Homecoming

Łódź, 2018

The Hotel Savoy is a few blocks from Piotrkowska, down a street called Generała Romualda Traugutta. Just past the Grand Hotel the street becomes a walkway, fanned with limestone setts the color of rainclouds—gray, taupe, violet—the stones sparkling here and there in pools of light where the morning sun strikes. The hotel—art nouveau, like much of Łódź—stands seven stories tall. The dormer windows are slightly reddened in the sunlight. Much lower, a circular window like an oculus is centered above what at one time most certainly was the hotel’s main entrance. Now the guests enter through a simple, unornamented glass door to the left, as if the past has foreclosed such displays of triumphant ingress, as if such noble gestures have become bound in time and place, forever inaccessible.

Inaccessible: the perfect word. These are all locked tombs of a sort, these places I visit.

I pull the book from my old JanSport: Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth: “A classic novel of homecoming, alienation and self-discovery set against the chaos of Europe at the end of the Great War.”[1] I arrive at ten o’clock in the morning at the Hotel Savoy, Roth wrote. I have decided to rest for a few days or a week. . . .[2] I enter the building (it is, in fact, half past eight). The corridor to the main staircase is of red stonework. My footsteps produce no sound, no echo. On the landing a plaster cherub spews water into a basin. The figure has been doing so for centuries, eternities. Roth stayed here, we can be sure, back in ’24 or ’25, as he wrote the novel. I can imagine him entering the hotel, light streaming past his body in bright streaks, like Saint Teresa’s angel in Rome. In his dark blue suit, he puts out a hand and the liftboy appears as if conjured. The boy takes his suitcases[3] under his arms and walks toward the staircase. It is probably the way an angel spreads his wings,[4] Joseph Roth thinks, as he watches the boy ascend the carpeted stairs. And then he turns and walks along the red stonework, his footsteps echoing crisply. I wonder where he worked. Here. Maybe here. I sit on a simple upholstered wingback chair. The table is small and round. I can imagine him setting out his regulation office foolscap, a little bottle of ink, an Adler steel pen, the only type he would use. An ashtray—square, amber glass, deep well, four large rests (sized for cigars)—to his left, from which a ribbon of silvery smoke rises. A glass—let us say schnapps, the color nearly matching that of the ashtray—to his right.

I am happy to be stripping away an old life once again, he wrote. I see in my mind the soldier, the murderer, the man almost murdered, the man resurrected, the captive in chains, the wanderer.[5] I pull a pencil from my JanSport and underline that last word, and then I turn the book and write, vertically, in the margin: and the heartbroken.

Paris, 1939

Morning. Joseph Roth sits facing the street at the café Le Tournon, at a table reserved for him. The name of the café is painted in gold on the window; he sees the words in reverse. A woman passes by—auburn hair, eyes flashing green and then darting away. It could be her. Why not? Perhaps she has escaped and come looking for him. He would be easy to find. At this hour he drinks wine. Too early for schnapps, and in any case he is suffering from cirrhosis and is trying to forego the beverage (it is like losing a friend, a lover, he thinks). Before him on the table rests an empty plate with a delicate faded blue-gold rim; a fruit knife with a serrated back, wiped clean; a tiny coffee cup on a saucer, half full; a spoon worn as thin as an old coin; and his writing paper. When the glass of wine is empty he will merely raise his eyes and the waiter will appear with the bottle, for in this civilized silence an eyebrow is enough. A cigarette burns in a triangular ashtray of hammered tin, three rests, one at each vertex. He lifts the cigarette to his lips, sets it down, his cufflinks sounding on the marble tabletop, an aureole of smoke around his head. He thinks of her.

