Books

Joseph Roth is a Jewish novelist who writes in the German tongue. I do not know how well known he is on his side of the Atlantic but he deserves to be better known on this. A little more than a year ago there was published in translation a novel about an old man, “Job”, over which a few of the discerning, myself included, threw up our hats. It remains in my memory, in spite of all the other books I have read since, as one of the most subtly beautiful stories and portraits of an old man that I have read.

Now The Viking Press has brought out a translation of another Roth novel, bearing the title of “Radetzky March”. Its theme is loyalty to the old Austrian Empire and to its last Emperor, Francis Joseph, as expressed in the lives and careers of three members of a family, two soldiers and a civil servant.

At the Batte of Selferine, when Francis Joseph was but a dashing youth, a second lieutenant of peasant stock, one Trotta, by an impulsive gesture, saves the Emperor’s life and obtains for himself a baronetcy, an estate, a purse and the esteem of the Emperor, an esteem which saved the family in a most important crisis. The book by and large is taken up with the adventures of the Trotta of Selferine, his son, the unflaggingly loyal District Commissioner, and the son’s son, the more or less unwilling soldier in whom may be seen at work the virus of the disintegrating forces that are destroying the ponderous Empire.

The novel is fascinating from beginning to end. It is crowded with historical data, with portraits of types that fascinate. The book is suffused with the pathos of nostalgia, the affection for memories that are beyond resuscitation. But those passages in which it seems to me Mr. Roth is most felicitious are those in which he portrays the courage and the pathos of old men. I do not know whether or not Mr. Roth is a radical; he may very well be, but perhaps his most memorable passages are those in which he attempts to take us into the mind and the memory and the limitations of the old Emperor and of his dogged, loyal servant, the District Commissioner, the son of the Hero.

We see the third of the line going to pieces, although he too dies like a hero, and the tragedy of his disintegration doesn’t seem to affect his author one-third so much as the effect of that disintegration on the old man. Even those whose lives the grandson touches seem to crumble, more often into death than not, and the pathos does not reach home so deeply as the pathos of being old and loyal to a dynasty, to an idea that is threatened by hostile victorious forces.

The details of life in a frontier garrison under the Hapsburgs seems to be interesting chiefly for its historical and sociological content rather than for what the author makes of them. But on the whole “Radetzky March”—which piece of music, by the way, the author seizes upon as the symbol of the old Austrian Empire—is a book extremely worth while reading, if not cherishing.

Harry Salpeter.