Joseph Roth (1894–1939) has been well served by translators, especially Michael Hofmann. His works are widely available and at least two are acknowledged masterpieces: Job (1930), a lyrical evocation of the fading world of the East European Jewish shtetl, and The Radetzky March (1932), Roth’s elegy for the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until now there has been no English biography. Keiron Pim takes up the challenge with Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth. It is the product of wide-ranging scholarship, a deep immersion in Roth’s oeuvre, and travels in Ukraine, where Roth’s hometown Brody is now located. He shows us Roth as journalist and novelist ‘tracing the continent’s trajectory between the wars in prose of sublime lyricism’ and creating a voice for ‘the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed’.

Roth was a man of many gifts – blessed with a brilliant intellect, a rare capacity for empathy, loyal friends, the love of women – but, like the biblical Job, he was marked out for great suffering. He never knew his father, who was declared insane just before his birth. His impoverished mother managed to give him a classical German education, the passport to university, but he found her love stifling. A brilliant student, he was accepted into Lemberg (Lviv), then Vienna University in 1913, but was soon drawn into the Great War. The 1920s – roaming across Europe, reporting for the Frankfurter Zeitung – were happy at first. Then, in 1929, exhausted by their peripatetic lifestyle, his young wife, Friedl, succumbed to schizophrenia. Guilt-stricken, Roth often feared for his own sanity. In 1933 he fled into exile. Stateless and financially dependent on friends, he drank constantly, and suffered an excruciating death from alcohol poisoning in 1939. Friedl was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.