Here in the café, Joseph Roth once wrote: And even the one who leaves the country behind takes with him the best that a homeland has to offer: the memory of it, homesickness.[6] Roth was born in a Jewish shtetl in the eastern hinterlands of the Habsburg Empire in 1894. Twenty-six years later, after the Great War, he fled the vanished empire of his youth and dreams to Berlin. Thirteen years hence he fled again—one could say escaped—this time from the splintering Weimar Republic to Paris. Roth, like all the exiles, carries with him his memory, his homesickness. This is the weight that holds him like ballast to the earth, a great enduring burden. The page before him is blank. The greenish lamps over the tables hang motionless, but later, when the people enter and move, they will sway like dancing ladies (he thinks of her). The morning light suddenly dims and he looks through the large windows, beyond the small outside tables and wicker chairs, mostly empty at this hour, to the street and buildings, which are darkening beneath a steely sky. Rain later, perhaps. Women in fancy hats and fancy shoes pass his window (he thinks of her).

He is the captive in chains, the wanderer, yes, the heartbroken. He cannot forget. She is always with him. This is what he carries. This is what he bears.

Vienna, 1919

They met in the autumn. Vienna in 1919 was a broken city. Bits of plaster fell from the sides of buildings and collected like talus on the sidewalks. Grass grew in the streets and the cobblestones were loose. The soldiers’ wounds were not yet scars, and they stood on street corners with outstretched military hats. They buttoned their tattered tunics and pinned up sleeves of lost limbs, folded carefully like the flags of a lost empire. They’d puff up their chests like flirtatious birds and stand as tall as their battered bodies would allow. Even in their wounds, Roth would later write, there was splendor.[7]

They met in the autumn, at the Café Herrenhof. She had auburn hair and eyes as green as the linden trees that grew in the Augarten. He once wrote, in so many words, that her hair was very smooth and always looked as though she’d just come from a bath, and she had slender, shy hands, which she kept in front of her, clutched one in the other, like a small reticule the color of pale skin.[8] She stood at the top of a short flight of stairs and looked at him. She wore a necklace of baby seedpearls, a silver bracelet over her left cuff, a tight, black high-necked dress. He asked her to dance and he reached out his hand and she took it, and they danced to a small orchestra—all strings and wind, a waltz, by Lehár if he recalls—and in their movements, careful and refined, there was something marvelous in the design. They were already a machine of sorts, intricate, a single entity. They danced beautifully.[9]

It was autumn when they walked together hand in hand in the Augarten, and like a painter he studied the color of her eyes. The trees still clung to their green—maple, hornbeam, sweetgum, white oak, elm, linden—and he would occasionally reach up and pick a leaf from a low branch and hold it to her eyes, while she smiled and pretended to look away. In the light he could see freckles delicately stippled across the bridge of her nose, falling as if carefully scattered onto her cheeks. Sometimes the wind would pick up and blow her hair over her face, and with his other hand he would reach out and hold it back and let his fingers linger on her skin. Yes, the green leaves of the linden trees matched perfectly.

Paris, 1939

Afternoon. The page is empty. His pen is dry. Exile is essentially a disjunction, a severing, and Joseph Roth feels this in his bones, like a fracture. He looks around the café. A woman with red hair pulled into a bun comes close to his table, a woman he used to know, and he smiles, a shadow of an old smile, and then she walks away. An old man shuffles past his table wearing indoor slippers. Roth envies him his shuffle, his being an old man.[10] Yes, they are lost here in the interbellum. The people balance helplessly, arms flailing, on what he imagines is some axis of discontinuity, a point of disintegration. The great empires have fallen, and the nations—each a carving out, each a kind of violence—have arisen. (It is not the loss of nations, perhaps, that defines the exile, he thinks. It is their founding.) Roth once wrote: In the space of a second, you can feel an unfathomable consciousness of time. With alert senses, in broad daylight, you can fall out of your own time, and stumble around among the centuries, as if time were space and a historical age were a country.[11]

He has given in and ordered a schnapps, such a beautiful glass, with its short stem, the slight flare of the rim, the liquid like a brilliant amber gem suspended in the glass bowl.[12] Over his head the cigarette smoke thickens, and as he looks around the room, he can see the tips of the cigarettes glowing red. How far away they appear, each a distant little star, pulsing with color. How perilous, these stretches of space and time.

