Biography examines Roth, his resonant legacy
Pim finds parallels to own life with writer who chronicled rise of fascism in Europe
Keiron Pim flew into Vienna on a warm October day. The 44-year-old writer from Norwich, England has recently produced the first English-language biography of Joseph Roth, the ingenious, agonized, alcoholic Austro Hungarian journalist and novelist, chronicler of the last years of the Hapsburg empire and the rise of fascism in Europe. Pim is here to see what the pandemic prevented him from seeing when he was writing his book: Roth’s Vienna.
Pim is not the obvious candidate for the role of Roth biographer. He has previously published two books, one a work of popular science on dinosaurs, the other a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure associated with 1960s London. And, as he admits in his acknowledgments, he does not speak fluent German. But when he read a review of Roth’s collected letters, he came upon this galvanizing sentence: “There is no biography of Roth in English.” Somehow Roth, who died in 1939 yet whose writing is as hotly resonant today as it was 100 years ago, had eluded the cradle-to-grave treatment of an English-language biography, although admirers have long called for one.
Pim had read one of Roth’s works years before — a book called “The Wandering Jews,” in which Roth returns to his Galician homeland to describe the “wonder-rabbis” and the Jewish believers who flocked to them. As he began to read more, he seized on Roth’s urgency and intensity, which he compares to a “double espresso.” He seized, too, on the way that Roth’s voice seems to reach across decades to pull readers into his vivid scenes, and on Roth’s renewed relevance as an outraged witness to the rise of tyranny. From exile, in 1934, Roth wrote, in a furious statement as applicable now as it was then: “The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech.”
Pim wondered, too, just how much of Roth’s history intersected with that of his own family: Pim’s grandparents had lived in Vienna in the same years as Roth. So regarding the absent biography, Pim thought, “I’ll do something about that.” His book, “Endless Flight,” was published in England in October and came out in the United States, from Granta Books, in December.
During a layover in 2019, Pim took a few hours to see the buildings where his grandparents, Viennese Jews, had lived. When he tried to return two years later, for his Roth research, Austria was in lockdown. Now, he locates No. 35. Buzzed in with no questions, Pim enters Roth’s first local dwelling.
Roth came from Eastern Europe, born in 1894 among the Hasidim and shtetls of a town called Brody, near Lviv (then called Lemberg). This was the edge of the empire, part of the shifting territory that would later be Poland but is now Ukraine. His father had gone mad just before he was born. Roth never knew him. He grew up the only child of an anxious, sheltering mother, reliant on relatives for financial support. Surrounded by antisemitism, he excelled in school, hoping to escape. Vienna would be the city
where he reinvented himself.
Roth’s plans were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. His experiences as a soldier became a subject he returned to again and again. He began publishing while he served, and became a master of the “feuilleton,” meaning
“small page” (its purpose, as Roth described it, was “to say true things on half a page”). The novels came later — 16 of them, by most counts; some were short, others left unfinished, but they came at a desperate pace, as his financial situation worsened.
During the war, he probably worked as a censor behind the front lines, but his record would become subject to his many fabrications and obfuscations. After the war, Roth said he had been a lieutenant, that he had been captured, that he had heroically escaped. He sometimes wore a military medal awarded for bravery that he had bought in a junk shop.
Roth drank. He claimed he started drinking at age 8. He drank Calvados and schnapps, and wine when he was on a “diet.” Pim argues that Roth’s alcoholism, for a Jew of his background and era, made
him “a cultural exception.” Roth’s friends, including popular Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, begged him to stop. But Roth was convinced that alcohol made him a novelist, not merely a journalist.
Scanning the contours of Roth’s life, some have labeled him a brilliant writer but a morally disappointing man. He left his wife, Friedl, alone in foreign hotels while he roamed Europe to report, probably exacerbating her mental illness. She was institutionalized by the time she was 30. Meanwhile, Roth had affairs, badgered acquaintances for money and, always, drank.
In Vienna, Pim realizes just how close Friedl and her parents lived to the flat where his maternal grandmother, Ilse Epstein, grew up. Their doors are perhaps 200 meters apart, on opposite sides of Am Tabor Street. The extreme proximity is not as obvious on Google Maps, which Pim relied upon to write the Vienna section of his book. Friedl perished in Austria, but Pim’s grandmother escaped, arriving in England in 1939. She met his grandfather and gave birth to his mother and aunt there. Shortly after, she died there, by suicide.
The first major review of Pim’s book — in the Oct. 6 edition of the New York Review of Books — came out “the day before my mum died,” he said. “I was just reading it with my teeth gritted, like, please don’t say something that absolutely floors me at this moment.” His mother didn’t live to see the publication of “Endless Flight,” but she knew the story: Her son had written a book about a man who had probably passed her own parents on an old Viennese street, on his way to capture a vanishing world.