The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-1939

Description

Joseph Roth, the greatest European newspaper correspondent of his age, left the splintering Weimar Republic for Paris in 1925 and, as an Austrian Jew, was exiled there for the rest of his life. Collected together here for the first time in English, these exhilarating pieces evoke a world of suppleness, beauty and promise. From the port town of Marseilles to the Riviera of Nice and Monte Carlo, to the exotic hill country around Avignon, from the socialist workers and cattlemen with whom Roth ate breakfast, to prostitutes and Sunday bullfighters, The White Cities is not only a swan song to a European order that could no longer hold but also a beautifully crafted and revelatory work.

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed Central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into a Jewish family in Galicia, on the eastern edge of the empire, he was a prolific political journalist and novelist. On Hitler's assumption of power, he was obliged to leave Germany for Paris, where he died in poverty a few years later. His books include What I Saw, Job, The White Cities, The String of Pearls and The Radetzky March, all published by Granta Books. Michael Hofmann is the highly acclaimed translator of Joseph Roth, Wolfgang Koeppen, Kafka and Brecht, and the author of several books of poems and book of criticism. He has translated nine previous books by Joseph Roth. He teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The White Cities is superb * Independent * Roth was a supreme observer, a cynical romantic with a flair for prophecy and an understanding of the slow fester of moral outrage... His commentaries are political and cultural bulletins of the time... it is a privilege to see an artist at work - and an artist he was - but also to experience a witness watching history as a living process * Irish Times * Nearly every piece contains an animated, poetic sympathy for the underclass - from Marseille fisherman to factory workers in Lyon. The early portraits in particular sing with exuberance, yet as the shadow of war falls again across Europe, so the consequences for Roth as a liberal-minded Jew become tragically evident * Metro * Entirely wonderful... Roth is a marvel * Sunday Herald *