Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters

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.

Upon his return to Europe from fighting on the eastern front in World War I, Franz Tunda finds that the old order is gone and Europe has changed utterly. Disillusioned by the new ideologies, he is the archetypal modern man taken up by the currents of history.

It is Roth's special gift that, in Tarabas's fulfillment of his tragic destiny, the larger movements of history find their perfect expression in the fate of one man.

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. “Worthy to sit beside Conrad 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 London Times

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.

Because he is born illegitimate, Friederich Kargan lacks even a social identity. Moving to Vienna, he becomes involved both in revolutionary agitation and a love affair before he is caught by the authorities on his first trip to Russia, enduring a Siberian interlude before escaping. He eventually returns to Russia after the February Revolution, becoming leader of the Red Army, but realizes during the civil war that the revolution seems to be over before it has begun; the cause has been betrayed, yesterday’s proletariat has become today’s bourgeoisie; exile might offer the only choice. A beautifully descriptive journey from loneliness into an illusory worldliness and back into loneliness, this is a haunting study in alienation by a master of realistic imagination.

A masterpiece of twentieth-century history, only recently rediscovered in Germany, appears for the first time in English. Every few decades, a book is published that shapes Jewish consciousness. One thinks of Elie Wiesel's Night or Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. In 1927, however, before these works were written, Joseph Roth (1894–1939) composed The Wandering Jews. At the time a correspondent in Berlin, emotionally ravaged by the whirlwind events of Weimar Germany, Roth examined the concept of Jewish identity and questioned what lay in store for it. Whether writing of the schism between Eastern and Western Jews, warning of the false comforts of assimilation, or eerily foreseeing the horrors posed by Nazism, The Wandering Jews remains as unforgettably vital today as it was when first published.

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

В 1926 году газета Frankfurter Zeitung предложила известному австрийскому писателю и журналисту отправиться в советскую Россию. Рот отправился в путешествие в июле 1926 года. Его первые репортажи полны живых впечатлений и написаны по следам его перемещений, однако скоро он обращается к волнующим его темам, раскрывая их на советском материале.

Эта книга была переведена на Первой Волжской переводческой резиденции, проведенной Центром современной культуры «Смена» и Домом творчества Переделкино. Переводчики из Казани, Волгограда, Астрахани, Минска, Москвы и Петербурга переводили очерки Йозефа Рота летом 2023 года в Национальной библиотеке Республики Татарстан и на острове-граде Свияжск.

Издательства выражают благодарность Музею-заповеднику «Остров-град Свияжск» за помощь в организации переводческой резиденции и за предоставленные изображения из фондов. Текст проиллюстрирован фотографиями из книги «1914–1930. Seize annees d’histoire en 700 photographies» («1914–1930. Шестнадцать лет истории в 700 фотографиях»), выпущенной издательством Ernest Flammarion editeur в Париже в 1931 году и журналов «Огонёк», выходивших в 1926 году.

Книга выпущена при поддержке Фонда «Живой город» и Министерства культуры Республики Татарстан.

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