1894–1920
Youth, War, Brody, and Vienna
JOSEPH ROTH, AGE THREE
[Moses] Joseph Roth was born in Brody in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on 2 September 1894, “under the sign of the Virgin,” as he writes drily in no. 98, “to whom my given name of Joseph stands in some vague relation.” He was Joseph, Mary in this instance was his mother, but there was no immaculate conception, no baby Jesus, and no man in the house. While “Mu” remained an only child, his mother was one of seven, and he had many Grübel or Grubel uncles and aunts and cousins, with some of whom he remained in touch all his life. (After his death, his favorite cousin, Paula Grübel, traveled to Paris, to give her stock of his early manuscripts and offprints to Blanche Gidon, his translator into French, who kept them safe during the occupation and the war.) They were not exactly poor (there were visits to the photographer, smart clothes, violin lessons, even a maid, at least some of the time), but Roth’s lifelong aversion to the idea of home will have dated from then (a lodger, his mother’s brave face and forbidding bosom, and pride and shame and continual anxiety); the town—whose very name he was often careful to suppress later, in favor of the more German-sounding “Schwaby,” or even “Schwabendorf,” so redolent was Brody (anti-Semitically evoked in a 1900 English Baedeker: “They differ in their dress and the mode of wearing their hair from the other inhabitants, who despise them”)1 of Galicia and the poor, dirty, and, above all, Jewish east; while dealings with his uncles will have left him neuralgically sensitive to any subsequent combination of money and advice (when forthcoming from Stefan Zweig, say).
The young Moses went to gymnasium in Brody. He was gifted, precocious, and studious, took his exams with distinction, enrolled at the University of Lemberg in 1913, and went on to complete six semesters of German at the University of Vienna. As his first poems and articles started to appear, he took the “Moses” off his name (it’s there for his Viennese Jewish in-laws, though, and during one crisis in 1926, in letters to Reifenberg, it makes a short and moody reappearance). It’s curious that he started to publish and learned to dissemble at the same time. In 1917 in a typical volte-face—he was a pacifist just three years before—he volunteered for the army; saw his native Galicia, only now under Mars; made his way back to Vienna; found himself (as the British say) cushy billets as a censor and on an army newspaper. It is good to read those sensibly less than valiant lines to his cousin Paula on the advantages of being out of range of the Russians; before Roth launched the myth of his officer’s career—a corrective myth his life seemed to require, something like a pair of spectacles, as David Bronsen sweetly puts it. Similarly, those epically haphazard and chaotically adventurous returns from the front described in Flight Without End or The Emperor’s Tomb or Hotel Savoy were not his lot. He was back in Vienna pretty promptly in December 1918, in the same awkwardly dyed ex-army gear as everyone else, got his start on a new progressive newspaper, Der Neue Tag, in April 1919, published a hundred pieces in the year before it folded, and in June 1920, a refugee from unemployment and inflation in Austria, he moved to Berlin.
The early letters are all personal and familial, to his Grübel cousins in Lemberg. They are joshing and showing off, affectionate and condescending. One can see in Roth a desire for independence (he needs license not to write to his uncle), and, at the same time, rather movingly, a wish to support, educate, encourage, cultivate these younger or female cousins. (One might think of the regular pattern, later in his life, where, hard up and managing to obtain a little money for himself, he straightaway transfers half of it to others; their need seems as great, or greater.) Unfledged himself, he shelters others under his wings. One might note, finally, that these are the only letters in which Roth sounds young, in fact like a young shuttlecock: frisky and agile, youthfully pompous or lightheartedly pugnacious, boasting of his publications, his undergraduate “red sofa with yellow trim,” amusing himself with Venice and Vienna, observing his Flemish neighbors and their Christian dogs, and entertaining the prospect of Albania. It is a tone worth cherishing, because once he’s twenty-five and in Germany, you won’t hear it again.