They are all exiles, the people of the new nations, the people between the wars. Never in history had they been so free. Never had they been so alone.

Berlin, 1928

They married on a spring day in 1922 in a Leopoldstadt synagogue in Vienna. They returned together to Berlin where Roth had moved to write feuilletons for the newspapers. Now he is writing his novel Job: “. . . a pure, perfect poetic work.”[13] He writes at Schwannecke’s, a long, narrow café with square niches along the sides that separate the visitors into their own private nations of smoke and sound. He sits alone and drinks his schnapps and fills up pages of his foolscap.

Their rented apartment is a single room with a view of a small, treeless courtyard of broken paving stones, and she waits for him there, sitting perhaps in the straight chair by the window, her hands in her lap, the sun casting her shadow across the floor. She has always loved to sit like this, with the sun on her face.

Sometimes when he leaves the apartment to write, she goes out into the park and rips petals from the flowers—yellow irises and dark blue zinc pansies and purple bellflowers and red red roses—carries them home in her dress (she pulls the dress up past her knees to form a little pouch, a white dress that turns orange when the sun sets, and the people stop to watch her long beautiful legs and she smiles at them), and she returns to the little apartment and lies on their bed, beneath the picture postcards he has sent her, pasted to the ceiling in a great collage of longing, and she spreads the petals over her body, leaving smears of pollen the color of ochre on her stomach and legs and breasts, to ameliorate what she believes is her unbearable smell. Once she said to him that someone had removed her internal organs and replaced them with someone else’s, leaving not the slightest trace of a wound or scar. She believes insects are crawling on her skin, and she scratches until she bleeds. She believes a large worm has taken up residence in her stomach.

He sits in the café. He drinks his schnapps. A woman with a complexion the color of meteorites opens up her mouth and laughs, she laughs endlessly, the better to show off her new gold fillings, she laughs at the saddest things. He listens to her laugh and then looks down at the page, dips his pen, writes: Her laughter lasted a few minutes. It sounded like the ringing of the high-pitched incessant signals at train stations and as if someone were striking with a thousand brass mallets against a thousand thin crystal glasses. Suddenly the laughter broke off. For a second it was silent. Then she began to sob.[14]

He waited in the little apartment, he waited a long time, while she laughed and then cried and then finally fell silent, before he left to walk to the café. He sat, in his nation of smoke, and he wrote: I was already in the process of losing my heart, my desire, and my capacity for love and pain.[15]

Łódź, 2018

The Hotel Savoy of Roth’s day was a place of movement and sound. Corpulent men sat in the lobby with their cigarettes and cigars, waiters hovering in impeccable suits and shiny shoes. Maids in white caps streaked along the flagstones like comets, ostrich feathers trailing behind them like tails of interstellar dust. He wrote of a soldier who carried a black ear trumpet in the top pocket of his uniform jacket, its bell opening up like a hungry bird. He wrote of a man who possessed the gift of dreaming the lottery numbers, who slept most of the days, only coming down at night to eat and drink and, if one had the financial means, to reveal the numbers. The dreamer lived here, at the Hotel Savoy, in the last room, no. 864. In the evening the men would all go to the hotel’s bar where the girls put powder on their white shoulders and drank lemonade through thin straws. The girls would come over to the tables, and the men in their uniforms would feed them pastry and crumbling cakes and give them little sips of their schnapps. The men would reach out and pinch the girls’ bright, young bodies, and the girls would shake like young swans. All of this, he wrote about.[16]

I sit at my table, writing my history, and the hotel is as quiet as a grave.

Paris, 1939

Evening. The sun has set behind the buildings, and the warm wind sends the leaves of the magnolia and hackberry trees scratching down the street. He begins his evenings with vermouth and sherry. Later, if he can fill a page or two to his satisfaction, he may treat himself to Burgundy or Bordeaux. Very good days may lead to a glass of champagne. This has not been a good day.

