Born in 1894 in a small Galician town, Roth served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, worked as a journalist in Vienna and Berlin, fled in 1933 to Paris where he dominated the alternately exuberant and despondent milieu of political and literary migr s. He died, destitute, in 1939 shortly before the beginning of mankind's darkest journey into the night. His protagonists are forever waiting for the tempest to sweep them away. Strange, but this Jewish refugee who endured shame and hunger in exile from Nazism, was more fascinated by the forces that dismantled outdated social structures than by the misfortunes that befell his brethren- by Emperor Franz Joseph more than by Adolph Hitler. First published in 1932, it enjoyed but a fleeting success.
Fiction contains an element of prophecy.
Joseph Roth foresaw the total and totalitarian catastrophe that occurred after he died. This then is a nostalgic and poignant novel that will be read breathlessly. It has an atmosphere of its own a tone, a voice. They are defeated from the start by some nameless malediction. They live in the back country, cut off from the mainstream, outside history.