Joseph Roth

An exiled Russian spy shares his dramatic life story from a Paris restaurant in this novel by the author of The Radetzky March. In a Russian restaurant on Paris’s Left Bank, Russian exile Golubchik alternately fascinates and horrifies a rapt audience with a wild story of collaboration, deception, and murder in the days leading up to the Russian Revolution. Praise for Confession of a Murderer “Worthy to sit beside Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s excursions into the twisted world of secret agents. Joseph Roth is one of the great writers in German of this century; and this novel is a fine introduction to this view of intrigue, necessity, and moral doubt.” —The Times (London)

Still bearing scars from the gulag, a freed POW wanders across Russia to an industrial town in Eastern Europe. In its massive Hotel Savoy, he meets a surreal case of characters - the dancer Stasia, a former factory owner obsessed with winning the lottery, and a host of cigar-puffing plutocrats and Slav revolutionaries - waiting in vain for something to happen: the return from America of a tycoon named Bloomfield. Like Europe itself in 1932, the hotel is the stage upon which characters follow fate to its tragic destination.

Now available for the first time in English, Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois is a novel fragment that was discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death. The book chronicles the life and times of Alexander Perlefter, the well-to-do Austrian urbanite with whom his relative, a small-town narrator, Naphthali Kroj, has come to live after becoming orphaned. The colourful cast of characters includes Perlefter's four children: Foolish Alfred, with his predilection for sleeping with servant girls and widows and boasting of the venereal diseases he contracts; the hapless Karoline, whose interest in math and physics and employment at a scientific institute seem to repel serious suitors; the flamboyant Julie, a sweet, pale and anemic girl who likes any man who is inclined toward marriage; and the beautiful and flighty Margarete, besotted with a professor of history. Written circa 1928-30, Perlefter represents Joseph Roth at the very peak of his literary powers - it was penned just after the publication of The Silent Prophet and just before his masterpieces Job and The Radetzky March. Rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation, Perlefter is an important addition to the Roth canon.

From Joseph Roth, an allegorical yet decidedly modern novelist, comes this story of postwar disillusion, the limits of faith, and "personal fate as governed by the blind, casual workings of a machine controlled by no one and for which no one is responsible" (The New York Times). When Andreas Pum returns from World War I, he has lost a leg but gained a medal. But unlike his fellow sufferers, Pum maintains his unswerving faith in God, Government, and Authority. Ironically, after a dispute, Pum is imprisoned as a rebel, and all that he believed in is now thrown into upheaval. Moving along at a breakneck clip, Rebellion captures the cynicism and upheavals of a postwar society. Its jazz-like cadences mix with social commentary to create a wise parable about justice and society.

“[A] remarkably prescient novella prefiguring the collapse of morality and the rise of Nazism” by the celebrated Austrian author of The Emperor’s Tomb (Publishers Weekly). 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 in Roth’s trenchant reportage. After serving in World War I, Paul Bernheim returns to Berlin to find himself heir to his recently deceased father’s banking empire. Troubled by skyrocketing inflation and 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, Bernheim realizes he has been deceived by a master in the craft of manipulation. “Although less widely known than many of Roth’s novels, Right and Left is a superb example of his anatomy of the psychology of fascism.” —Los Angeles Times

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering shine out their greeting. In the 1920s and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled extensively in Europe, leading a peripatetic life living in hotels and writing about the towns through which he passed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply observed - and collected together here for the first time - his pieces paint a picture of a continent racked by change yet clinging to tradition. From the 'compulsive' exercise regime of the Albanian army, the rickety industry of the new oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' houses of Tirana forced into modernity, to the individual and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his hotel stays, these tender and quietly dazzling vignettes form a series of literary postcards written from a bygone world, creeping towards world war.

Joseph Roth’s final novella, The Leviathan, concerns a shtetl’s finest coral merchant and how his dream of seeing the sea for the first time materializes at a terrible cost. In the small town of Progrody, Nissen Piczenik makes his living as the most respected coral merchant of the region. Nissen has never been outside of his town, deep in the Russian interior, and fantasizes that a Leviathan watches over the coral reefs. When the sailor nephew of one of Progrody’s residents comes to visit, Nissen loses little time in befriending him for the purpose of learning about the sea. The sailor offers Nissen a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come to Odessa and tour his ship. Nissen leaves his business during the peak coral season, and stays in Odessa for three weeks. But upon his return to Progrody, Nissen finds that a new coral merchant has moved into the neighboring town, and his coral is quickly becoming the most sought after. As his customers dwindle, life takes an evil twist for Nissen Piczenik. And the final decider of his fate may be the devil himself.

The renowned author of The Radetzky March examines the mind of a Russian Revolutionary and the limitations of ideology in this classic n ovel. Based on his own observations during an extended stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926, The Silent Prophet is Joseph Roth’s vivid attempt to explain the Russian Revolution and its betrayal by exposing the personal motivations of its leaders. Written at the height of speculation about the fate of Marxist Revolutionary Leon Trotsky, it is a brilliant portrayal of revolutionary idealism-turned-cynicism. The illegitimate and rootless Friedrich Kargan—the Trotsky figure—becomes a leader of the Red Army during the civil war. But he soon realizes that the ideals he fought for were already lost. after openly defying the coldly amoral Savelli—the novel’s Stalin figure—Kargan is sent into exile in Siberia.

Vienna of the late nineteenth century, with its contrasting images of pomp and profound melancholy, provides the backdrop for Joseph Roth's final novel, which he completed in exile, a few years before his tragic death in 1939. The Tale of the 1002nd Night is a brilliant, allegorical tale of seduction and personal and societal ruin, set amidst exquisite, wistful descriptions of a waning aristocratic age, and provides an essential link to our understanding of Roth's extraordinary fictive powers.

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. "[A] book of impassioned reportage and polemic...it is impossible not to feel a sympathetic wonder. "—Michael Andre Bernstein, The New Republic "In these disturbing yet strikingly illuminating pages, the truth of Jewish destiny from long ago vibrates and sings..."—Elie Wiesel "No other writer...has come so close to achieving the wholeness that Lukacs cites as our impossible aim. "—Nadine Gordimer "What a marvelous writer! Read him now. You can thank me later. "—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "[C]aptures and encapsulates Europe in those uncertain hours before the upheaval of a continent and the annihilation of a civilization. "—Cynthia Ozick, author of Quarrel and Quandary "[A] writer well worth adding to the short list of giants such as Thomas Mann, Elie Wiesel, and Primo Levi. "—Hadassah Magazine, Sanford Pinsker

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, The 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.