The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth (review)

This lively, masterfully translated volume of sixty-four short pieces by the Austria-Jewish journalist and novelist Joseph Roth (1894-1939) will be of interest to literary scholars and theorists, historians, and translation scholars alike. Roth, perhaps best known to the English-speaking world as the author of novels and essays chronicling a nostalgia for the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Radetzky March, 1932) or of continental European Jewish life after 1900 (Job, 1930; The Wandering Jews, 1927), was also a prolific newspaper reporter and skillful, early German-language adopter of the genre of literary criticism and light literature known as the feuilleton. He was also an inveterate traveler throughout Eastern and Western Europe: First out of personal interest, and then of necessity when the Nazi Party took power in Germany in 1933. The Hotel Years was chosen as the title for this collection because Roth notoriously lived out of suitcases from 1925 until his death in 1933. Michael Hofmann, the translator of this volume, is also the official translator of all fourteen of Roth's books that have appeared in English, novels and short works alike. He is justly considered the scholar most responsible for having (re-)introduced Anglophone literary and academic culture to Roth in our time. As such, his authoritative interpretation here of Roth's turns of phrase, sometimes-archaic formulations, and witty, incisive observations in short-form prose remains as strong as when his first translation of other Roth short pieces, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933, was published in 2002.

The Hotel Years is as personal a project as Hofmann has yet undertaken in his myriad renderings of Roth into English. Indeed, it is the translator's stated intent that the Hofmann-Roth collaboration reviewed here "take the English reader closer to Roth than anything else he wrote" (xii). The earlier Hofmann translation, What I Saw, was a straight translation of a Roth reader in German that the Berlin-based literary scholar Michael Bienert had compiled and published from Roth's short-prose oeuvre on his own. This time around, Hofmann's methodology was, in the true impressionistic spirit of the feuilleton, to select and arrange the sixty-four pieces according to his own knowledge of Roth's whims and aesthetic sensibilities born of a decades-long engagement with the author's literary output and personal history. This is especially useful in the footnotes which Hofmann provides to various pieces–sometimes translating German proverbs in order to make what Roth is referring to in his texts understandable, sometimes providing short biographies of long-forgotten historical or literary figures to whom Roth alludes, sometimes defining dates and places key to full understanding of Rothian wit in particular passages.

Hofmann has also used some of his own intuition as to what best fit together when arranging the pieces into chapters. Some chapters are thus more or less arranged chronologically, some thematically, and some are linked only by topical, historical, or stylistic commonalities the reader is invited to discover during engagement with the text. The only other governing principle was that no piece could have yet appeared in any book Hofmann had translated of Roth's. The chapter headings are equally enigmatic: "Germany," Sketches," "Austria and Elsewhere," "Pleasures and Pains," "Albania," and the like. A short introduction to the collection is also provided, along with one short piece to begin the collection not part of any chapter, and one "coda" piece at the end in which Roth recounts his earliest memory, the loss of his cradle. Quite helpfully, a four-page index of names, places, and other terms is also included at the end of the book.

Scholars of turn-of-the-century Europe, regardless of country or language, have recently noted certain unfortunate similarities in politics, economics, and the contentious public sphere between those days and our own. This reviewer also sees certain parallels between the 1900's and today, perhaps not as completely transparent when The Hotel Years was published...