Backlisted - Job: The Story of a Simple Man by Joseph Roth

Episode Date: February 15, 2021

Joseph Roth's Job: The Story of a Simple Man (1930) is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to explore this austere and powerful novel, first published in German as Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes, are Keiron Pim, whose much-anticipated biography of Joseph Roth will be published in 2022, and a returning Backlisted guest, bibliomemoirist and playwright Samantha Ellis. Roth was a prolific yet enigmatic writer - his other books include The Radetzky March and The Legend of the Holy Drinker - and this episode takes a long, considered look at his (often chaotic) life and work, and where Job fits into both. Also in this episode, Andy shares a reading by Salena Godden from her acclaimed new novel Mrs Death Misses Death, while John is beguiled by the fragmented visions of Max Porter's The Death of Francis Bacon.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)08:37 - The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter16:14 - Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden22:07 - Job by Joseph Roth* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When you're working out at Planet Fitness, it's a judgment-free zone, so you can really step up your workout. That's why we've got treadmills. And our team members are here to help, so you can be carefree with the free weights. There are also balance balls, bikes, cables, kettlebells, and TRX equipment. But, like, no pressure. Get started for $1 enrollment, and then only $15 a month. Hurry this $1 enrollment sale at Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See

Home Club for details. Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation.

And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. are we all recording john are you are you recording? I am recording, Andy. Okay, come on. Yay!

We have lift off. Let's do this. Okay, let's go. Let's go. I've got a drink. I've got my notes. I've got some books. Hello, Samantha.

Hello, Kieran. Hello, Andy. Hello. Where are, Samantha, where are you calling us from this evening? I am in North London, like every Jewish girl should be. And I have just done my Friday night candles on Zoom. And, yeah, all ready to talk about Roth. Kieran, where are you?

I'm in Norwich, Andy. The fine city of Norwich, Norfolk. I know you're in Norwich. I dream of seeing Norwich again one day. Oh, one day that dream will come true, Andy, I promise you. I hope so. If you hope and pray. And how has Norwich responded to events of the last year?

Well, if Norwich was quiet to start with, it's kind of descended into silence, really. I have tried to see it as an opportunity to enjoy the city where I live all the more and its many virtues and its history and its beautiful architecture and all of these things. And frankly, I am busting to get out. Yeah, and then what did you do in week two? Yeah, exactly.

John, shall we begin? Let's do it, shall we? Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you find us in a small town on the Russian border in the early 20th century, eating bowls of warm soup with a small Jewish family living in a single room. The floor scrubs so clean it shines like melted sunshine, the tallow from the cheek candles dripping on the Czech tablecloth. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers

crowdfund books they really want to read. I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by a new guest, Kieran Pym, and a returning guest, Samantha Ellis. Hello. Hello. Hi. Samantha joined us on our eighth ever episode five years ago to discuss Lolly Willows by Sylvia Townsend Warner. And then it took her four years to crawl her way back onto the show for episode 94 when she joined us to talk about The Prince of West End avenue by alan eisler and both may we say

terrific uh novels and terrific amazing books episodes so thanks for coming back for a third time thanks for having me kieran pym is an author freelance journalist and creative writing tutor whose last book was jumping jack flash david Litvinov and the Rock and Roll Underworld. I'm going to say that again so listeners can get a pen and write down the title of that book if they haven't read it because it is sensational. Jumping Jack Flash, David Litvinov and the Rock and Roll Underworld by Kieran Pym.

So, Kieran, thanks for coming in just on that basis alone. That book is the first biography of one of the most extraordinary characters in 60s London, published by Jonathan Cape in 2016. Previously, Kieran wrote a popular science book about dinosaurs and edited and introduced into the light the medieval Hebrew poetry of Mia of Norwich, the first translated edition of poems by a 13th century writer from the city where Kieran lives. That is range, Kieran, don't mind me saying. I like to think that they all have something in common about digging things up from the past, possibly. Oh, I like it. How I rationalise it.

But yeah, it's been a kind of curious literary career to date that's involved a fair bit of leaping around. Kieran is attempting to balance the homeschooling requirements of three daughters in lockdown with writing the first English language biography of Joseph Roth. That's a coincidence. Whoa! Whoa, what? No one warned me about that! I wondered what I was doing here.

Someone warn me about that. I wondered what I was doing here. Huge, if true. And it's scheduled to be published by Granta in autumn 2022. And so very quickly, before we introduce Samantha, clear up. There's a pint resting on this, Kieran. How do you pronounce Joseph Roth? Okay.

I think we can say Joseph Roth. However, a great many of the scholars and enthusiasts for his writing who I've spoken to in the last few years have pronounced his surname as he would have done, which is Roth. Or if you want to be really Germanic about it with a kind of rolled R, Roth. Either Joseph Roth or Joseph Roth. Joseph Roth. Joseph Roth. But I think we can go for Joseph Roth. I think we can go for Roth. I think we can go for Roth. I think we can go for Roth, yes. Like he's Phil's brother, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. That's fine. That's fine. I heard Matthew Parris introduce, grumpily introduce an episode of Great Lives about Ralph Vaughan Williams by saying, the researchers have told me I have to say Ralph, but I'm not going to.

It's Ralph Vaughan Williams. So we're taking a leaf out of his book and we're saying, the researchers have told me I have to say Rafe, but I'm not going to. It's Ralph Vaughan Williams. So we're taking a leaf out of his book and we're saying Joseph Roth. Thank you very much. We're also joined by Samantha Ellis. Samantha is the author of a brilliant reading memoir, How to Be a Heroine, or What I've Learned from Reading Too Much, and a biography of Anne Bronte, which we talked about, I think I talked about on here actually, which is also wonderful, called Take Courage.

