For the ‘Common Roots: Europe and National Culture’

Edward J Esche (Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge) [BIO]

Email: edward.esche@anglia.ac.uk

 

ABSTRACT:

Joseph Roth was a Jewish journalist and novelist of the inter-war years. He was born in Brody in 1894, lived in Berlin from 1920, then moved to Paris in 1925, where he died in 1939. Granta Books has recently completed a project of publishing in English all of Roth’s major works, some of them in new translations. Granta was originally founded as a magazine in Cambridge in 1889, re-launched in Cambridge in 1979, after financial difficulties in the 1970s; its books division is responsible for the resurgence of interest in Roth’s work in the English speaking world. Joseph Roth is, among other things, an outspoken Europeanist: his letter to a friend upon arriving in Paris could almost be taken as a blueprint for the ideals of the European Union to come. This paper, entitled, ‘”What is my nation”: social location in Joseph Roth’s later novels’ will explore presentations of national versus European communality in the writing of Joseph Roth.