He thinks of her. He has not written a word.

Joseph Roth, like all the exiles, exists in a liminal space, a borderland, where, in this tugging, this betweenness—yes, a kind of interbellum—a doubling manifests. Gertrude Stein (ad verbum): “It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations.”[17] So the exile’s imagination becomes a kind of a stereoscopic dreamland, a blending of two images: a nostalgic one of past (we might call this melancholy), a hopeful one of future (we might call this euphoria). Everything becomes altered here in the borderlands.

Roth sits at his café, his blank page before him. He sits alone (between his two civilizations), as the light leaves the sky and the darkness takes hold, as the rain finally begins to fall. Roth raises an eyebrow. The waiter refills his glass. There is something Austro-Hungarian about the color of the liquid, how it carries the hue of a vermillion sunset, settling over the plains and mountains, diffuse and sensuous. Exilist Vladimir Nabokov: “There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point, arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, that is intrinsically artistic.”[18] It is here where Roth sits, waiting for the words to come.

A Train Station, 1931

The train station is somewhere in the old empire. He is filling up pages of what would become—according to our literary experts—his masterpiece: The Radetzky March (1932). A small round table. His regulation office foolscap, the little bottle of ink, the Adler steel pen. A cigarette burns in a long, thin rectangular ashtray of frosted glass, two rests, one at the midpoint of each long side. He keeps his coat draped around his shoulders, a fashion of the time. Remnants of sun gleam in two lines upon the tracks and flick over the golden flowers of the laburnum on the railway embankment across the way, and then, as he watches, the sun—a dissipating fleck of what can only be called vermillion—disappears behind a canvas of low mountains painted violet on violet. The main clock sounds, and there is a rustling in the station as all at once the people look up and pull their watches from their fob pockets—some nod contentedly, while others, brows lowered, carefully twist the knurled winders with almost invisible flicks of their fingers—and then they replace their watches, and they are together again. But Roth does not check his watch. He has gone wandering.

He remembers a train. When was this? Nine years ago? Has that much time passed? He stands at the window and little lights on distant hills drift by like stars, beneath stars, mingling with his own reflection. The train sounds like a lullaby and the whistle a faint echo of a mother’s call. Small towns take shape and disappear. I will write of this someday, he thinks. (Now, in the train station, nine years later, he writes.) The train shudders around a curve and he turns and walks down the corridor, his hands on the walls to steady him. He goes to her. Quietly he slides the door aside and tiptoes back into the compartment (he writes). They pass over a bridge, the train wheels sounding briefly louder. She fears the bridge will give out and the train will fall—every time she fears this. She is lost in the darkness, but in flashes she comes to life: her face, her shoulders, her arms. He slides the curtain closed, stands there, hesitates. She speaks: Maybe we should have taken a sleeping car, she says (he writes). He moves closer. He can smell her perfume, like elderflower. Closer. She stands. Here is gravity, here is attraction. A frenzied unbuttoning. She lifts her arms and the dress rises. Elderflower and, now, something else, something darker, something more verdant. Hands. Skin. Hair. Desire comes cascading over memory, and washes away all traces. And she receives him like a quiet room.[19]

When they arrived to the city, they drove to one of those small hotels where he hoped their love might flower in a wretched, creaking and altogether paradisal bed.[20] Now he can barely imagine the touch of her skin. The way she would fall asleep next to him, a sleep close to the surface, a sleep of dreams. They might lie together, with her hand in his. But is this how they fell asleep in the small hotel when their love was new? He has stopped writing. He tries to remember. Her eyes. Her nose. A little dimple on her left cheek when she smiled. Or was it her right one? Too much has passed, too much changed. He realizes there is no precise thing, no clear and determinate aspect, that can bring her beauty into focus. Sensations are transformed through the filter of the mind into perceptions, are transformed through the filter of recollection into mere atmospheres—this is what memories are: atmospheres, air. 