She also writes plays, including How to Date a Feminist, which has been produced in London, Gdansk, Mexico City, Istanbul, and in several theatres in Germany, in one of which it was staged in a boxing room. And, but put all those achievements aside and hold on to your hats everybody because samantha also worked on both paddington films no higher in a very you know in a fairly minor way but you know can you give us one thing that you contributed to the Paddington universe? Well, I think I was brought in partly because my parents are refugees from Baghdad.

And I think we were looking at the refugee storyline, which Michael Bond does so brilliantly, but obviously needed more of it for 90 minutes of film. So I didn't do all of it by any stretch of the imagination. film so i didn't do all of it by any stretch of the imagination but i did sit around talking quite a lot about refugees and paddington not being welcome and how he would try and fit in and uh i still find even i just reading the book with my son tonight it's so moving little bear arriving and not irrelevant to tonight either. The themes of exile. Indeed. Absolutely.

Loss. So we've got the biographer of Joseph Roth here. But Samantha, what are your bona fides for attending this evening? Well, I wrote a play several years ago for a drama school, Lambda, in London, wrote a play several years ago for a drama school, Lambda, in London, which was about Joseph Roth's life and also about his novel, The String of Pearls, sometimes translated as The Tale of the Thousand Second Nights. There was no biography for me to read at that point, so I guessed quite a lot.

So I'm very keen to read Kieran's biography because I think probably about 80% of the guesses are wrong. So I had to do a lot of rewriting. In your version, did Joseph Roth come from Peru and like marmalade sandwiches? That was key to my version, yeah. Is that correct, Kieran? It's not how I understand it, but I haven't finished my research yet. History is interpretation, everybody, isn't it? It is.

John, over to you. The book, of course, that we're here to talk about, in case you hadn't already guessed, is by Joseph Roth, Job, The Story of a Simple Man, first published in 1930. And that book will be our focus, but in customary backlisted fashion, we'll cover other books by Roth in the course of our discussion. But before we head back into Central Europe to test the mettle of our faith, John, what have you been reading this week? So the book I've been reading is The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter. Max Porter, author of Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lanny. And I think we can officially say a friend of Backlisted. He did two amazing Backlisted

one on Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban, live at the Port Elliot Festival, but also one before that on The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Carey um about a painter gully jimpson and this new book is also about a painter is about the great british artist of the mid to late 20th century francis bacon and very specifically about uh the last his last days he is dying lying on a bed dying in a hospital um in Madrid, a hospital run by nuns, being attended to by one particular nun, Sister Mercedes. And what is it? Well, it's a Max Porter book, so it isn't easily classifiable. It certainly isn't a straightforward novel. It certainly isn't a straightforward book of poetry, but it has elements of both. It is divided into

seven short sections, each one a painting, an untitled Francis Bacon painting or an untitled Max Porter version of a Francis Bacon painting. And the best way to kind of characterize it, I suppose, is Bacon is, he dies of a heart attack, but his asthma, his respiratory condition is very, very bad. And he is ebbing in and out of consciousness in a liminal state, remembering episodes, flashing episodes from his life in and out, as I say, in seven quite discrete sections. It's also, I suppose, a meditation. It certainly isn't art criticism or art history. Max himself has said that it was an attempt to write as if he were painting rather than about painting. And indeed, he appears in the narrative, at least at one point, asking Francis Bacon questions. For people who like Max's work work i would say perhaps if you imagine um the style

that he i think kind of develops the impressionistic uh very very dense um language that he perfected with the dead papa toothwork sections of lanny it's like seven of those. So quite a short book, incredibly evocative and also fascinating. I mean, it sounds like the polar opposite of Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve, which is the book that I talked about last time. Yes. I guess we all have bits and pieces of Francis Bacon lore stored away, you know, those extraordinary visceral canvases. You know, Bacon, we know about the squalor of his studio. We know about the terrible sort of sadomasic relationships he had with younger men like George Dyer. We know about the struggles he had to get his paintings.

Eventually, they were perhaps valued at the right level. But like a lot of painters, he was ripped off earlier in his career uh we know about the famous drinking um at the colony rooms all of that is there that kind of sense of loose 50s soho 60s soho is there but there's also as i say a really interesting attempt to translate, almost synesthetic attempt to translate the moving of colour on canvas into words. And, you know, painting is there in front of you. It isn't trying to mount an argument. It isn't trying necessarily to tell a story.

That's stuff we perhaps we kind of project onto it. So it's not going to be an easy book for for people to grapple with um necessarily and that's a good thing you know this is a book i will read i think again and again it's a book that sent me back enthusiastically to the paintings um it's maybe not francis bacon might not be the painter that you would have assumed Max Porter in his Lanny mode, his sort of deep English kind of green man mode might have chosen, but he's been obsessed with Francis Bacon's work since he was a child. And that obsession I think has been borne out by this, I think, really, really remarkable bit of work.

He says something which I love. He says something he wants to capture the stink of Bacon's life, the sort of shocking, visceral stink. Turpentine, he says, oil, fags, cologne, breath mints. Well, I think he achieves it. And the best way, I think, maybe to witness it is to listen to Max himself a brilliant reader of his own and other people's work but here is a section of Max reading from the second of the seven kind of paintings in the sequence

take a seat why don't you but I'm still asleep so she doesn't hear. Nice familiar weight at the foot of the bed. The sort of fever guest weight. Aunt or mother. Nurse or the after-fuck check-up to tuck me in. Still a little whiff of hurt in the room. Of procedures. Rather wonderful, actually, to be reminded of childhood sickness and post-coital exhaustion in the same second. Rather comforting. Close. Take a seat, why don't you? I heard you before, piggy. Process. Grouse. A throwaway remark to a journalist. Tweet my bloody tombstone. Quail. Redcurrant jus. Oysters. The pheasant stew I tried to do after we had it at the claustrophobic place when I bit down on shot. It's extraordinarily nice not to have to order or get up.