1. To Resia Grübel1
[Schwabendorf, holidays 1911]
Dear Resia,
I want to answer your letter as promptly as you wrote it—if not more so, seeing as it’s Sunday, and there’s little to do. When I wrote in my last letter to ask if I might come, that wasn’t a serious inquiry: you shouldn’t take everything seriously. I am a sworn enemy to etiquette.2 Now I’m not sure if I will be able to come, because I’ve been set some reading to do. It’s all because I’m an “A” student, and more is required of us. Anyway, I know I won’t be able to talk Mama into going, she never wants to leave the house. She seeks various pretexts for this, and since the help was discreetly “let go” yesterday, and there’s little chance of finding a suitable replacement, the prospect of my visit has rather receded. Well, the sky won’t fall down on top of us. And if we should be able to come after all, then we can do all the nice things you suggest.
I gave Christiampoller3 your best; he would have leapt straight into an eighth heaven, had it existed. But as there are only seven, he contented himself with the seventh of them, and thousands of little lights sparkled before his eyes, and he heard choirs of seraphim and cherubim, just like in Goethe’s Faust, which, alas and alack, you haven’t read. He—i.e., Christiampoller, not Faust—will probably come to Lemberg. It’ll be good. He’s been brushing his hair and pressing his pants for three weeks now. All for Lemberg. Of course, he’s not as industrious as he used to be, and his studies suffer as a consequence.
I don’t understand why you’re so worried about the war. It seems to preoccupy you all day.
Why do I not hear from Paula?4 Perhaps she’s waiting for me to turn up on the doorstep? If we do come, I’ll give you notice. For the moment, be well, and write back! Pronto!
Kisses
Your cousin M.5
With much love to everyone.
1. Resia Grübel was Roth’s cousin, daughter of his mother’s brother Siegmund Grübel. The family lived in Lemberg/Lvov/Lviv, not far from Brody.
2. sworn enemy to etiquette: either never true or subsequently abandoned. JR was Old World in his courtliness. The phrase itself has, one might note, an element of etiquette within it.
3. Christiampoller: a local character, in Brody (two names presumably run together as one, for comic effect).
4. Paula: Resia’s younger sister. See note in following letter.
5. M. short for Muniu, Roth’s nickname as a child, the Polish diminutive form of Moses, his given name.
2. To Resia and Paula Grübel
[Brody, 2 September 1912]
Dear Resia,
you’re quite right, time hurries on and the years go around quickly, and already I’ve completed seventeen of them. I was very pleased to get your birthday congratulations; that’s not just a manner of speaking either, I mean I felt real, deep, inner, genuine-in-every-fiber pleasure. I know how devoted you are to me, and that you really are concerned for my welfare. It’s not so hard to tell real feelings from false. I see you take delight in the way my writing is coming on, and I want to thank you for that especially. Thank you too for your wishes regarding my studies. This last year will soon be over, and after my final exams all the trials and tribulations of school will be behind me, and I will go on to the great school of life. Let’s hope I earn equally good grades at that institution. [. . .]
Thanks again, and kisses from your
Cousin Muniu
Dear Paula,1 I want to thank you as well for writing. I’m delighted that my dear younger cousin is thinking of me as well
Kisses,
Muniu
1. Paula: Paula Grübel (1897–1941?). Lifelong friendship with Roth. She was murdered in the Holocaust.
3. To Heini Grübel
[Brody, no date]
Dear Heini,1
your sweet little note pleased me every bit as much as a long letter would have done! You are still so young, and frankness and straightforwardness are the plants native to the childish soul. That’s why good wishes from you made me so happy, because from whom other than a child, symbol of the life to come, should one desire wishes? I in turn wish you success at school. It’s not so long ago that I started wearing the school uniform myself, and quite soon now I will set it aside. I hope you get through gymnasium cheerfully and in good health. What makes me especially happy is the thought that we’re now both scholars together.
