Joseph Roth was a complicated man. A boy from a Galician shtetl who belied his origins; a Viennese gentleman who despised westernised Jewish values; an avowed Catholic who revered Talmudic learning. Dismayed by modernity and aghast at others’ blindness to the Nazis, Roth was a relic of a past age alive to present dangers. Most at home in hotels and bars, he was a stalwart friend and a leech on all who loved him; chivalrous and solicitous, he also hoarded pocket knives and harboured vicious grudges. Roth paid the bills for his wife’s asylum care but failed to visit her, and all his closest relationships followed a terrible cycle of rupture and repair.
In his writing, though, Roth was transcendent. As Keiron Pim puts it in his new biography, Endless Flight, Roth was able to “peer into souls and see the world with sunlit clarity where others squint through fog.” Fêted by editors, lauded by contemporaries, Roth was a groundbreaking journalist who now ranks as a world-class novelist. During his lifetime, though, success and security forever eluded him. His finest novel, The Radetzky March, was completed in 1932, just in time to be burned and then banned by the Nazis. Afterwards his books struggled to find readers. He died in Parisian exile, in the Necker Hospital for the poor, at the age of 44. Even in death, fate robbed him of comfort: it was May 1939, after his beloved Austria was lost to the Anschluss but before the war he longed for had been declared on Hitler’s Germany.