It all just arrives when I think of it and somewhat offsets the embarrassment of Capello lying a mile from here when I suppose I always thought one might be murdered, have one's throat slit or be garrotted in an alley off Frith Street. Not comic. Vultures. Bit down on shot and regretted saying anything about accidents. I can still feel it right through me, like a shock. Metal drill in my fillings right down through my urethra buzzing in my underbladder. Edward the martyr or Francis the painter? Oh,

hello, ducky. You look like a pastry. A slightly overdone bun. I would have you twisting to look over your shoulder, cap on, uniform, slight formless gash where your crowded mouth is, that lovely brow like a minotaur's shoulder in the middle. Good face. Do you know the poem Picasso wrote about Guernica? I was terribly, terribly struck by it. Gernika. I was terribly, terribly struck by it. Cries of children, cries of women, cries of birds. Do you know it? He says, I think, something like, cries of the stew in the pot. Can you imagine? Scorched earth and little button mushrooms, thyme, shallots, manzanilla. I suppose something dry, all sticky in the lacruze i say bloody bring it out here don't bother plating it up we'll eat from the casserole won't we darling just bread and more

wine i think that will do splendidly look at that may all who see thee bless the great creator who made so fair a thing quite right quite right sante sold Quite right. Sante. Sold. Read it. If you like Bacon and you like Max Porter, you will not be disappointed. Andy, what have you been reading? I've been reading the first novel by our former guest, Selina Godden, which is called Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death.

Selina was our guest on the episode that we made about Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. And it is, with all due respect to any guests who are here today, one of my favorite moments we've ever had on Batlisted was when Selena read from Last Exit to Brooklyn. And as she read, the hairs on my arms went up. And I can remember looking at our then producer, Matt, and it's the first time that I ever did this. I'm looking at him saying, this is recording, isn't it? It was one of those electrical things in the room that I just thought, if we've recorded this, this is going to be the most incredible thing. And indeed, all these years later, whenever people listen to that episode, that's one of the things that they contact Batlisted about and say, wow, I couldn't believe that.

So I'm very specifically talking about Selina's novel, not just her novel, the audio book of her novel. The subject of the novel is death and death is a woman. Death has been spending eternity doing her job, but she's getting tired. doing her job but she's getting tired she decides she wants to rest and she chooses a young man called wolf williford to take down her memoirs and around that selena weaves a really fascinating mixture of poetry prose and performance and if you want to understand how all those things mesh together i think it's really the audio book that you have to go to alan moore the great alan moore compares this novel to richard broughtigan and before i'd read it i thought i'll come off it alan moore the great alan moore it's not going to be anything like brought again do you know what it is really like richard brought again or hubert selby jr

knowing that selena loves that counter-cultural left field experimental writing and seeing it come through her work and her voice in whatever sense you want to use that it's really exciting a bit like max's book i didn't understand all of it but i like books that i don't understand all of um because they keep you guessing and they keep surprising you so i'd like to uh play a bit now of Selina Gordon's reading from Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death. And I chose a section that really affected me the first time I heard it because it seemed very relevant to where we are in 2021. This is that rainy day. It is raining here and it is raining now. Look at the news, read any newspaper, listen to the radio, watch your TV. Here I come. I clean up. Death cleans up. Death takes all the glory. Death gets the last word. People will say, you died. That's it. And that is all. That's the punchline. They will say your name and shake their heads and sigh. You are dead. Bowie. Dead. Prince. Dead. They'll see a photograph of you and say the word, dead, gone, past tense, done and dusted.

It enters the room every time someone remembers you and says your name. All of my dead are here, in this room now, as I speak. I can feel them as I write this and think of their names. It's pretty crowded in here right now because I know a lot of dead people now. You know a lot of dead people now. You know a lot of dead people now. We know a lot of dead people now. We all know a lot of dead people. And it hurts to erase you.

I cannot seem to do it. My phone is filled with dead people. I never unfriend my dead people. Brilliant and vibrant and colourful people who are now bone and stone cold dead. People who aren't even here to see what you became. To see what they left behind. To see plump pink children stamping on sandcastles, killing and consuming everything, to see the death of the demanding chubby shit you were, and the birth of the kind wise person you will become, to see the photographs and share the memories, to gasp at how fat you got or how bald you are how you wear spectacles now your laughter lines the laughs

and the love love the love the love the love that's the stuff darling the love love the love the love love that's what living was always about. Wow. Right? She read that last night. I went to her gig at the Idler last night. Obviously, went, you know, in heavy inverted commas. She read that piece.

It's just stunning, isn't it? We'll be back in just a sec quite a big key change there. I'm on it, Nick. Nick, I'm on it. I'm on it. Well, how do you follow Selina Gordon reading so brilliantly from Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death? You get the Soviet State Military Orchestra to play the Radetzky March for you. Yes, that was the Radetzky March by Strauss.

The Radetzky March is, of course, probably Joseph Roth's most famous novel. And during the show today, we're going to hear other renditions of the radetzky march from a variety of sources uh so uh so eyes down get your bingo cards out uh for that we're not talking about the radetzky march today we're talking about job a different novel written three years earlier three four years earlier two two years earlier says the biographer joseph roth kieran pim um but before we actually talk or start talking about job i feel as though john and i both feel that roth is in a sense one of the most challenging authors we've ever talked about on Backlisted because no one book seems to encapsulate all the things that

he's about so before we start talking about that let's ask the traditional backlisted question Kieran I'll ask you first as the biographer when did you first read Joseph Roth? I can be quite precise about that 2002 when Granta published Michael Hoffman's translation of The Wandering Jews which my cousin read and recommended to me he thought it'd be right up my streets. And I read it and I thought it was wonderful. And so he was always an author after that who was there in the back of my mind. But I didn't go on to read him for quite some time after that. But then when I was writing my last book, the David Litvinov book, I started thinking about him again then. I read a little book about him by Dennis Marks, which is just called Wandering Jew,