And then time passes—as is the nature of these memories—and he is back in Berlin. Two men in white suits entered their little apartment with a stretcher. A third man, a doctor, pierced her thigh with a long syringe dripping with venom. They tied her down with three leather straps. She looked up at him, and then she looked away and closed her eyes. As they carried her through the door a postcard fell from the ceiling like a leaf—he remembers how it fell in a seesawing cliché, how it doubled in a pier glass, iron-framed and set on the floor at an angle between the windows, how it soundlessly settled onto the bed’s counterpane, striped widthwise with parallel gold bands that had faded to something more like pale sepia. Here are his details. He holds onto them. They are a kind of homecoming, a pathway of return, a faint echo of a mother’s call. A diminishing of the large things, an enlarging of the small. The sun was setting then, too, in Berlin, and he sat in the straight chair by the window—as he sits now—and watched it disappear—a dissipating fleck of vermillion—behind the buildings, violet on violet.

Epilogue

The sound of the rain. There is a word for this, a word on the tip of his tongue, but he can only come up with humming. A fine word. The rain is humming. In fact, at this late hour at the Paris café, everything seems to be humming. The people beginning to rise, weak on their pins, donning their coats and black hats. The landlady splashing glasses in the sink. The landlord pushing the empty chairs together, straightening the tables. The occasional swish—a humming—of a car or taxi beyond the windows. Even the lights seem to be humming. And once more he gave himself up to the gentle humming of the world.[21] He raises an eyebrow, a single finger in the air. A final drink.

And as Joseph Roth waits, as he listens to the rain, he resides between a staggering rememoration of great heaviness, and a complete forgetting of unbearable lightness. Exilist Milan Kundera: “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”[22] A dialectic of memory and amnesia. And here again is our doubling, our liminal state. The exile may turn his head backward, like Dante’s diviners (Dante: another exile), or he may cast his gaze forward, without memory, a different kind of hell, one rather of great cold. These are the twin dangers of exile: an unending orientation toward a mythologized and unattainable past, or a countervailing existence of forgetting, of life without meaning (for life without past is eo ipso life without meaning). Does the exilic writer cross some steaming torrent of Acheron? Or does he row his vessel across the more tranquil Lethe, a river of forgetting? Roth’s Hotel Savoy (I hold the book in my hand) is really a story of waiting—everyone in the novel waits, for love, for riches, for a savior. It is a novel of hope (but one eternally deferred). But his later novels—Job, for example, The Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb (1938)—have been called backward-facing novels.[23] These are novels of memory. It is as if the aging writer, more and more imprisoned in his exile, more and more alone, chose the infinite heaviness of the past.

But then sometimes the past slips away, a cigarette burns in a triangular ashtray of hammered tin, the rain on the street sounds like an applause, and beyond the rain the countries of Europe fall headlong into war. And before the people leave the café and enter the sodden streets, they laugh. They want him to laugh with them. They want him to relinquish his burdens (the page, still empty, clamoring for words), to float up into the air, to dance with them amidst the swirling silver smoke of forgetting, and laugh. And why not? He stands up with the others. He forgets about her, for just a moment, he forgets. And he laughs.

And then the people leave, and he is alone.

Exilist John Simpson: “Exile can after all be a relief as well as a sadness.”[24] We began to fall in love with our misery, Roth once wrote. We buried ourselves in it.[25] Yes, there is a kind of exaltation in exile. The humming—or let us say, patter—of the rain enshrouds him in isolation. This is what he’s been waiting for, this is his destination, this place in which all the past comes rushing up to him, and all the future is revealed. This is his new empire. He is finally ready.