Servus,2 my dear chap,
Kisses from your Muniu
1. Heini: Heinrich Grübel, younger brother of Paula and Resia.
2. Servus: familiar Austrian greeting, classically used between intimates and equals, i.e., classmates at school, or fellow officers in the army.
4. To Paula Grübel
Vienna, 14 August 1916
Dear Paula,
it really was coincidence. Who ever would have guessed it: all of nineteen! But then, nineteen years are like a piece of fluff on the scales of eternity. And it’s in eternity that we live. From eternity, in eternity, for eternity. Yes, for eternity as well.
What do I have to give you? I don’t have any money. But I get paid 6 hellers a line. Count the number of lines in this letter,1 and you’ll have a tidy sum.
What can I wish for you? Three kingly things: a crown, a scarlet cloak, a scepter. The golden crown of imagination, the scarlet cloak of solitude, and the scepter of irony. It’s hard to come by these things at nineteen. They’re not much in evidence.
But there’s one thing I wish you above all: that you don’t forget your laugh. Laughter is a tinkling silver bell that some good angel gave us on our life’s road. But because it’s so light and loose, it’s easily lost. Somewhere by the wayside. And big fate goes by with squeaking boots, and grinds it underfoot, the laughter.2 Some people are lucky and find another. Or someone else finds it, and picks it up, and returns it to its rightful owner. Not often, though! So look after it!
I’m going to be in Baden later this week. At any rate, before I join the army.
Bye! Till soon!
Mu3
1. Roth numbers the lines of this letter.
2. laughter: a passage like this has absolutely the same rhythms and diction as some of JR’s very late writing; cf. “Rest While Watching the Demolition,” from 1938.
3. Mu: Muniu.
5. To Paula Grübel
Vienna, a Wednesday [1915 or 1916]
Dear Paula,
I have a pretty next-door neighbor. She spends all day in front of her embroidery frame, doing petit point. A thoroughly Dutch figure, in spite of the fact that she’s a brunette. In the afternoon, when the sun shines, a sunbeam falls plumply and lingeringly on her embroidery. And then when her blond little boy stands beside her, the whole scene is utter Holland. Unfortunately, Mme Sun has had a toothache these past few days. She’s wrapped her face in black cloths. From time to time a bit of white cotton wool peeps out.
And now it’s gone and started raining. M. Wind, my friend, has married Mme Cloud. I attended their wedding, a jolly affair. Now Mme Cloud is giving birth to their children on a daily basis: small and great Showers. What a to-do. I must ask the wind to desist, because his sons will insist on spoiling my creases. And you know how sacrosanct they are.
We have cake. It’s resting quietly in a corner just now, giving off a splendid aroma. It’s almost like Brody, on a Friday. Or do you know of two phenomena more indissolubly connected than home and baking smells?
A couple of days ago, I went out. It was gorgeous. The fields look just like my cheeks when I haven’t been to the barber’s for a couple of days. The song of the last scythe hangs unseen in the air. In the clouds there’s still a last verse of lark song. The dandelions have a patriotic shimmer. Somewhere in the distance, smoke rises vertically into the sky. The ground is decked out in all the cast-off glory of the trees. And in the air there’s the bitter whiff of steaming earth and wet foliage . . .
Ever since 1 October, the library has been open all day. Soon lectures will begin. This year, Brecht1 is giving a course on classical drama (less interesting, unfortunately). Then the girl students will show up, with their earnest expressions and tousled hair. Anxious faces, like a three-day rain. How I hate those women! Though students are no more women than streetwalkers are.
Do you remember Csallner? The fellow who used to borrow lecture notes from me in German? We’ve become friends. He has some admirable qualities. Including an attractive fiancée. I would back him to achieve, oh, half a dozen children, a small pot belly, and a professorship in Budapest—and still to remain a Philistine.