which is just a little study, a kind of psychogeographic study of Dennis Marks' attempts to try to piece together Roth's story. And that kind of whetted my appetite a little bit more as well. I think I quoted that book briefly and some of Roth's The Wandering Jews in the Litvinov book and it kind of just brought him back up to the surface of my mind again. And so when I was looking for a new subject after that last book, I was kind of googling Roth around And then I realised that there wasn't a biography or there isn't an English language biography, at least. So I started really reading him again properly then. And I went to Rudetsky March first, and then I went to Job

after that. And it's kind of gone from there really Samantha when did you first read Job or or Joseph Roth or or Encounter or hear the name Joseph Roth I was working at the sadly now closed Joseph's bookstore in Temple Fortune and we had a whole stack a whole shelf of Roth um that was getting um added to because Michael Hoffman was translating them at this kind of rate of knots and they were sort of coming in and I was reading lots of books about exile and refugees really to make sense of where not where my family had come from but what they had been through coming from Baghdad their experience is obviously very different but I just had a whole thing where all I did was read about refugees for a very long time and about exile about loss and and I don't remember which Roth I read first but I think it was the Radetzky

March and then I just kept going and they used to kind of laugh at me because I only worked one day a week and I would come in each week I get paid at the end of the day I'd buy a new Roth book I'd go home I'd come in again and then I was like i'd run out i was like come on michael hoffman you need to translate some more and um and then i got the opportunity to do this play i talked to everyone i couldn't believe no one else was reading him and um we we did a week's workshop with these drama students on the on the idea and then they all got given a copy of the book. And then I came in again and they all hated it. I mean, they all hated it. There were like 25 of them.

And they were all like gloomy because they were going to have to spend a year working on this text thing. And they're like, why did you choose it? What were you thinking? What do you see in him? And it was not a happy moment. But I have to say it was useful because I did have to think about your question, actually, Andy.

Why is it so challenging? Like, there's a 25 intelligent, interested, you know, creative people. It's interesting. There's never been a book on Backlisted that we've debated between us which book we were going to do more than we debated which Joseph Roth book we were going to do. And listeners, what we decided is that we'd lead with Job. But we're also going to talk a bit about the Radetzky march which is probably his most famous book and the legend of the holy drinker because that's one well known i would say in britain and america and is also very short and written at the end of his life it seems to me from our perspective that joseph roth was much um more obscure in general terms uh 25 years ago than he is now and that do you feel as though he's had a real revival partly down to michael hoffman's

tireless work on his behalf yeah i think i think it it's it's fascinating he was i mean 25 years ago you know when i sort of publishing book selling i i i don't think he he would have he i don't think he would have occurred at all as a to me as a great european writer i just wasn't aware of him at all that's you know maybe my but i think i think hoffman's hoffman's translations grant's publishing of the work, has changed that to a large degree. Until we did the podcast, the only Roth I'd read was The Legend of the Holy Drinker, which is a book that I love because it seems to me to be him at his best. It's beautifully written.

It's short. And he has this remarkable ability, I think, in all his books to write very very clearly about very big and complicated subjects in a way that makes makes them quite resonant i think his star is still in the ascendant but i still think he's he's a writer that people have heard of rather than read in a lot of cases kieran could you just say briefly why Job was the book that you came up with that you you felt we could usefully lead with what is it about Job that listeners if they were going to read a book by Joseph Roth they should read Job rather than one of the others okay I think it's the richness and beauty, kind of sad beauty of the prose.

I think it's the satisfaction of the plot. His plots are not always, shall we say, that satisfying. Sometimes you can tell that Roth has possibly got slightly bored at some point and drifted somewhat from the original premise to something that interests him more halfway through. I think Job is far more disciplined. It is one of the few of his works that leaves you with a feeling of hope.

Although, to get to that feeling, don't worry listeners it drags you through some sensational misery and bleakness which is why i did i did think actually andy about three quarters the way through i thought oh andy's gonna love this i i did the unrelenting punch in the face misery of it was very much my uh cup of. I agree with what Kieran was saying. This is from Michael Hoffman's introduction to The String of Pearls. Michael Hoffman, who was such a great guide to us, coincidentally on our Rosemary Tonks episode last month.

Michael Hoffman has basically got three careers running simultaneously he's a poet he's a translator and he's a translator of joseph roth and he would he would see himself in those terms he feels that he's given over a great chunk of his life uh soul and career all those things to joseph roth i'd just like to read this. This is Hoffman's brief exploration of the puzzle of Joseph Roth. It's rare for an author to make such multiple, almost contradictory claims on us as the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth, 1894 to 1939. As a chronicler of the Jazz Age, you can set him alongside Scott Fitzgerald. With Malcolm Lowry, he is one of the great poets of alcoholic decline, and his work brings back

the vanished world of Jewish culture in Central Europe as much as that of the photographer Roman Vishniac. His memorial to the dual monarchy, the empire of Austria and the kingdom of Hungary, spread over many sad and adoring novels, is a wonderful complement to Musil's monumental comedy The Man Without Qualities. Roth is a novelist of exile and of personal destiny and responsibility, a French-influenced fabulist, Stendhal in some versions, Proust in others, and the prose heir to Heine, a poet of Stimmungen, of public pomps and private melancholy, but a writer of plots as much as anyone this century. Each one of Roth's 13 novels, doubles and triples, presents aspects of two or more of the above, like a domino

or a piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The reach and the fullness of these books, which are rarely long and never dense or heavy, is quite extraordinary. They seem to defy literary physics. The barriers between the books come to seem just about the least satisfactory thing about them and then elsewhere he says yes the books are probably spoiled by being rushed but there is in each of them more of worth than in most other books. Who actually besides wants to exist on a diet only of masterpieces? More seriously, I would argue that in a sense, they were never properly separated out. That in them, Roth's numerous fables are complected together, rather like a Rubik's cube. are complected together rather like a Rubik's cube. Over many books you will learn about father worship and father neglect, the eastern Jew and the Austrian officer, exile, alcohol,

the man disappointed by women and the conservative holdout. The sum of the books coheres more than any individual novel. Now, I can see literally everyone on my screen is nodding, silently nodding. The sum of the books coheres more than any individual novel. Samantha, has that been your experience of reading Joseph Roth? Yeah, very much so. And I think, you know, I think it's a little bit like Shakespeare. I mean, you get something from reading Pericles. It's not the perfect work, is it, that Hamlet is. It's not got the structural beauty. But you couldn't have, sort of couldn't have one without the other.