There must be, I think, some reservation, some protected zone somewhere, where the new may only enter without first destroying the old, with weapons lowered, and under the white flag of peace. [. . .] In the future is the past. Antiquity may disappear from before our eyes, but not from our blood. Anyone who has ever seen a Roman arena, a Greek temple, the pyramids of Egypt, or some crude Bronze Age tool will understand.[26]

In the end he does not succumb to the unbearable heaviness of the past. It is in fact the very sustenance for his creation. The demise of Roth’s homeland is a precondition for its literary resurrection. There is rapture—not rupture—in this collapse. “—There can be no reconciliation, Stephen said, if there has not been a sundering.”[27]

He lifts his pen, dips it into the ink.

What remains now is language, what Hilde Domin calls “that last, essential home.”[28] And with language, as with a protective chrysalis, the writer’s imagination, fortified by its linguistic roots, seeks to indemnify itself against the loss of the past, as if activated by some biological force. But there is more than just shelter here, for now, only now, can the creative act commence. Tendered forth from the exile’s loss we may finally recognize the fragile-winged unfolding of an aesthetic gain. This is the exile’s task, to transform these figures of discontinuity and displacement into connection. He finally begins to write, which effectuates the very act of crossing that is the exilic experience. Exilist Michael Seidel: “All fictional experience is a boundary crossing of sorts, a projection from familiar space into narrative space where consciousness is displayed as verbal territory.”[29]

The notion of movement, of homelessness, of waiting, literally becomes the metaphor that allows for the conception of these fictive domains at the level of the text, which is to say, if I may put it so (I am writing, here in Łódź, I am writing furiously), that the creative act instates a kind of rendering of the very experience that the creative act seeks to maintain.

As if time were space and a historical age were a country.

Yes, he begins to write.

It has been said that when the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras was asked if he had no concern for his fatherland, he replied that he was in fact greatly concerned for his fatherland, and he pointed to the sky. Over a thousand years later the theologian Hugh of Saint Victor wrote: The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginning; / he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; / but his is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.[30]

So he writes. He makes his crossing. He finally finds his freedom. We are almost happy in our illness, he once wrote in his notebook, in the rain, in Vienna, as he walked to the Emperor’s tomb.[31] There are no nations here, but there is a home. Not one found on any map, not one of hills and valleys and mountains and rivers, not one of buildings and palaces and streets, but one of words.

The rain falls like the long roll of a military song. Always, the easiest of deaths, the easiest of relinquishing, comes with the accompaniment of the Radetzky March. Will you be staying? the landlord asks, wiping his hands with a white towel. For a while longer, Joseph Roth replies. The landlord lights a couple of pallid candles and sets them in drops of their own wax on the marble table, before turning off the lights. They are like funeral candles, Roth thinks, and the darkened café is like a tomb. And he was gone, and I heard the shutter clatter down outside the door.[32] And finally it is that time of night, when the café is empty, that time he calls home. He enters with weapons lowered. He exalts. He writes: 

It is a day of miracles. The war—surely it would have been called the War of all wars—which had seemed an inevitably, has been called off. Cooler heads, as they say, prevailed. The white flags of peace wave. He sits in the café with his cigarettes and a small glass of wine and reads the letter again, postmarked 23 May 1939, Landespflegeanstalt Mauer-Öhling, Mattersburg, Burgenland, (Österreich): “Herr R—,” the letter reads. “We are pleased to report that the unexpected has occurred! Your wife has experienced a change, a great change for the better! She woke up this morning suddenly lucid. Her first word, Herr R—, was your name. She would like to see you immediately. It is as if no time at all has passed. You can imagine her eagerness to hasten this reunion. It is difficult to express our amazement in this regard, but after careful observation, we believe she has made a full recovery. . . .” The letter continues for several additional pages. His train leaves soon. He has his suitcases—two of them—at his table. His coat around his neck, a fashion of the time. He will travel east through the mountains on a slow train, he will travel with the other home-comers. He tries to imagine her skin. He tries to imagine her eyes, as green as the leaves of the linden trees. Her auburn hair as smooth as rain. The freckles on her nose and cheeks. Her smile, that same smile that he can almost recall from the night they first met, when she stood at the top of the stairs in her black dress, when they danced a waltz. He tries to imagine the feel of her hand in his. He finishes his wine. Stubs out his cigarette in a triangular ashtray of hammered tin. Franz, he says, the bill! He rises. . . .[33]

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[1] Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy (1924), trans. Jonathan Katz (London: Hesperus Press Limited, 2013), back cover. Subsequent works in this essay are by Joseph Roth, unless indicated otherwise.