I have poems due to appear in Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung, if they haven’t come out already. I haven’t the cash or the inclination to go to a café or to invest in a copy. Either would set me back 60 hellers. If you wouldn’t mind, perhaps you can see if they’ve run something of mine. No royalty, alas. But a few short stories I sent in, I should be paid quite well for. Then I’ll be in Baden. I’m looking forward to All Souls’ and Christmas. Two poems in the supplement will earn me 12 crowns.
What do you think about money? I don’t think it’s worth bothering about. If I had it, I would chuck it out the window. Money’s the opposite of women. You think highly of a woman until you’ve got her, then when you get her, you feel like chucking her out (or at least you ought). Whereas money you despise as long as you don’t have it, and then you think very highly of it.
I was pleased that you came around yesterday. Even more pleased, admittedly, that I was out. Even so, I’d like to see you. You’ll be needing to find me in any case, so that I can read you this letter . . .
It’s too bad you live so far away. I have thin soles, and shoemakers are expensive. A shoemaker’s heart is tougher than his soles. [. . .]
Things are all right. I myself am better than all right. My heart is heavy and my pockets are light. Mind you, if my pockets were as heavy as my heart, then my heart would be as light as my pockets.
When are we going to see each other?
Greetings
Muniu Faktisch2
1. Brecht: Walter Brecht, professor of German literature at the University of Vienna.
2. The full version of Roth’s nickname; faktisch—actually, or in point of fact—was something he was much given to saying when he was still a young pedant and “A” student.
6. To Paula Grübel
Vienna, a Thursday [1916]
Dear Paula,
it’s summer outside, and a holiday, and a scent of lime blossom has snuck in from somewhere, and perched on my windowsill. Alas, my neighbor is a Jewess, and scares away my lime blossom with her appalling squawks. Her voice is shrill, and smells of onions. There is little sign of the holiday in my courtyard. At best, its denizens have rest days. They can only rest, not be holy. Outside, meanwhile, girls dressed in white sell badges. I was approached by a score of them, and I didn’t buy. Then one came—and I bought. For I am an individualist, and despise the mass. And the girl from whom I bought was an aristocrat. She walked alone, and offered her wares to no one. She was like a priestess among temple prostitutes.
There is something of Venice1 in the air today, as there sometimes is on summer days, and I am in a mood as if after lunch I were going by gondola to some wharf. Open before me is a book: Vischer’s Aesthetics,2 I was reading it yesterday and the day before yesterday, but I am too uncultivated to understand it. It’s so terribly learned, and only when Professor V. condescends to climb down from the dizzy heights of his lectern—which is rarely enough—do I understand him. The things I do understand in the book give me little pleasure, because I knew them all anyway. I will give it back to my colleague, who won’t understand it either, but even so we will discuss it endlessly between ourselves, and one day I will give my colleague a fearful slap, for being such a liar.
I am going to have my lunch soon, and am looking forward to it. Today we are having something cheesy and prosy, but the Venetian element in the air today will ennoble and Italianize it, and I will eat nothing cheesy or prosy, but macaroni. And then I really will go out on a gondola, past the Ring and the Volksgarten, and I will encounter a pretty Venetian girl, and will accost her thus: May I bore you, Signorina? And the pretty Venetian girl will reply in purest Viennese: See if I care. And for all that, I am in Venice today. Today, today only, I am the doge of Venice and an Italian tramp rolled in one, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will go back to being the dreamy German poet, art enthusiast, and 3rd year German student studying under Professor Brecht. Tomorrow Faust is being performed at the Burgtheater—the play, not the horrible opera!—with Ludwig Wüllner in the title role. And I will stand up in the gods, dog-tired or god-tired, and will imagine I shall have seen Faust.
Lunch wasn’t good, because firstly, my neighbor beat his wife with a broomstick. Secondly, the macaroni weren’t proper macaroni at all. And thirdly, Auntie Rieke ate cheese off the point of her knife. Just as well Aunt Mina confiscated my revolver in Lemberg, otherwise I might have committed tanticide.