I mean, there are Roth books that I'm not necessarily desperate to read again, but I'm sort of glad that I have been on the journey with him. Because I think it's a journey of his life that he, I mean, he went through quite a lot. And I think a lot of authors wouldn't necessarily put that into their books. And what I like about it is that he, it's all in there, I think. Certainly the more you read, the richer the world becomes that you enter through his work.

They're all like different angles into this kind of fabulistic world that he creates. And with every book, it does become richer, becomes stranger and more beautiful. And there's a certain quality to his prose, a kind of dreamlike quality. And there's a certain quality to his prose, a kind of dreamlike quality. It's a real strangeness that once you're in there, it does something very odd to you. I can't think of any other writer who has quite that effect on the reader. So really, yes, I think the more of his books you read, the more you become hooked. I think the more of his books you read, the more you become hooked. Isn't it part of the thing about him is that he is incredibly difficult to place in terms,

you feel a lot of the time this could be being written in the 1860s rather than the 1930s. He's so different. And this is actually something that Hoffman says in his introduction to the Rudetsky March. You know, his books aren't about consciousness. He says this brilliant thing. He says, you know, in the way that Proust or Faulkner or Joyce or a lot of the great kind of middle century kind of modernist writers are about, you know, expanding. They're about less and less and consciousness expanding more and more he says that his books ross novels are about blatant and undeniable big things at the most attended and lit by detail ross novels and stories always depict the great turnings of

a life loss love honor career betrayal frustration death and. And I love what you say, Kieran, about the slightly otherworldly nature. But he's the most, when you read his letters and you look at his journalism, he's the most worldly writer. I mean, he's extraordinary. He's a proper jobbing journalist. That's a really good point, actually. And he's's so one of the things i found in trying to write this book about him is he's so hard to pin down because whenever you think you've pinned him down one way then you think well hang on though i've got this instance of him being absolutely the opposite of that as well james woods says about him the literary critic james wood says about him it's like he learned the lessons of modernism and then somehow managed to travel back in time

to the 19th century and put them into the 19th century novel which are those incredibly perceptive in terms of that they have those kind of ballrooms and and agricultural scenes you'd expect in Tolstoy and meals but they're meals, but they're totally, they're visited by a whole other sensibility than we might used to be. So, Samantha, in a sec, you're going to read us the beginning of Job. But I think because of this thing about Roth being so hard to pin down,

and we're so fortunate to have his biographer here, who's, as he said to me i've i've just written a hundred thousand words about this and you expect me to do it in two minutes i do kieran i've got i've got a little clock ticking so could you give us a quick biographical sketch of the life of joseph roth okay this is a real whistle stop tour and i think i've got it down to about two minutes but i will do my best okay so, so Joseph Roth, writer who wrote over a dozen novels and novellas, several works of non-fiction, thousands of wonderful newspaper articles, not straight news reports, but feuilletons, poetic and personal reflections on his travels and the politics of

his time, most of them published in the Frankfurt Zeitung newspaper in the 1920s and 30s. He was raised by his mother. He never knew his father, who went mad before he was born. This was the first great loss of a life that was shaped by a staggering series of losses and blows. The second defining loss was that of the Habsburg monarchy that he grew up under, which collapsed at the end of the First World War. He's been described as the great elegist of the cosmopolitan, tolerant and doomed central European culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The book that most elegises it is the Rudetsky March. So he's a man who lost his father, then his fatherland. He was born Moses Joseph Roth in a predominantly Jewish town called Brody, which lay on the eastern edge of the empire. Back then it was part of Galicia, now it's in Ukraine.

I went there a couple of years ago, maybe we'll come back to that. He left Brody as soon as he could, first for university in Lemberg, then he transferred his studies to Vienna, then they were disrupted by the First World War coming along. He served in the war, having initially been a pacifist. Then he volunteered. He spent much of the 1920s in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. Those were his bases anyway, but he was in perpetual motion, traveling around Europe, filing dispatches from the south of France, Rome, Albania, Russia, Poland, all over Germany.

It was a frenetic, exhausting lifestyle, but I think he'd have been bored to death by anything else. By the turn of the decade, he was one of the best-paid journalists in Europe, and yet he was perpetually broke for various reasons. One, he was by then a heavy drinker. Two, having grown up in near poverty, he developed quite a taste for fine living and liked to stay in the very finest hotels. Three, he was immensely generous, and even when he was broke and catching money off rich friends like Stefan Zweig, he'd then go on to share it out among his other equally hard-up friends.

And four, most poignantly, his wife Friederike, or Friedl as she was known, succumbs to schizophrenia and he had to work incessantly to raise the money to cover her expensive psychiatric care. Now that feeds into Job in a way that we may talk a little bit about later. Hitler takes power, Roth leaves Berlin for the final time, and he made Paris his home for the last six years of his life, a life drastically shortened by his alcoholism. He died a horrible alcoholic's death in a Parisian porpoise hospital in May 1939. Some of his friends felt he needn't have died then if he'd received better care, but really perhaps it was better that he didn't live to see what the next five years would bring for Jewish Europe, which surely would have finished him off anyway, one way or the other. So does that come in at two minutes? A round of applause, please, for our friend. uh congratulations kieran you successfully triggered Phil Kelsall playing the Wurlitzer organ

at the Tower Ballroom Blackpool. Is that what happens when it gets really bleak? Yes. Suddenly the Radetzky March jumps in. I'm prepped. Whenever I think things are getting too grim, up will pop the Radetzky March to bounce us along. That was, Kieran, but the point is, for me, Boo Grimm, up will pop the Radetzky March to bounce us along.

