Joseph's
Bookstore
1257 Finchley Road
Temple Fortune
London NW11 0AD
T: 020 8731 7575
F: 020 8731 6699
Opening Hours:
Mon - Fri:
9:30 - 18:30
Sat & Sun:
10:00 - 17:00
Opening Hours:
Fri: 10:00 - 17:00
All other days:
10:00 - 10:00
The rest is Commentary...
Every month, Commentary explores a key Jewish thinker or writer, with a brief biography, an introduction to their major works, and suggestions for further reading. Enjoy!
Author of the Month for November
| Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany and he died in poverty in Paris. |
Joseph
Roth |
Essential Reading
|
|
The Radetzky March "..magnificent and entirely merited, and yet still troubling"
-- Michael Hofmann, translator.
|
Roth's most famous
novel, "The Radetzky March," charts the history of the Trotta family through three
generations spanning the rise and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Through
the Battle of Solferino to the entombment of the last Hapsburg emperor, Roth's
intelligent compassion illuminates the crumbling of a way of life.
 |
"It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature." --London Review of Books
|
This beautiful, miraculously concise novel, covering a vast span of history, was Joseph Roth's last published book. It ranks alongside The Radetzky March as one of his finest.
While visiting Vienna, the Shah of Persia falls for a beautiful countess. The
Austrian officials arrange for him to spend the night with the "countess", but
unbeknown to the Shah she is a prostitute who merely resembles the countess.
From this night follows a chain of ruinous consequences.
 |
The
legend of the Holy Drinker
"The sensitive translation preserves the pared-down elegance of Roth's style and
marries this final statement to the relentlessly observed, ultimately tragic
novels that brought him fame" -- Publishers Weekly |
The Legend of the Holy Drinker, written and published in the year of Roth's death, is a deeply affecting tale of Andreas, an alcoholic like the author himself, who drinks himself to death in the rough houses of Paris.Despite its melancholic subject matter The Legend is an uplifting novella.Throughout the tale Andreas, previously an impoverished vagrant, is continuously visited by miraculous good fortune that illuminates the last days of his mendicant existence and lift him, and the reader, to a new understanding of his (our) dissolution.
Michael Hoffman's superb translation has rightly garnered much praise |
What I
saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933
|
In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political pieces that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann and the young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, they record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic.
Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants – the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues—as well as the more whimsical aspects of the city—the public parks and the burgeoning entertainment industry. Warning early of the threat posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty, creating in the process a memorable portrait of a city.
 |
White
Cities: reports from France 1925-39 "[Roth] is as brilliant and original a journalist as he is a storyteller,
casting his eye and cocking his ear where lesser writers never venture"
|
Collected together here for the first time in English, these exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the erotic hill country around Avignon; from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, White Cities is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a beautifully crafted and revelatory work.
Previous
Authors of the Month
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Also
Recommended:
Saul Bellow
Henry Roth
John Updike