A Christian is a rarity in my courtyard. But even so, there is one living here. The window across the courtyard from me is very pretty. A fair-haired boy is doing his homework. His dog is beside him. Does a Jew keep a dog? The fair-haired boy, the dog, and I—we are the only decent people in the whole building.
Last week, I went to hear Professor Brecht every day, and watched Miss Lumia write everything down with her awful industry. She looks so comically serious when she does that, and she’s so serious, I can feel it against my back—because she sits behind me. There are women who are moving in their beauty. Lumia is moving, too—but in her dimness.
I have a pretty red sofa with yellow trim, which I am about to go and lie down on. It’s 3 o’clock now, and I’ll remain horizontal till 5. Then I’ll wash and go for a walk. No, take a gondola. Because it’s still Venice.
Maybe I’ll come to Baden next week. If I have any money, I’ll bring Wittlin3 along, so you can see there are other young men than Baden lawyers.
Now write and tell me about the three pines.
Byebye!
Muniu
And in this space you can draw me something pretty:4
1. Venice: this refers to a contemporary feature in the big Viennese funfair, the Prater, an installation called Venice in Vienna.
2. Vischer: Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887). Author of On the Sublime and the Comic (1837) and Aesthethics, or the Science of Beauty (1846–1857).
3. Wittlin: Jozef Wittlin (1896–1976), friend of JR’s. A Polish author and essayist, Wittlin studied in Vienna with Roth, and served in the same regiment in World War I. Lived in exile in Paris after 1939, after 1941 in New York. Wrote Salt of the Earth (1935), and translated several of Roth’s novels into Polish. Paula, JR’s favorite cousin, never married.
4. The page was left blank aside from this injunction.
7. To Paula Grübel
Field Post 632 on 24 August 1917
Dear Paula,
among the accumulated mail of four weeks I found your letter, which I was all the more pleased to see because of the quite astonishing maturity of its language, and its thought. Have you really become so old?
I am currently in some Augean shtetl in East Galicia. Gray filth, harboring one or two Jewish businesses. Everything’s awash when it rains, and when the sun comes out it starts to stink. But the location has one great advantage: it’s about 6 miles behind the lines. Reserve encampment.
Materially, I’m not so well off as I used to be. Our newspaper is failing, and once the aura of reporter has faded away, there’ll be nothing left of me but a one-year volunteer. And I’ll be treated accordingly.
But for the likes of me that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Little opportunity for active creation, aside from a couple of lyric poems, which were more out of passive sensation anyway.
What you have to say about reading with Frau Szajnocha1 makes me very happy—by the way, said reading is clearly manifested in the stylistic quality of your letter. Please salute the lady for me, and give her my best.
I enclose a poem at your request, kindly read it carefully. Its beauty lies in the originality of its imagery. I consider it one of the few of mine that have completely succeeded.
On August 5 I had a poem in the Prager Tagblatt.2 Please, order up a copy. I should like to have it for reference for some possible future collection.
I hope to be in Lemberg sometime in the next few days. I view your decision to go there as a little premature. I’ll have more to say on the matter in a letter to Uncle.
I think I’ll be gone from here in 2 to 3 weeks. I may be transferred to Lemberg, to the Record Office, or possibly Sternberg. It’s also possible that our office will be moved to Albania, to start a paper there, in which case it’s Albania here I come.
Best wishes
Your M.
1. Szajnocha: Helena von Szajnocha, née Baroness von Schenk (ca. 1863–1945), lived in the same house as the Grübel family in Lemberg/Lvov, Hofmana 7. The divorced wife of a university professor in Cracow, she was a French tutor. A personal and literary influence on Roth and Wittlin. Chronically infirm, she made her rooms a sort of literary and musical salon.