Kieran, the point is, for me, the thing about Joseph Ross is, before he starts writing his 13 or more novels, he's already created hundreds of thousands of words of journalism. Yes. And he's one of the most successful journalists of his day, the 1920s. He's reputedly made a Deutschmark, a line. Yes. It's the famous thing about him. So he's made it.

He's made it. He doesn't need to then create this decade of penury and artistic struggle, but that's what he has to do. Yes, this is it. It's not like he was underpaid, really. It's not that he had poverty kind of forced upon him by his profession as a writer. Given different circumstances and given different proclivities, I suppose, he would have possibly lived a very comfortable life. But rather like Job in the Bible, he was dealt one affliction after another, and his expenses kept racking up. And it just became worse and worse, really. I mean,

it's extraordinary when you look at his life sometimes you think um it's almost a kind of bleak humor it's always bleakly funny because every time you think things can't get worse then they get worse um but obviously it wasn't funny because it was real and it certainly wasn't funny to him samantha is suffering seems to me to be one of the things that the novels of his that I've read they have in common as a theme presumably because it was never far from his mind while he was writing them I think so but also I think disillusionment is almost more than suffering you know it's sort of beliefs and then beliefs that you have to let go painfully um and sometimes they're religious beliefs sometimes then beliefs that you have to let go painfully um and sometimes they're religious beliefs sometimes their beliefs and you know empire in a fatherland in a father

in a marriage i mean the story of him and his wife is is is in everything that he writes i think you know it's absolutely devastating he marries this lovely woman she she develops schizophrenia he has to end and you know they're living in and out of hotel rooms which is probably not a great thing if you don't have great mental health you know there's no stability she she gets madder and madder and unhappier and unhappier he has to institutionalize her and you know i mean he didn't live to find out that she was killed as part of the euthanasia program by the nazis but he might have known that was where it was going. And he had to leave her, you know, and go to Paris on his own.

And it just, you know, this sort of, I don't know what it sort of does to you to believe in someone and think you're going to spend the rest of your life with them and then to find that they can't do it. And also that you are going to have to fail them. I mean, he did, as Kieran said, I mean, pay for medical treatment. And, you know, he, he did, I'm not, he did a lot. He did everything he could, but he wasn't able to be with her and look after her in the way that she needed.

This piling on of sorrow, that's kind the the plot of of of joe without giving all of it away i mean you know based on the the biblical sort of story of joe the thing that really fascinates me is that in in this book in particular and maybe also it's there in the legend of the holy drinker and various degrees in in rudetsky march i mean mendel singer the the main character in in who is a you know a simple man an unremarkable jew as he as he describes it it's not like hubris is it it's not like he does bad things he just he literally is these these sorrows mount on him I don't think I've read anyone who quite catches that sense of a sort of enigmatic fable as well as Rothschild.

He doesn't feel to me like this is a psychological portrait in the way that you would. It's not about torment or the things that I've done wrong. It's about surviving. It's about surviving things that happen to you. And his disillusionment in the end is he blames God for his misfortune. Yeah. So it's that line, isn't there, probably about halfway through where it says that Mendelsinger examined his conscience for grave sins and couldn't find any. He didn't do anything really wrong. But yet life keeps throwing, or God keeps throwing these tests,

these afflictions, these sufferings at him. And he's tested to the very brink. I wonder, Samantha, could you read us the first few paragraphs? Normally we would read the blurb on the back of the book, but actually I think it's almost more useful just to hear the setup of the story because it does have a fable-like quality like a lot of Roth does. Many years ago they lived in Sukhno in Russia, a man named Mendelsinger. He was pious, God-fearing and ordinary, an entirely commonplace Jew.

He practised the simple profession of a teacher. In his house, which was merely a roomy kitchen, he instructed children in the knowledge of the Bible. He taught with honourable zeal and without notable success. Hundreds of thousands before him had lived and taught as he did. As insignificant as his nature was his pale face, a full beard of ordinary black framed it. The mouth was hidden by the beard. The eyes were large, black, dull and half-veiled by heavy lids. On the head sat a cap of black silk rep, the stuff out of which unfashionable and cheap cravats are sometimes made. His body was stuck

into the customary half-long Jewish caftan of the country, the skirts of which flapped when Mendelssohn hurried through the street and struck with a hard, regular tack like the feet of wings against the shafts of his high leather boots. Singer seemed to have little time and a lot of pressing engagements. True, his life was always hard and at times even a torment to him. A wife and three children had to be clothed and fed. She was carrying a fourth. God had given fertility to his loins, equanimity to his heart and poverty to his hands they had no gold to weigh and no bank notes to count sorry they had no gold to weigh and no bank notes to count nevertheless his life flowed along like a poor little brook between

bare banks every morning mendel thanked god for his sleeping for his awakening and for the dawning day when the sun went down he said his prayers once again. When the first stars began to sparkle, he prayed for the third time. And before he laid himself down to sleep, he whispered a hurried prayer with tired but zealous lips. His sleep was dreamless. His conscience was pure. His soul was chaste. He had nothing to regret and he coveted nothing. was chased he had nothing to regret and he coveted nothing and that is such a brilliant setup because of all the awful things that are going to happen to him which he does i mean this is a thing about this kieran i don't want to give the ending away yeah it's very hard to talk about this book

