Rares G. Piloiu - The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roths Works

The argument for writing a study on Joseph Roth has first of all a personal motivation. I was born and raised in Eastern Europe, and my family roots reach into the multicultural world of the former Habsburg Empire, a world that constitutes the background for much of Roths work. Spending holidays with my mothers side of the family in Transylvania, I grew accustomed to hearing a mlange of languages, including Romanian, Hungarian, and German, imperceptibly melting into each other as the need required in a harmonious coexistence of what later I understood to be the specificity of Mitteleuropa. I would not want to idealize this notion, whose historical avatars carry an ambiguous legacy, but I do want to draw on my personal interest for it, an interest stimulated in part by personal experience and in part by literary experience. Crossing the Carpathians each summer and winter had something ritualistic and purifying about it, and this was not simply due to the sacred nature of the religious holidays that marked my childhood visits into Transylvania or to the warmth of our familys reunions. There was something objective about it that I could feel while still on the train, a type of permanence embedded in the mild rolling hills of the countryside, in the almost dull reappearance of similar towns and villages densely built around ancient church steeples, and in the obstinately slow rhythm in which everything seemed to move. For me, as for a Hans Castorp of another era and geographical location, crossing the Carpathians from the flatlands was like moving from an ugly and omnipresent history (it was, after all, Nicolae Ceausescus 1980s Romania) to a place outside of history, a magical realm under the rule of eternity. There, more powerful than history, tradition left its indelible mark on everything. Later in life as I read Roths novels of Austrian inspiration of the 1930s, I could almost immediately relate to his fascination with the permanence of the Habsburg world at a time when history had started to show its hideous and inhumane face. His recollection of the smells, sounds, and sights that repeated themselves in a dizzying kaleidoscope everywhere one went awoke in me similar feelings of familiarity and reassurance. If cultures have a spirit of their own that defies politics, history, and territorial partitions, as the Hungarian Jewish writer Gyrgy Konrd claims, then the spirit of Central Europe that Roth depicted in his writings was definitely the same one that marked some of my strongest childhood memories.

The image of Central Europe that emerges from the works of other authors who influenced me, such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Milan Kundera, and Peter Esterhzy, is also, as I later learned, influenced significantly by Roths fiction. The indebtedness of many modern Central European writers (and not only European if one takes into consideration the admissions of Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee) to Roths nostalgic depiction of imperial Austria reinforced my curiosity about Roth, especially the fact that his work took on a distinct political meaning in the 1970s and 1980s. In the years succeeding the defeat of the Prague Spring of 1968, the phrase Central European literature represented an intellectual protest against a grim historical reality dictated by the stern partition of Europe between West and East. At the same time, the tragedy of Central Europe, which Kundera decried in his famous 1984 article, started to be associated with the tragedy of Central European Jews, of which the Austrian Joseph Roth was one. Kundera, but also Konrd, saw in the Central European Jewish cultural model the embodiment of everything Central Europe stood for: tolerance, tradition, moderation, and respect for culture and education. Reviving the memory of that Jewish world, a world vanished in the tumult of a murderous and impatient history, became synonymous with restoring the memory of that part of Europe that was too easily wiped out in the conflict between the western and the eastern parts of the continent. In the politically charged atmosphere of the 1980s, Central Europe even represented for some an alternative to the political divisions between East and West, the culture of peace and denuclearization, and the end of ideologies. I later realized that assigning Central Europe a quasi-utopian role, mediating between the spirit of the West (technology) and that of the East (ideology), was not a new trope. Roth had also depicted Habsburg Austria as well as the traditional life of Central European Jewry in utopian colors in order to create an alternative to what during the 1920s and 1930s appeared to be the irreconcilable forces confronting each other in Europe: on the one hand the bourgeois individualist model and on the other hand the fascist and communist collectivist one. Like many Jewish intellectuals of his time, Roth was interested in articulating an idea of redemption that allowed the Jewish identity and the modern human condition in general to reconcile themselves with a tragic history and even to sow the seeds of a future emancipation.

The search for redemption carried out by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals who came of age in the first quarter of the twentieth century represents one of the major paradigms within which modern Jewish intellectual history manifested itself. This search testifies to not only the historical difficulties encountered by European Jews at the time of a crucial moment in their history but also the synthetic power of their political imagination, their central locality within the German culture, and their revaluation of the Judaic religious heritage that their parents generation had almost forgotten. Roth dedicated his energy and literary imagination to developing this idea of redemption. In more than fifteen novels and countless journal articles, essays, and short stories he addresses some of the thorniest problems encountered by the modern individual, from political disillusionment to moral paralysis and from social estrangement to historical dissolution. For Roth, as for many members of his generation, the solution to even the most mundane problems lies in a profoundly moral, quasi-religious relation with the world, which he tries to reconstruct piece by piece starting from the negative consciousness of the redemptive dimension of human existence to its positive, unequivocal affirmation. His social, religious-existentialist, and historical novels reassert in one form or another the necessity for a reunification of