WIEN 2008Photo: G. Ludovice
Joseph Roth
He was a writer Austrian. Moses Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in BrodyAt the end of Austro-Hungarian. Of Jewish origin, was a journalist and writer.
After the war, he traveled throughout Europe. It was a great chronicler of the Republic of Weimar - Times of crisis that preceded the rise of Nazism in Germany.
In articles Berlin, Roth notes the spectacle of the old Prussian capital, stormed the refugee buses and skyscrapers, becoming the epicenter of the cruel history of Europe that would follow.
Nostalgia critic Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was already a novelist known in German-speaking world and a famous journalist Job when it launched in 1930.
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was already a novelist known in German-speaking world and a famous journalist Job when it launched in 1930.
The work of this writer born in Brody, then in the Austro-Hungarian Galicia, now Ukraine, turns, especially to the irreversible changes that has affected the world of origin to the 1 st World War The size of this cataclysm is something that we , overshadowed by the even greater catastrophe that was the 2nd World War, we lost sight of.
But the war that marked the end of the Habsburg Empire was perceived by Roth and his contemporaries, as the end of the world whose citizens have become irreversibly exiles - even in homes where they were born. This is because the paradigms of society that were created became, the traditions were lost, the Europe of wars incited his swim in the fever of progress and individualism, and so buried what remained of the medieval conception of the world, static, in which supposed that the different social strata corresponded to a cosmic order, and therefore should be perpetuated, identical over time.
Stranger to this new world, Roth has spent most of their literature to a nostalgic recollection of that universe grounded in ancient certainties and formalized in an order that was lost with the ashes of the Empire, and the criticism, bitterly ironic, the folly of Europe the metropolises of the 20th century. The memory of Roth and his desire unachievable back to the lost world became a sort of old-utopia, which he contrasted the march Increasingly terrible history, which he conceived as a counterpoint to the bewilderment of his own time.
In this universe, disappeared and idealized, two competing traditions to human life and society as a transcendent meaning: on the one hand, the culture of Austria-Hungary, embodied in voluntary and austere Kaiser Franz Joseph, on the other, the Jewish tradition of the East Parliament, that Roth knew very well at home with his mother and his grandparents.
This dual universe appears to be lost as a home which had become impossible to return, while the world he lived in exile seemed meaningless, built "barracks and camps, even with the most modern comforts. This incurable Weltschmerz was nourished the work of one of the most interesting representatives of German literature of wars, and the same irremediable pain of the world led him to alcoholism, despair, and premature death in the hospital for the poor in Paris. Maybe it was good as well: how Roth refused to leave Europe , had lived longer, would probably turn into a gas chamber.
In Job, which was a huge literary success immediately translated into all European languages, and also for the Portuguese, now a forgotten issue of Martins, 1943, this contrast between two worlds is built on the trajectory of a poor family of Russian Jews, who emigrated from the village they live miserable for the United States.
Roth, remember, never traveled to America, but the United States were, in their imagination - indeed, in many of his contemporaries, also born within the Habsburg monarchy, and Egon Erwin Kisch and Franz Kafka - the embodiment of the distorted human and social deprivation: a flattened universe, where the symbolic and spiritual dimension wrecked, dissolving into a definitive petty materialism, the endless struggle for satisfaction of needs, which are increasing as the heads of Hydra.
Job therefore is the most Jewish of Roth's books, in which the assimilation of the Singer family to the reality of modern American is the greatest of all disasters: in his miserable village, victimized by the Cossacks as much by poverty, the exiled Singer, who dreamed, according to the tradition of the Jewish diaspora, with the coming of the Messiah and the miraculous return to their ancestral lands now under the absorbent character of extroversion total of American society, they become strangers even to own skin.
Divided into two parts, the book reproduces, in a modern perspective, the traditional topic of Jewish mystical thought, namely, the concept of Galut or Jewish exile to represent modernity as the top in this condition reaches a climax. Mixing social criticism and nostalgia, Roth does not, however, the romance-thesis: his narrative to this interpretation, but is much more than that. It is a treasure of German prose of the 20th century, whose stripped-down style and polish brims with irony as much as feeling. In phrases reminiscent of the brief nature of the sacred texts of Judaism, and extremely brief descriptions that go so far with the precision of an arrow, he deals with the look of amazement that is the privilege of foreigners and exiles, the paradoxes of their reality contemporary: the apparent freedom and slavery real, the illusory wealth and real misery, poverty and the apparent distortion of all values.
It is a great opportunity to learn more about this author, who spent decades forgotten, especially outside Germany, and in recent years has been experiencing an amazing posthumous glory in the Anglo-Saxon world, and now between us. Luis S. Krausz, Doctor of Literature and Culture Judaicapela University of São Paulo, is the author of Rituals Crepuscular: Joseph Roth and the Austro-Jewish Nostalgia (Edusp, 2008)
In 1933He immigrated to FranceWhere public Tarabas (1934) False Weight (1937) Antichrist (1934) Confession of a Murderer (1938) And, posthumously, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939).
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