it is not talk about the ending. But I'm going to say that so much of what happens to Mendelsinger is arbitrary, as so much of what happens to Job in the book of Job in the Bible is arbitrary because bad stuff happens. The ending, it seems to me, is also deliberately arbitrary arbitrary it's unearned right and so if we read the ending and we derive certain emotions from it personally i think that's sort of missing the point i think it's quite a high risk strategy to take because you're pushing certain narrative buttons that you're you're in the

knowledge that a normal reader will respond to them in a particular way but i i felt it's all part of the arbitrariness of bad things happen or good things happen or events take place what it struck me kieran is the book of job in the bible is about a spiritual issue joseph ross book of job is about how you how you respond to those things culturally not spiritually it's interesting yeah and i wondered if you could just tell us, how does Job fit in with Roth's other novels? In what way is it not like the other novels? Well, again, without wanting to say anything about the ending,

the ending is not like many of his other novels, particularly the earlier ones, which time and again, of his other novels, particularly the earlier ones, which time and again, the 1920s novels, where he keeps going back to the same situation, which is soldiers returning from the First World War

and attempting to fit back into post-war society and finding that it can't quite accommodate them and they can't fit back into it. Most of those books end with these characters adrift. There's no great resolution and that's the point. It's that these people have been kind of spat out by

society and no longer really have a place. Whereas with Job, we do have a resolution and it does move on at the end in a way that we find satisfying and yeah i don't want to say more than that but is it the most is job the most embedded in a particular kind of traditional jewish culture compared with roth's other novels absolutely yes yeah it's described as his most jewish novel um and it is the first one um where he really goes back to the world that he grew up in, which is, I think, almost entirely because of the way in which he wanted to retreat from the world at that time. The writing of this book, the context to it is Friedel, his wife, succumbing to schizophrenia, his world becoming intolerable, his presence becoming absolutely excruciating. his world becoming intolerable, his presence becoming absolutely excruciating. And whereas the 1920s novels were these Heimkehrer Romana, they were known as home covers,

novels about returning soldiers. They're like holding a mirror up to Weimar society. Whereas this book is more like a painting of the past. It goes back, i think the first three words of the book are actually hugely telling because he says many years ago and we think well okay it sounds like he's telling a fable but actually it's not many years ago what it is is someone writing at the end of the 20s 1930 about something that happened about 20 plus years ago you before the First World War. And what's implicit in that is that the First World War was a kind of temporal rupture, really. It was a complete chasm, which for Roth,

when he's the other side of it, the world before, the prelapsarian world, seems utterly distinct and beyond reach. And because of the way it fell for him, coinciding pretty much with his transition from adolescence to adulthood, it's a really neat and distinct division between childhood and adulthood. And his childhood lies on the far side of the First World War. Looking back, it's a childhood spent under the Habsburg monarchy, which collapses at the end of the war. And so really quite neatly, what seems to him like a relatively

idyllic upbringing, obviously it didn't seem so much at the time, but in the late 1920s, in nostalgic hindsight it did, seems like somewhere that he would wish to retreat to when the present becomes so painful. So he starts writing really from Job onwards about his past, about the world he grew up under, and he starts writing in richer more poignant more lyrical prose I fell in love with a different Roth I think I fell in love with the kind of you know a Bain sophisticated scrappy messy kind of you know the journalist writing his books on

the fly out of hotel rooms while trying to deal with his kind of, you know, crazy, not yet institutionalised wife and going out drinking all night. And, you know, the angry Roth, angry about what's happening in Europe and furious that no one was listening to him. I mean, absolute rage of his journalism. I mean, absolutely just, why is no one listening?

This is going to happen. He knew. I mean, I just feel like Roth knew, you know, obviously we read him with hindsight but he knew I mean he really could see it all coming um and you know and I um feel like you then go to Job and it's this kind of very beautiful perfect novel um as as as we've all said I mean it's beautifully structured it's perfect and it's about this world in which everyone has a place and everyone sort of knows their place and people who come out of the place of the shuttle you know it's it's not really a good idea you know it might

work out in the end but it's not really a good idea you know you should stay in your sort of place no one expects to really live a larger life or a messier life or fight anything or and i don't know i mean i suppose i wanted the kind of compulsive kind of storyteller liar drinker writing all night drinking all day you know i think this is nostalgic look at what it was like in the shtetl because actually um i'm going to tell you a terrible terrible Jewish joke that my rabbi told me. Forgive me. I've just asked forgiveness in advance. It's fine.

It's Friday night. Come on. Come on. Okay, so my rabbi told me this joke, and I love this joke. I've put it into four plays. It always gets cut. Moshe is drowning in the river, and he's drowning, and he prays to God. He said, I've been a good man all my life.

Save me, save me. And a branch goes goes by and he thinks should i grab no i'm not gonna because god is gonna save me uh a boat goes by do you want to come up no no no no problem i'm you know god save me hang on a big like massive ship comes by they put down a ladder they're like jump up we're gonna get you to the side no no it's fine And then he drowns and he goes to heaven. He says to God, why didn't you save me? And God says, I sent a branch. I sent a boat. And I sent a fuck off big ship with a ladder.

You've got to help yourself. And I feel like the idea of Orthodox Judaism is being entirely based on faith and on just doing, you know, just going down the same old tracks feels to me very nostalgic and not really, not how anyone actually doing it actually feels about it. I'm, you know, and I could be wrong. odd things about about job and i and it it connects back to the holy drinker book as well i think is you think it's going to be about a man whose simple faith uh is rewarded and it's true that there is without giving too much away there is clearly is a reward in this book but it doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with with mendel's faith his faith his faith has sort of left him um and that's fascinating to me and that does connect to me with that the the the kind of you're talking about arbitrariness the arbitrariness in the in the

legend of the holy drinker where the miracle is the man who gives him the money and enables him to and it has a similar kind of weird religious dimension although it's catholic by this stage because i think kieran am i right in thinking he did convert to catholicism well there's a question mark over that some of his some people think that he did or um and some were adamant that he didn't since some of his catholic friends tried to claim him for Catholicism. Some of his Jewish friends said that, no, he never converted.

