The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares G. Piloiu (review)

Rares G. Piloiu's The Quest for Redemption offers a comprehensive study of Joseph Roth's fictional works, including a review of scholarship and some interesting side glances at Roth's journalism. The author argues for the centrality of Jewish thinking in Roth's work—in the form of a turn to tradition and a spiritual, at times mystical experience of authenticity and moral certainty lost in the modern, overly rational world. A central text for Piloiu is Roth's essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927), a text documenting Roth's confrontation with the primitive conditions under which many Jews lived in Eastern Europe and their remarkable spiritual resilience. Piloiu is interested in the notion of "redemption," understood, following Hasidic thinking, as an everyday, historical experience (43) that is at the same time mystical, religious, social, and also moral and individual (46–47). Faced with the unappealing alternatives of the bourgeoisie's assimilationist rationalism and an "emerging nationalism," Roth in his work promotes a notion of "redemption" that allows for "a more meaningful identification of the individual with the community and tradition" (51). The notion is admittedly vague, but Piloiu does make the convincing point that a similar turn to Jewish tradition can be found in texts by Rosenzweig, Buber, and, somewhat more distantly, Kafka, Freud, Benjamin, and Bloch, albeit in very different forms and shapes—nuances that sometimes get lost in his argument.

How, for instance, does Austria exemplify the "order of redemption" (221) understood in a Hasidic sense? To me one of the key questions this study raises, but only implicitly, is how the model of redemption is linked to other images Roth invents to describe humankind's metaphysical homelessness—is there indeed one model underlying all of Roth's writings, or does his work rather offer a series of narratives, figures, and images all meant to illustrate the human condition but from a variety of perspectives? Is it indeed the case that modernity, rationalism, and secularization, in a world focused on the individual but not the collective, are always and by necessity tied to each other? Or do Roth's fictional worlds, at times, also allude to modes of being modern that do respect diversity?

Without a doubt, Piloiu's approach works well for certain texts. This goes for Hiob (1930), which is indeed a meditation on a man who, lured by the promises of modern society, leaves his homeland with his family, faces a series of major trials to eventually return to find peace and a spiritual home. Roth's Tarabas (1934) too can be read as the story of a protagonist who abandons a history of violence and undergoes a long process of redemption to eventually embrace tradition. But doesn't the same text also show how an investment in tradition and religion can lead to violence? It is the uncovering of a painting of the Virgin Mary that triggers the violence at the core of the text when the Jewish innkeeper in whose inn it is discovered is accused of having desecrated it, leading to what Piloiu describes as a "moment of collective psychosis" (158).

The limits of the concept of "redemption" are particularly clear when one looks at the novel Radetzkymarsch (1932), of which Piloiu offers a reading I do not find very convincing (205–37). It is precisely the focus on "tradition" and the way the past is constructed (the story of the Hero of Solferino) and ideologically (ab)used in the service of empire that keeps the representatives of the second and third generations of the Trott a family from finding anything like authenticity or developing a moral outlook on life. Cannot Carl Joseph's heartbreaking love affair with Frau Slama be understood as an argument for a more modern attitude toward sexuality? Carl Joseph at the end of the novel indeed does act morally—he is killed seeking to provide his men with drinking...