Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works Rares G

Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Purdue University Press Book Previews Purdue University Press 9-2018 The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works Rares G. Piloiu Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews Part of the European Languages and Societies Commons, and the Jewish Studies Commons Recommended Citation Piloiu, Rares G., "The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works" (2018). Purdue University Press Book Previews. 16. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_previews/16 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. The Quest for Redemption Comparative Cultural Studies Ari Ofengenden, Series Editor The series examines how cultural practices, especially contemporary creative media, both shape and themselves are shaped by current global developments such as the digitization of culture, virtual reality, global interconnectedness, increased people flows, transhumanism, environmental degradation, and new forms of subjectivi- ties. We aim to publish manuscripts that cross disciplines and national borders in order to provide deep insights into these issues. The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth’s Works By Rares G. Piloiu Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana The saint lives in the world. He does not reject it. —Max Brod, Paganism, Christianity, Judaism: A Confession of Faith Copyright 2018 by Purdue University. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. Paperback ISBN: 978-1-55753-830-7 ePub ISBN: 978-1-61249-550-7 ePDF ISBN: 978-1-61249-549-1 Cover image: ©Yvette Depaepe Contents Avant-Propos ix Introduction The Judaic Dimension of Redemption in Roth’s Work and a Brief Review of the Relevant Secondary Literature 1 Chapter 1 The Promise of Redemption and the Meaning of History: A Central European Jewish Synthesis 17 Chapter 2 Homelessness, Anarchy, Negative Utopia: TheVia Negativa of Redemption in Joseph Roth’s Early Novels 89 Chapter 3 Transgression, Confession, Atonement: The Search for Redemption in Joseph Roth’s Fiction of Religious Inspiration 127 Chapter 4 Memory, Restitution, Justice: The Search for Redemption in Joseph Roth’s Historical Fiction 197 Chapter 5 Redemption and Irony: The Case ofThe Tale of the 1002nd Night 261 Conclusion 277 Main Directions in the Roth Scholarship: A Brief Chronological Sketch 285 Works Cited 301 Index 321 Avant-Propos The argument for writing a study on Joseph Roth has first of all a personal moti- vation. 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 Roth’s work. Spending holidays with my mother’s side of the family in Transylvania, I grew accustomed to hearing a mélange of languages, including Romanian, Hungarian, and German, imperceptibly melt- ing into each other as the need required in a harmonious coexistence of what later I understood to be the specificity ofMitteleuropa . I would not want to ide- alize 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 family’s 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 geographi- cal location, crossing the Carpathians from the flatlands was like moving from an ugly and omnipresent history (it was, after all, Nicolae Ceausescu’s 1980s Romania) to a place outside of history, a magical realm under the rule of eter- nity. There, more powerful than history, tradition left its indelible mark on everything. Later in life as I read Roth’s 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 ix x Avant-Propos defies politics, history, and territorial partitions, as the Hungarian Jewish writer György Konrád 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 Esterházy, is also, as I later learned, influenced significantly by Roth’s 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 Roth’s 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 parti- tion 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 associ- ated with the tragedy of Central European Jews, of which the Austrian Joseph Roth was one. Kundera, but also Konrád, saw in the Central European Jewish cultural model the embodiment of everything Central Europe stood for: toler- ance, 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 com- munist 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. Avant-Propos xi 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 twenti- eth 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 ded- icated his energy and literary imagination to developing this idea of redemption. In more than fifteen novels and countless journal articles, essays, and short sto- ries 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 ofWeltgeschichte and Heilsgeschichte, making redemption part of everyday existence and imparting to history the hope of spiritual deliverance. By revisiting the Chasidic tradition, Roth unites the apparently contradictory notions of tradition and innovation, faith and reason, salvation and history. It is through this synthesis made possible by the idea of redemption that one can comprehend Roth’s many paradoxes, including the coexistence of social- ism and conservatism, of his radical individualism and collective traditionalism and of his anarchism and stoicism, which represent so many puzzles for numer- ous interpreters who often speak of Roth’s “contradictions,” “paradoxes,” and “ambivalence.” This study is a revised, updated, and extended version of my doctoral thesis, written at the State University of New York at Buffalo in 2006.

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