Five works across fifteen years. One vision, unwavering.
In Hotel Savoy, Gabriel Dan - a returning prisoner of war - checks into a vast, crumbling hotel in post-war Łódź where the displaced and the dispossessed wait, floor by floor, for a rich man's return from America to change everything. A world in miniature. A world in ruins.
In Rebellion, Andreas Pum has lost a leg in the war and received a medal and a barrel-organ permit in exchange. He is grateful, faithful, and entirely trusting in the state that broke him - until a single altercation on a tram sets in motion a catastrophe his innocence cannot prevent.
In A Chapter of Revolution, a winter train crawls through a frozen Russian landscape between Kursk and Voronezh. The men aboard have made a revolution. The revolution is already becoming something else.
In The Silent Prophet - written in the late 1920s, rejected by his publisher, found in three fragmentary manuscripts after his death - Friedrich Kargan gives everything to the revolutionary cause and returns to find that the cause has been replaced by its opposite, and that no one knows what to do with the men who actually believed.
In The Legend of the Holy Drinker - the last work Roth completed, written in Paris in the final months of his life - a homeless man living under the bridges of the Seine is given two hundred francs and asked to repay the debt to the Little St. Thérèse. He intends to. He always intends to. The result is one of the most mysterious and most beautiful novellas of the twentieth century.
By Joseph Roth. Author of The Radetzky March.
