Life was never going to be easy for Moses Joseph Roth. Before he was born in 1894, his father had abandoned the family home in Galicia, a region now part of western Ukraine. They never met, and fear of abandonment was a constant cause of anxiety for Roth. His disquiet was exacerbated by the extreme poverty in which many residents of his home town, Brody, lived.
As soon as it was possible, he distanced himself from both his origins and what he thought of as his suffocatingly protective mother. He also began to distance himself from his Jewishness. This resulted in a lifelong feeling of displacement and ambiguity about an identity which he eschewed in favour of Catholicism.
The figure of Franz Joseph I of Austria offered a far more attractive model to Roth – as well as a substitute father figure – than the growing Zionist movement then becoming popular among Jews, but which he always rejected along with all forms of nationalism. He was notably perceptive about the form extreme nationalism would take in post-first World War Europe. The move towards fascism would also result in essentialist positions being taken about Jews and in time, no matter what his own beliefs were, Roth was a Jew.
Sense of happiness
Having met a beautiful woman called Friedl Reichler, Roth repeatedly postponed marrying her. Eventually, they were wed but, for both of them, any sense of happiness was fleeting. His separation issues led him to impose paranoid levels of control. Friedl’s mental health began to deteriorate and, eventually, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic.
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His self-recriminations became another form of misery, made far worse by an increasing reliance on alcohol. Remarkably, he maintained the ability to write stories, novels and contributions to the feuilleton sections of various newspapers while becoming increasingly impractical about money and demanding more and more of it to pay for his expensive stays in hotels and ever-increasing bar tabs.
Eventually, his drinking would lead to his death at the age of 44, almost at the commencement of the second World War. His wife, friends and relatives would die in those awful years so, as his very patient and considerate friend, the writer Stefan Zweig, said he “had not to go through those ordeals”.
Kieron Pim – using, in the main, secondary sources – brings all the details of this consistently creative but wretched life together in an engrossing fashion, giving all the historical context we might need to understand the flows of European politics at the time. His analysis of Roth’s novels is clear and convincing, free of fanciful conjecture.
By the end, at Roth’s graveside where issues of identity and allegiance were still disputed, we have a clear appreciation of why, writing in June 1938, Roth said: “My feet are sore, my heart is tired, my eyes are dry. Misery crouches beside me… terror flutters up, and doesn’t even frighten me any more. And that’s the most desolate thing of all.”