[2] Ibid., 3.

[3] “He lives out of two suitcases (by some accounts, three, but I prefer to think of him with two), a large one and a small one.” —Michael Hofmann (trans., ed.), introduction to Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (London: Granta Books, 2013), xv.

[4] Roth will one day get this down in writing; see “Arrival in the Hotel,” in The Hotel Years (1929), trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: New Directions, 2015), 156.

[5] Roth, Hotel Savoy, 3.

[6] Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925–1939, trans. Michael Hofmann (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 2004), 141.

[7] “The Blind Mirror” (1925),  in The Collected Short Stories of Joseph Roth, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), 110.

[8] See “April: The Story of a Love Affair,” in ibid., 81.

[9] “In a city which exists so profoundly in music, with nerves so attuned, with such a subtle sense of rhythm and cadence, dance must, as a gregarious distraction, transform itself into art.” —Stefan Zweig, “The Vienna of Yesterday,” in Messages from a Lost World (1940), trans. Will Stone (London: Pushkin Press, 2016), 198.

[10] “Rest While Watching the Demolition” (1938), in Report from a Parisian Paradise, 240.

[11] “The White Cities,” in Report from a Parisian Paradise, 93.

[12] In a letter to Stefan Zweig, Roth admitted that his drinking “is shortening my life, that is true, but it is also preventing my immediate death.” Cited in Sidney Rosenfeld, Understanding Joseph Roth (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 13.

[13] Stefan Zweig; from the back cover, Job: The Story of a Simple Man (1930), trans. Ross Benjamin (New York: Archipelago Books, 2010).

[14] Job, 147 (minutus mutatis).

[15] “The Morning, a Letter Arrived” (undated), in The Collected Short Stories of Joseph Roth, 166.

[16] Hotel Savoy, 3, 20–21, 24, 32, 62.

[17] Gertrude Stein, “An American and France” (1936), in What Are Masterpieces? (New York: Pitman, 1970), 62.

[18] Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited (1951) (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 166–67.

[19] Many of these words would become part of page 208 of The Radetzky March (1932), trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 2002). The last sentence, however, he put down, in slightly different form, in Flight Without End (1927) (trans. s.n.) (Woodstock: The Overlook Press, 1977), 36.

[20] The Radetzky March, 273.

[21] The word he is looking for, however, is patter. See The Radetzky March, 360.

[22] Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 5.

[23] “. . . the later works are interpreted as manifestations of the idealizing nostalgia of an alcoholic monarchist with a decreasing grip on reality.” —Katharine Tonkin, Joseph Roth’s March into History: From the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft (Rochester: Camden House, 2008), 1.

[24] John Simpson (editor), The Oxford Book of Exile, ed. John Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), vii.

[25] The Emperor’s Tomb (1938), trans. Michael Hofman (New York: New Directions Books, 2013), 56, 125.

[26] “The White Cities,” in Report from a Parisian Paradise, 118–19.

[27] James Joyce, Ulysses (1922) (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 249.

[28] Hilde Domin, “Heimat,” in Altogether Elsewhere, ed. Marc Robinson, (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1994), 129.

[29] Michael Seidel, Exile and the Narrative Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 107.

[30] Hugh of Saint Victor, The Didascalicon of Huge of Saint Victor, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 101.

[31] The Emperor’s Tomb, 56.

[32] Ibid., 163.

[33] Joseph Roth, Homecoming (1939), manuscript unpublished and believed lost.