2. The Prager Tagblatt was a leading German-language newspaper in Prague.
8. To Paula Grübel
Vienna, 24 February 1918
Dear Paula,
when I came here, it was freezing cold and clouded over, you could stare at the sun with your naked eye, it was small and round and red like a Christmas blood orange. On Friday, it suddenly warmed up, a hot wind, the foehn. It was very pleasant on our street, among other things I saw on the streetcar a man in a stiff hat, and a wreath around it, presumably of paper, attaching it to his chin, like two bonnet strings. A young lady ran into my arms on the Ring. She presumably took me for a lamppost. Another lady’s skirts flew up in the wind, you could see her stocking was ripped, and she had a provisional red garter. Nice.
At home, I found I had an invitation from the “Scholle,”1 and I duly went along on Saturday. A couple of dilettantes read their contemptible poems. A young lady condescended to participate. Her mother, a Jewess from Leopoldstadt, stood up and said: That’s my little girl. Those four words made her—the mother—immortal. More than the daughter will ever be by her writing. The mother will take up residence in the “Scholle,” and, please God, in a book of mine.
On Monday I went to the Burgtheater to buy tickets. I looked for my friend, Roth the actor, but didn’t find him. He wasn’t at home, maybe he’s left town. Nothing to be had at the box office. I went to the Deutsches Volkstheater. A lady cashier with a mustache. The mustache of an actor, who had had it taken off. She was frowning and hard as if she had food to sell. She looked as though she wanted me not to go near her theater. Purely to annoy her, I bought a ticket for the matinee show of Molnar’s Herrenmode, a piece of filth. On Tuesday I went to listen to Hubermann.2 He played a Bach etude with skill, froideur, and physical exertion. Then some Italian music with warmth and fervor. Finally, as I’d wished, “Ave Maria.” He played it in such a way that I can’t possibly torture you with it any more. Divine.
I felt a little rush of sympathy when he bowed stiffly afterwards. While playing, his expression was austere; the instant he puts down his bow, he loses all his majesty, he’s a poor wretch, almost shy. I thought of my story about the violinist.
I smoke Turkish cigarettes, a delicious aroma, and play with Helene’s little son. He’s blond and blue-eyed, wears a velvet jacket with two big pockets where he stores pencils, pens, pocket knives, chains, crumbs, gingerbread, and chocolate. He gets very dirty at times, and takes particular delight in making me dirty.
I took out a subscription at Last’s, and borrowed Otto Flake’s Logbuch. Flake3 is from Luxembourg, an Alemanne by birth, a cheery, healthy, and sensual type. Occasionally, in his descriptive passages he combines naïveté and inspiration, childish and serious touches so brusquely that you have the sense you’re reading Heine. But then he doesn’t have Heine’s Jewish sentiment, or French elegance. Sometimes he’s clear and objective, like Gottfried Keller, and as bitter and bracing as that. Keller was Alemannic too. You should borrow something of Flake’s, you won’t regret it. Resia4 should read him.
I was ill for three days, with the flu. I had myself looked after, drank chamomile tea, took quinine and aspirin. Today I’m feeling better.
Please tell your father—I’m writing to him under a separate cover—not to go off the deep end if I didn’t send him a card. Does he need a postcard from me with a couple of lines of writing on it to prove my gratitude and devotion? Where would that take us! It’s absurd to be so fixated on externals. I got sick, otherwise I would have written long ago.
If you have any mail for me, would you kindly forward it to me. I’m leaving next Sunday or Monday. Keep me posted.
Greetings to Aunt Resia, and Heini
Your Mun.
Best wishes to Frau v. Szajnocha!
1. Scholle: “soil” or “sod” in German. Almost always—as here—with an unpleasantly patriotic taint.
2. Hubermann: Bronislav Hubermann (1882–1947), a renowned violinist. There is a childhood photograph of Roth in 1905 with a violin.
3. Flake: Otto Flake (1880–1962), writer and essayist. Das Logbuch had just come out with S. Fischer in 1917.
4. Roth’s aunt Resia, wife of Siegmund Grübel.