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’.
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