Joseph Roth

Roth in 1918.

Joseph Roth (pronounced Yozef), born Moses Joseph Roth (2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939), was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist.

He is best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life, Job (1930), and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English in The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.
In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.

Born into a Jewish family, Roth was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg (now Lviv) in East Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, which had one of the biggest Jewish populations in Europe. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born.

After high school, Joseph Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy and German literature. In 1916, Roth quit his university course and volunteered to serve in the Imperial Habsburg army fighting on the Eastern Front, "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor." This experience had a major and long-lasting influence on his life. So, too, did the collapse in 1918 of the Habsburg Empire, which marked the beginning of a pronounced sense of "homelessness" that was to feature regularly in his work.

In 1918, Roth returned to Vienna and began writing for left wing newspapers, signing articles published by Vorwärts as Der rote Joseph ("The red Joseph" – "rot" is German for "red"). In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a successful journalist for the Neue Berliner Zeitung and, from 1921, for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. In 1923 he began his association with the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, traveling widely throughout Europe, and reporting from the South of France, the USSR, Albania, Poland, Italy, and Germany. According to his main English translator, Michael Hofmann, "He was one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period, being paid at the dream rate of one Deutschmark per line." In 1925 he spent a period working in France. He never again resided permanently in Berlin.

Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in 1922. In the late 1920s, his wife became schizophrenic, which threw Roth into a deep crisis, both emotionally and financially. She lived for years in a sanatorium and was later murdered by the Nazis.

Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Roth spent most of the next six years in Paris, a city he loved. His essays written in France display a delight in the city and its culture.