The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Roth, Joseph

Born Sept. 2, 1894, in Schwabendorf bei Brody, now in the Ukrainian SSR; died May 27, 1939, in Paris. Austrian writer.

Roth studied philosophy and Germanic languages and cultures in Vienna. He fought in World War I from 1916 to 1918, later becoming a journalist and attacking fascism from a standpoint of bourgeois humanism. In 1933 he emigrated to France.

Roth wrote antimilitarist realistic and satirical novels about postwar Europe, including Hotel Savoy (1924; Russian translation, 1925), The Rebellion (1924; Russian translation, 1925), Zipper and His Father (1927; Russian translation, Zipper and Son, 1929), and Right and Left (1929). In his best novel, Radetsky’s March (1932; Russian translation, 1939), and its sequel The Tomb of the Capuchins (1938), Roth depicted the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The essay “Flight Without End” (1926) and the novel Job (1930) were devoted to the life of Jews after the war. White Russian émigrés in Europe were depicted in the novels Tarabas, a Guest on Earth (1934) and Confession of a Murderer (1936). The novel The False Weight (1937) reflected Roth’s dual attitude toward the USSR: while recognizing the historic importance of the October Revolution of 1917, he rejected revolutionary methods of struggle.

WORKS

Werke, vols. 1–3. Edited by H. H. Kesten. Cologne, 1956.

REFERENCES

Knipovich, E. “Marsh Radetskogo: Roman I. Rota.” Literaturnoe obozrenie, 1939, no. 16.
Langer, N. Dichteraus Österreich, 3rd series. Vienna-Munich, 1958.

N. B. VESELOVSKAIA

References in periodicals archive

Their topics include dropping the historical ball: opposition to the study of postwar European communities and its consequences, the myth of Jewish fortunes and the reality of Krakow, transferring visual culture: the case of Eliezer-Zusman, the extrapolation of Jewish educational traditions in the pedagogy of freedom, and a reading of Joseph Roth's novel Job: The Story of a Simple Man (1930).

Warsaw and Jerusalem: Polish-Jewish History, Culture, Values, and Education Between Paradise and Inferno

As Andrew aged, his public persona increasingly resembled a character that might have stepped from the pages of a Joseph Roth novel, a gallant beau sabreur escaped from the debris of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which until 1918 his father had indeed served as a German speaking Polish colonel.

Tireless war reporter marked by boyhood in the Warsaw Uprising

His subjects, Leopold von Sacher-Moser (1836-1895), Lazar von Hellenbach (1827-1887), Theodor Hertzka (1845-1924), Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), Robert Muller (1887-1924), and Joseph Roth (1894-1939), belonged to a bourgeois liberal milieu which, according to the historian Carl Schorske, was especially aggrieved by the cultural shifts within Austrian society at the turn of the century.

Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire

In a letter my cousin Shlomo Naor wrote while he was in Israel, he mentioned that his mother first knew my father's cousin, the writer Joseph Roth, in Vienna.

Some Notes on My Father's Cousin, Joseph Roth

The Swedish home retailer also seeks to expand its e-commerce presence in the United States, but acknowledged that this could take time given the country's large geographic expanse, Joseph Roth, Ikea U.S.

Ikea targets $55 billion in online sales by 2020

Among contemporary witnesses, Confino summons Joseph Roth, a prescient journalist and novelist born in 1918 in Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the epicenter of Europe's "Bloodlands" (the apt term devised by Yale's Timothy Snyder).

A Biblical theory of the Holocaust

This is Hofmann's tenth translation from Joseph Roth, and it represents a culmination of the project he began in 1988 to bring Roth's oeuvre to the English-speaking world.

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters