A man without papers

Joachim Redner

Endless Flight: The life of Joseph

Roth

by Keiron Pim Granta

$49.99 hb, 537 pp

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) has been well served by translators, especially Michael Hofmann. His works are widely available and at least two are acknowledged masterpieces: Job (1930), a lyrical evocation of the fading world of the East European Jewish shtetl, and The Radetzky March (1932), Roth’s elegy for the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until now there has been no English biography. Keiron Pim takes up the challenge with Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth. It is the product of wide-ranging scholarship, a deep immersion in Roth’s oeuvre, and travels in Ukraine, where Roth’s hometown Brody is now located. He shows us Roth as journalist and novelist ‘tracing the continent’s trajectory between the wars in prose of sublime lyricism’ and creating a voice for ‘the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed’.

Roth was a man of many gifts – blessed with a brilliant intellect, a rare capacity for empathy, loyal friends, the love of women – but, like the biblical Job, he was marked out for great suffering. He never knew his father, who was declared insane just before his birth. His impoverished mother managed to give him a classical German education, the passport to university, but he found her love stifling. A brilliant student, he was accepted into Lemberg (Lviv), then Vienna University in 1913, but was soon drawn into the Great War. The 1920s – roaming across Europe, reporting for the Frankfurter Zeitung – were happy at first. Then, in 1929, exhausted by their peripatetic lifestyle, his young wife, Friedl, succumbed to schizophrenia. Guilt-stricken, Roth often feared for his own sanity. In 1933 he fled into exile. Stateless and financially dependent on friends, he drank constantly, and suffered an excruciating death from alcohol poisoning in 1939. Friedl was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.

These are the bare facts; Pim gives us the full tragic history. He doesn’t see Roth as simply a victim of his circumstances, however. Struck by the parallels between Roth’s fractured life and the lives of his characters – the returned soldier Franz Tunda, for example, in Flight Without End (1927), who ‘was not at home in this world’ – he sees Roth’s homelessness as a psychological state and the key to his character. Following David Bronsen, author of the 1974 standard German biography, Pim argues that Roth’s identity was ‘split’ or at best ‘hyphenated’: a provincial East European Jew living the life of a cosmopolitan Viennese man of letters. Applying Sartre’s concept of ‘authenticity’, Pim decides Roth was so conflicted about his Jewishness that he felt

‘inauthentic’ as an Austrian.

It is an oddly old-fashioned approach; human identity is understood as multi-faceted nowadays. But Pim argues that Roth internalised the anti-Semitism in his environment, felt a fraud as an Austrian, blamed his Jewishness – and suffered from pathological ‘self-loathing’. Drawing on studies of ‘Jewish self-hatred’, he applies the term to Roth. The trouble with this explanation is that self-haters don’t normally display Roth’s steely self-confidence. Assured self-irony is his typical tone. In a witty letter written in June 1930 to Kiepenheuer, his publisher, Roth tells him: ‘He is the most courtly man I know. So am I. He got it from me […] He believes in me. So do I.’ Roth is not always this relaxed about his identity, but he was stubbornly convinced he was both an Austrian and a Jew. There is a simple historical explanation for his preoccupation with this question.

Before the war, ethnic minorities across the Habsburg Empire, including Roth’s Galicia, were citizens of the Dual Monarchy and therefore also ‘Austrian’. When Austria-Hungary was carved up in 1918, Roth found himself redefined as a citizen of Poland, but refused to relinquish his Austrian identity. No one was going to tell him who he was. Determined to recover his lost citizenship, he invented a Schwabian German father and acquired a fake baptism certificate. ‘A man without papers,’ he once said grimly, ‘is worth even less than papers without a man.’ He was often angry, occasionally using anti-Semitic language to express hostility to fellow Jews, but there is no evidence that he turned this anger on himself. His assimilated co-religionists were the usual target. Their snobbish disdain for Ostjuden like him drew his ire: ‘Every form of assimilation is a flight from the sad society of the persecuted.’ And he deplored their complacency in the face of rising fascism. Roth regained his Austrian citizenship in 1921, but it remained tenuous. Henceforth he lived in a state of inner exile, unable to accept the loss of the old order, deeply suspicious of the extremist politics contaminating the new.

It is true, as Pim observes, that Roth’s habit of embellishing his threatened Austrian identity became increasingly egregious; he was not above fabricating imaginary war experiences. It is also true, as Michael Hofmann comments in A Life in Letters (2012), that these small lies often expressed emotional truths. Roth did sometimes feel, like Tunda in Flight without End, that the mass graves of the unknown soldiers yawned for him. But his sadness is subtler and more self-aware than Pim allows. Self-pity quickly generates self-irony: ‘I have no home; aside from being at home in myself [...] therefore I take great care to remain within myself’ (from a letter dated 10 June 1930). He can laugh at his own pain while teasing his reader. Pim describes Roth as still ‘playing’ the old-world Austrian gent up until his death. His friends saw him rather as a man struggling to maintain his dignity in the face of the cascading indignities of exile.

Speaking for all the wanderers on God’s earth, Roth once lamented: ‘Oh – the whole world thinks in such tired, worn, traditional clichés.’ Pim might have done without the cliché of Jewish self-hatred. Nevertheless, his biography offers a wealth of insight into the tragic life of one of Europe’s greatest writers, and is more than welcome. g

Lapis Lazuli

i.m. Robert Adamson

I couldn’t get there, but looked on from here, Through the live-streaming lens, An unseen absent presence, moved to watch This gathering of your friends, And all it comprehends:

Love, praise and memories, your poems of course. But, I don’t know, what may Have been most moving in the whole occasion Was, following that display Of photographs, the way

Your voice broke in, and there you were on film, Chatting and answered by Spinoza (so he’s learned to talk?), with his Impossibly blue eye Of lapis lazuli.

The first time that we saw him, Judy wore Earrings of that same stone, And Spin perched on her shoulder, where he had Immediately flown, To claim them for his own,

Or try to, pecking, jabbing, without success. And now I think of Yeats And his determination to believe That gaiety mitigates, Indeed transforms our fates,

Beyond the tragic scene on which we stare, Transfiguring that dread –An image carved in lapis lazuli The talisman which fed The faith he credited.

Not sure I share it, but, while the footage played, I wanted to comply, Watching you chat and chuckle with Spinoza –Brief days before you die –Eye to glittering eye.

Hawkesbury

i.m Robert Adamson

Above the cliff a Brahminy kite circles on an updraught, holds the scene in the keen, yellow charge of its eyes. Earlier I watched a sea-eagle ride a disc of air –then suddenly pull its wings into a deft stoop, a high-speed dive before it let down its talons like a set of stevedoring hooks, snatching up a rat lying in a warm coil of rope on the dock. Perhaps the kite will take a fish from the water, or another nesting rat.

Now it simply circles, a slow enchantment whose purpose seems impossible from so very high up. And you are gone, Robert, from your high place above the water, gone from the mudflats and the river where your words conjured a raptor’s view, the Hawkesbury surveyed with your sharp, rapturous eye. I walk back to the wharf, a crow calls with a voice of charred gloom. The kite has drifted away to circle and hunt elsewhere. I watch crabs on the mudflats work their claws around mangrove roots pegged out like snorkellers. And I think of you, Robert, pen in hand, breathing easily – words angling deeply – poem after poem pulled from the river.

Judith Beveridge