the age of 44. Translator Michael Hoffman declares that the alcoholic and prematurely decrepit Roth worked on this story with unusual care and deliberation, polishing it painstakingly in a manner he'd seldom had time for during his journalistic career. It's a diamantine piece of writing-craft. Though it has the surface simplicity of a hagiography, its depths are anything but naive. Some readers may find it reminiscent of Leo Tolstoy's late tales of sanctity, but Roth's concept of Holiness is far subtler, and thus more interesting than Tolstoy's.

The Drinker of the title is a 'clochard', a derelict who sleeps under the bridges of the Seine. One night, chance encounters begin to attend him, money comes his way, not any fortune but enough to get him fed and clothed and rested... and drunk more often and more utterly than his routine of poverty had allowed. In his damaged consciousness, the encounters are 'miraculous' and require him to confront his conscience, to redress his own worthlessness. In the end, he dies in a state of delirious sanctity, convinced that a little girl he encountered in a bar is Saint Therese. Whether the author, Roth, supposed that we the readers would unquestioningly accept the Drinker's epiphany as real ... ah well, the the elusive genius of this story. Did Roth himself die in a state of blissful religious certainty? Ah well, I rather think he hoped to die as well as his drunkard; whether he did or not, he concluded his writing career with a miracle.

Excellent Portrayal of Weimar Germany
"Right and Left" chronicles the temporarily intertwined lives of two characters whose circumstances and personalities reflect the uncertainties of German society in the post-World War I era.

Paul Bernheim is the weak and vacillating, though well-intentioned scion of a wealthy family whose fortunes have collapsed amidst the inflation and chaos of the 1920s. On the other hand is Brandeis, the enigmatic and unscrupulous Russian emigre who thrives in the disordered atmosphere of the times. Their paths cross amidst the glamorous nightclubs, gambling dens and upscale restaurants of Weimar Berlin.

Published in 1929, the book presciently foreshadows the disaster looming on Europe's horizon, perhaps most clearly in Roth's depiction of Theodor Bernheim, Paul's younger brother, an enthusiastic member of a right-wing, anti-semitic paramilitary group.

Though "Right and Left" may lack the dramatic impact of "The Radetzky March," it does effectively portray the malaise at the heart of German society in the 1920s, if not as artfully as "Flight Without End." Nonetheless, the book is well worth reading for its depiction of its time, its excellent prose and the clever insights that are Roth's stock in trade. ... Read more