Elegies for a Vanished World

The mark of a Joseph Roth short story is the leap into a kind of magical elegy. The pain of loss is everywhere in his work, especially in the stories collected here by Michael Hofmann, his adept translator. Roth the writer emerged from the rubble of a lost world, the world of Europe before World War I, where everything was known or knowable and nothing would ever change--or if it did, never for the worse.

And then, in the blink of an eye, an archduke was assassinated and the whole elaborate artifice fell apart. Roth has made that historic moment into a psychological moment, too, for his characters: Loss of innocence goes along with loss of home, or of homeland. His fictional terrain is a land of specific places--the bad corners of certain cities, squalid little villages near bigger villages, train stations along the way, town squares, parks and cemeteries--in a world where all the reasonable maps have been lost or, worse, burned. “Already,” one of his narrators says, “I had forgotten my birthplace, the little town in Russia which no longer exists. It has been blown up by guns, burnt down by fires, trampled upon by boots, and now the golden maize flowers where once were dirty lanes and houses, and the wind blows over the streets and pavements of my childhood. Other towns grow rich and powerful or, if they are condemned to die, they die slowly, death torments them for a hundred years or a thousand. But our little town it abruptly mowed down with its big sharp scythe.”

The pain of loss is here, it is true, but also the handiwork of artistic reconstruction, the life-giving force with which Roth tries to rebuild and refurnish his lost homeland. As he remembers specific moments, he reconstructs the disappeared: both the people and the places, and, of course, the times. There is the moment in “The Blind Mirror” when Fini, a drab little office girl, comes alive to romance, walking with a man in the park, “different by night, warm and nurturing. She couldn’t see what was behind the trees, what was happening in the stupefying light of the lamps, those stalled silver lightnings that plunged the distance to the next light in deeper darkness.” There is a moment in the dazzling “Strawberries” when night falls over the fields: “How suddenly the evenings used to fall there with remote glittering stars in a frozen blue sky, with short vehement darkening indoors, with howling devils in the stoves, with ghosts spun from nothing. The sun was visible for half an hour a day. It was pale and white, obscured by a frozen windowpane. Narrow paths were trodden into deep snow; people walked between tall white walls of snow.” (Not just war but poverty, too, patrols the perimeter of Roth’s literary universe, just as it did Galicia, the part of Ukraine where he was born.)

To read this seductive collection is to be invited into a writer’s notebook--a very great writer’s notebook. The book has some of the odd pleasures one might have got looking into Proust’s trash can. It bobsleds down from the pristine summits of perfect, resonant storytelling to the very depths of artistic raveling and exasperation. In some cases, you can almost feel Roth saying to himself, “No, that’s never going to work” and simply putting down his pen and turning to his whisky and the evening’s entertainment. Roth has been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and they do share a similar obsession with lost worlds. But a few of the pieces published in this collection (“The Triumph of Beauty” comes to mind) are reminiscent not so much of Fitzgerald at his best but of the American writer’s incessant Saturday Evening Post spewings--they are minor, tossed-off works of an obvious master.

Still, it’s a privilege to be disappointed over and over by so able and profound a writer because the disappointment comes from the stuttering brilliance of what is achieved even in Roth’s slapdash moments and from the knowledge that much higher goals were reached in his other works. In this collection, story ideas and characters are begun, then left off and then come up again in a different guise in a different story further on. You can see the hero of “The Honors Student,” the odious, apple-polishing hypocrite Anton Wanzl, in a later incarnation in the overweening, self-regarding, deceitful narrator of “Youth,” but both stories are ambitious attempts, not final immutable works, the first one published in 1916 in Osterreichs Illustrierte Zeitung, an Austrian newspaper, the second unpublished in Roth’s lifetime.

Six of the pieces collected here were not published while the writer lived; five others are unfinished. One cannot help but wonder whether--for all their brilliance, for all the fairy tale magic of them, for all their pure, frost-encrusted, plowed-dirt Eastern Europeanness--Roth intended them for publication at all. (One is reminded of Kafka’s famous command to his executor: “Burn everything!” His will was disregarded in this matter, of course.)

Roth was himself almost an archetypal figure of Eastern European fiction. Born at the eastern edge of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire (the ungainly but seemingly unshakable colossus that in its last days included Prague and Vienna, Moravia and Silesia, Ukraine and Poland as well as the recently tormented Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia), he served in the Austrian army during World War I and later became a journalist in Vienna working for German newspapers. But for Roth--who was also a Jew and therefore embodied the conflict that was eating away at old Europe--fact proved inadequate to the trauma, upheaval and fascination of his times, so he turned to fiction; he married, he lived in France, continued to file dispatches to various respected papers and traveled around post-revolutionary Russia.

His theater became the exile’s diaspora, and so he became a modernist. You cannot read these stories or indeed any of his novels without thinking that this is the soil from which all great 20th century fiction grew. Roth’s was a difficult life, and not only because of war and exile. Only six years after they were married, Roth’s wife had a schizophrenic breakdown from which she never recovered (his father also had died in an insane asylum). While she sickened, he went on to greater and greater success with his work, including “The Radetzky March” (1932), his near-allegorical novel about the decline of the Hapsburg empire--about the end of Europe as he knew it. Exiled from Germany, his work blacklisted by the Nazis as they readied for the next war, Roth retired to Paris, where he sank deeper and deeper into monarchism politically and alcoholism personally. He died in 1939.

It’s odd how in his stories especially--in part because they are flawed--Roth lets us see how close elegy is to humor or, at least, that the two are built on the same foundation of loss. You feel he is always on the verge, though possibly in tears, of telling a Jewish joke. For example, in his story about a destroyed Russian town (“This Morning, a Letter Arrived”), he writes about all the residents who’ve been dispersed to the four corners, including the baker Mendel Surokin, who “now runs a restaurant in Tokyo, is married to a Japanese woman, and has six children.” One day, Herr Kobritz, a wealthy traveling tradesman from the same town, finding himself in Tokyo, “sat down in a restaurant, and was served some excellent fish. The fish was completely according to his taste and rich Herr Kobritz was already beginning to philosophize, expounding his theory that the whole world was just a village, one big village. How else was it possible to explain that he could travel to the end of the world, to Tokyo, there to be served fish of the very sort that his cook at home prepared for him?” This of course is when the chef and owner, looking quite Japanese, walks up to him and says, “Good evening, Herr Kobritz.” Kobritz, postponing the punch line as in any good joke, thinks: “So the world really was just one big village, where everyone knew the wealthy Herr Kobritz.”

Of course Kobritz, who represents the old order, is wrong, and what gives him the illusion of being home--the presence of the baker Surokin in Tokyo--is in fact prima facie evidence that home has been destroyed. “My strongest experience,” Roth wrote, “was the War and the destruction of my fatherland.” How like Roth to twist it, to play with the pain and, finally, to make a joke of it.