A timely biography traces Joseph Roth's tales of fascism

Roth was an outraged witness to tyranny, which drove him to exile, and his books to the stake. In "Endless Flight," Keiron Pim examines the flawed man and his resonant legacy.

VIENNA - In the last glowing light of a hot October day, a group of Viennese 20 - a few go back and forth with a volleyball in front of an old Nazi anti-aircraft tower. Keiron Pim stops to take their picture. Pim flew to Vienna a few hours ago. He is a 44-year-old, soft-spoken writer from Norwich, England, who describes himself as someone who blinks a lot. And he recently produced the first biography in English of Joseph Roth, an ingenious, dying, alcoholic Austro-Hungarian journalist and novelist, chronicler of the final years of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of fascism in Europe. Pim is here to see what the pandemic prevented him from seeing when he was writing his book: La Vienne de Roth.

Pim is not the obvious candidate for the role of Roth's biographer. He has already published two books, one a popular science work on dinosaurs, the other a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure associated with 1960s London. And, as he admits in his acknowledgments, he does not not fluent in German. But when he read a review of the letters collected by Roth, he came across this galvanizing phrase: "There is no biography of Roth in English." Somehow, Roth, who died in 1939 but whose writing resonates as vividly today as it did 100 years ago, had escaped the cradle-to-grave treatment of an English-language biography. , although fans have long been asking for one.

ImageKeiron Pim, author of "Endless Flight ", at the Bristol bar in Vienna.Credit...David Payr for The New York Times

Pim had read one of Roth's works years before - a book titled "The Wandering Jews", in which Roth returns to his Galician homeland to describe the "wonder-rabbis" and the Jewish believers who flocked to them. As he began to read more, he caught Roth's urgency and intensity, which he likens to a "double espresso." He also captured the way Roth's voice seems to span decades to draw readers into his vivid scenes, and Roth's renewed relevance as an indignant witness to the rise of tyranny. From exile in 1934, Roth wrote, in a furious statement as applicable today as it was then: "The historical discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the resounding lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a cry. when they doubt the word."

Pim also wondered how much Roth's story intersected with that of his own family: despite his surnames the more British, Pim's grandparents had lived in Vienna in the same years as Roth. So regarding the missing biography, Pim thought, "I'll do something about it." His book, "Endless Flight" , was published in England in October and is released in the United States, from Granta, on December 6.

Less than a five-minute walk from the tower of flak, Pim turns on Rembrandtstrasse. This is Leopoldstadt, the historic Jewish quarter of old Vienna and the neighborhood that gave its name to Tom Stoppard's new play. In 1920, just a few years after Roth's arrival, there were 200,000 Jews living in Vienna, most of them in Leopoldstadt, many of whom were refugees from the East, fleeing poverty and pogroms.There are less than 150 00 Jews in Vienna today. Pim has been here before: During a stopover in 2019, he took a few hours to see the buildings where his grandparents, Viennese Jews, had lived. When he attempted to return two years later, for his research on Roth, Austria was stranded. Now he locates No. 35. Interrupted without question, Pim crosses the dark threshold of Roth's first local dwelling.