Verbal postcards from Vienna and Galicia
IN THE past few years, there has been a fascinating revival of interest in the great interwar Jewish writers. Kafka, of course, didn’t need a revival. He has always been regarded as one of the great modern masters. But Antal Szerb, Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth have all been rediscovered, largely thanks to a new generation of translators, such as Michael Hofmann, and small publishers, especially Pushkin Press.
There is something intriguing about the contrast between Zweig and Roth, in particular. Both grew up in the AustroHungarian empire at the turn of the century. Zweig was born in Vienna and saw the world from the centre of the empire. Roth, by contrast, was born in Galicia, in Austrian Poland, and his greatest work at the empire from the periphery, from the garrison towns and small Jewish villages on the borders.
This new book of short stories by Roth, The Coral Merchant, brings together tales of 1920s Vienna with stories from small-town Galicia. The first two are about a middle-aged clerk and a teenage girl. Both are set in postFirst-World-War Vienna. They are about loneliness and a contrast between life at home and the big city. They evoke a bygone world of book-keepers, electric trams, poor people eating polenta and gravy and fried potatoes.
But the best stories, The Bust of the Emperor and The Leviathan, are set in the old, traditional world of smalltown Galicia. We are far from Vienna; it’s another world, of small garrison towns with usurers and shopkeepers, taverns and synagogues and, for the first time in the book, we meet Jewish innkeepers and merchants.
Both stories are about the transition from the old world to the new. The Leviathan
is about a Jewish merchant who is unable to keep up with the changing times. He had made a good living selling corals, but is eventually forced to sell artificial corals because the local farmers can’t afford the real thing. The world is changing, even in his small town, and he goes into a terrible decline.
The Bust of the Emperor is about Count Morstin, descended from an old Polish family. He had served in the Dragoons, and was formed by the Habsburg era. In the world he had grown up in, gendarmes all wore the same feathered helmets with the Habsburgs’ glittering double eagle. In every garrison town, you would see the same blue uniform tunics and black dress trousers and every public building looked the same.
The Count keeps a bust of the Emperor outside his front door. But, after the First World War, the Empire has gone and Galicia is part of independent Poland. “Is it still my home?” the Count asks himself. “What is a home?” He eventually leaves the country. The bust of Franz Josef is an unchanging symbol in a changing world.
These questions about home and belonging and catastrophic change are at the heart of Roth’s best writing. The Bust of the Emperor is one of his very best stories, which came at the end of his career, long after he had left his beloved Austria to look back on his native Galicia with a burning nostalgia — a sentiment, perhaps, that speaks to us today.