Why we love Joseph Roth so much

Writer Joseph Roth and his partner, Andrea Manga Bell, in Paris in 1925. brandstaetter images (Getty Images)

It cannot be said that he did not enjoy a certain fame and recognition in life —

was a soap opera with many devotees and Marlene Dietrich made his name fashionable by confessing that his favorite book in the world was

—, but when Joseph Roth died of cirrhosis in a Paris hospital in May 1939, not even the city's Jews sang a

, since they thought he was a convert, not even the Catholic priests consented to give him a mass, since no one knew if he was baptized.

Even her tombstone seems an affront: she appears on it as an "Austrian poet", when in fact she died stateless and without recognizing the republic that succeeded the Austro-Hungarian empire.

She left an unpublished manuscript that would be published months later by a German publisher in exile in Amsterdam, in an almost secret edition that was about to be lost in the dawn of the new war.

Nothing pointed to posterity.

Forgetting had already become strong even among his friends, stateless people like him and some soon to be suicidal, like Stefan Zweig.

There was no indication that more than 80 years later he would be one of the fashionable authors, one of the most revered, cited and honored at the beginning of the 21st century.

The interest in Roth grows and seems inexhaustible.

To the constant reissues of his books in Spanish, essays on his figure are added this fall, such as the magnificent one by Berta Ares Yáñez, '

, which details the essential biblical and Jewish keys to understand his books.

A new biography in English has also just been released, by Keiron Pim, which updates the myth and deepens it, although there is little more convincing evidence of Roth's vitality than his inclusion as a character in

, the latest installment of Corto Maltese .

Image from the latest issue of Corto Maltese, 'Berlin Nocturne', in which the character based on the writer Joseph Roth appears (on the right in the first panel).

Mysterious and ineffable are the reasons that lead a legion of readers to be interested in the work and life of a poor stateless and alcoholic Jew, but I am going to venture half a dozen features that underpin Roth's contemporaneity and may explain why so many faithful believe it. we feel one of our own.

1. He is a prophet.

Joseph Roth was one of the first intellectuals to predict the Holocaust, although he did not live long enough to see his prophecies fulfilled.

He deeply understood the xenophobic and violent transformation of German society and singled out the Nazis as the destroyers of civilization, even before they came to power, and long before the threat was taken seriously by anyone.

In

he narrates the world of the

, the Jewish culture of Poland and Ukraine in which he was born and which he considered already lost (in 1927, eight years before the Nuremberg laws!), and

or

they are painful pleas of pure lucidity.

Read today, it amazes how right she was and how she was just yelling at her.

2. He is a nomad who never had a home.

The youth of the 21st century, anguished by a life to jump from the bush, without a mortgage or a garden, is a bit like the life of Roth, who always lived in hotels, had no children and had love relationships that today we would call fluid, open and free (one of them, tragic: almost all his money went to pay for the clinics where his schizophrenic wife was treated).

His first major work was

and from then on his books were full of vagabonds, travelers and hustlers.

There are no Ulysses or Ithacas in its pages: everyone assumes that life is fragile and mutable, and one has to adapt to perpetual motion, because capitalism (here comes the Roth-15M connection) has destroyed certainties and a sense of community.

Joseph Roth, with his wife, Andrea Manga Bell, in Austria in 1933. Anonym (Getty Images)

3. Yearn for the sacred.

Like all uprooted people, he feels enormous nostalgia for a world where another life was possible.

A life with community ties, where things made sense and transcendence was a daily miracle that no cynic denied.

Surely today the sanbenito of

would fall to him , and

can pass for a reactionary monument worthy of a speech by Santiago Abascal, if he knew how to make good speeches.

But he would not be lacking in postmodern defenders —as he is not lacking, in fact— who would interpret his nostalgic fondness as a subtle response to the banality of the present.

All the fierce debate about the uses of memory and history that marks so many discussions today is already anticipated in Roth's books.

4. He is a readable narrator who transcends fashions.

Roth's voice is unique.

He does not ascribe to any movement, he does not resemble almost anything and for this reason he does not need explanation or exegesis.

Although many analyzes fit, as Ares Yáñez has shown.

It is better understood with a few brushstrokes of knowledge of Judaism, since all its narrative draws from that tradition, but it is not necessary to be aware of the theological disputes between Hasidic and Enlightened in seventeenth-century Poland to understand

or

, since Roth fable as an oral storyteller, with a simplicity that dazzles and transcends any cultural or historical barrier.

He can be fashionable at any time, his literature is timeless, like the Bible.

Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth in Ostend, Belgium, in a photograph dated 1936. brandstaetter images (Getty Images)

5. As a polemicist, he took no prisoners.

He is terrified to imagine a tweeting Joseph Roth.

There were few controversies of his time in which he did not intervene.

His collections of articles and letters from him reveal a temperamental, ingenious and very difficult to counter argument, a fearsome colleague in any dispute.

Neither friendship nor personal debt softened his judgment: if he had to argue vehemently and call his interlocutor an idiot, he did so without hesitation.

Poor Stefan Zweig suffered from it often.

In not a few letters, after reproaching him with much harshness for his political positions, Roth asked him for money.

The courteous and the brave.

6. His personal tragedy moves today's hyper-sentimental world.

If Roth's books were not enough by themselves, the writer's life (or rather his death) would place him in the parnassus of the 21st century: lonely, hopeless, sick and a preventive victim of the most horrible perpetrators in Europe.

When the owner of the hotel in Paris where he lived for the last few months denied him alcohol, saying that she had already had enough to drink, she would secretly go to another cafe and order a clandestine Pernod there.

He wasn't a smug drunk, just a sad, resigned, consumed poor man.

Someone to love.

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