And it is even said that he had two funerals, one Catholic and one Jewish. I heard that there was one funeral and then a bunch of people on the other side of the fence shouting Jewish prayers over the floor. There was a kind of dust-up at his funeral. Which is a better story. I know, it's true.

It's a very good story. Is there a dust-up at his funeral, Karen? Well, there was an argument. There were people complaining. I mean, it sounds quite chaotic, really, and absolutely emblematic of his life, really. And did he disavow this novel? Have I got that right?

He sent a copy to Stefan Zweig, is that right? That's right. Before it even came out, he was tired of it. The book came out in October 1930. There's a letter from late September 1930 where he says words to the effect of, I'm done with it. I'm tired of it. Or maybe I'm just tired, I think is how he puts it. He was never one for rereading his work, going back to it. Once it was done, it was done. And he moved on. He wrote so fast and on the backs of fag packets and so randomly in cafes

that we don't actually know, do we, quite when all the novels were published or when they were written? No, they're chaotic because he's writing sometimes two or three at once. Job, for example, he was writing. Then he put it aside because this is quite funny. Early 1930, he had signed a contract with a right-wing Catholic, conservative and anti-Semitic Nazi-owned newspaper called the Mönchner Neuesten Nachrichten, I think it was. And this was at a time when he had kind of fallen out with the Frankfurter Zeitung, which was the great liberal newspaper of Weimar Germany. So he took this kind of right-wing, lowbrow paper's dollar or Deutschmark. And as part of the deal with them, it was that he had to write them a novel for serialization.

He had a one-year deal. About three weeks from the end of that deal, the newspaper reminded him that he was meant to be delivering a novel to them. And so he sidelines Job and then frantically starts writing this other novel, drinking even more than ever. And to remind himself that he had to get it done quickly, he started scribbling on the manuscript, must complete novel in three weeks must complete novel in three weeks where he completes the novel um wow and yeah he did write quickly but to be fair he wrote best when he wrote at a reasonable pace his best books the ones he took time on is that true of radetzky march i think so yeah he took his time over that one and it's you know uh and it shows but he scoops up the manuscript for this novel, for the right-wing paper,

including the pages which said, must write novel in three weeks, posts them off to Munich. And the editors of this paper were aghast and did not want to publish the novel that had been hammered out in three weeks. And his relationship with that newspaper ended fairly rapidly after

that and then he went back to the frankfurt societal um but that's uh that's a roundabout way of answering your question um job should i should i read this um yeah okay so and this is it's a nice example of the kind of pastoral way that he wrote about the land, the kind of Galician rural landscape that he grew up in. The young sickle moon was already spreading a strong silver light. Faithfully accompanied by the brightest star of the heavens, she sailed through the night. Sometimes the dogs howled and frightened Mendel. They tore at the peace of the earth and increased Mendel Singer's unrest. Although he was only five minutes away from the houses of the town, he seemed to himself infinitely

distant from the inhabited world of the Jews, indescribably alone, threatened by dangers, and yet incapable of going back. He turned northward. There breathed the dark forest. To the right, the swamp, with a few isolated silvery willows stretched away for many versts. To the left lay fields under opal veils. Sometimes Mendel thought he heard human sounds coming from an uncertain direction. Sometimes Mendel thought he heard human sounds coming from an uncertain direction. He heard familiar voices, and it almost seemed to him as though he understood what they said. Then he remembered that he had heard them long ago, that he was listening to an echo which had long been waiting in his memory. Suddenly there was a rustling to the left in the wheat, although no wind stirred.

The rustling seemed closer. Now Mendel could also see how the man-high ears of wheat moved. Something must be slinking amongst them. A human being, a huge animal, perhaps a monster. It would have been well to run away, but Mendel waited and prepared for death. A peasant or a soldier would now emerge from the grain, accuse Mendel of theft, and beat him then and there, stone him, perhaps. Or it might be a tramp, a murderer, a criminal, who would not wish to be seen or heard. Almighty God, whispered Mendel. Then he heard voices. There were two of them, who passed through the grain, and that it was not one quieted the Jew, although he said to himself that there might well be two murderers. No, they were not murderers, but lovers. A girl's voice spoke. A man laughed. Even lovers could be dangerous.

There were many cases where a man had become furious when he caught a witness of his love affair. Soon they must emerge from the field. Mendelsinger overcame his terrified disgust of snakes and softly lay down, his eyes turned towards the wheat. Then the years parted. The man emerged first, a man in uniform. A soldier in a dark blue cap, booted and spurred, the metal shining and clinking softly. Behind him, a yellow shawl gleamed, a yellow shawl, a yellow shawl. A voice arose, the voice of the girl. The soldier turned, laid his arm about her shoulders. Now the shawl passed, the soldier went behind the girl, his hands held her breasts. She sank back against him. And we know from the yellow shawl that that's his daughter, Miriam, who wears a yellow shawl.

So this is his daughter, Miriam, going with a Cossack. Miriam, it turns out, actually has several Cossack lovers from the local barracks. One of Mendel's sons, Jonas, wants to join the Cossack army as well. So I think between the two, these kind of strike at the parameters of Mendel's existence because they're like the brutal symbols of assimilation that shake his world. Sex and the military, one creates new life, the other deals in death. It's very peculiar for me to praise Roth as a stylist

when the style changes significantly from book to book. But one of the things that I absolutely loved about Job, Job is one of my favourite books that we've done on Batlisted for quite a long time. And I must say, the reason why I like it so much is it's packed. I thought to myself, this is packed with brilliant sentences. Sentences, right, are what you want. I mean, you want them arranged in a pleasing order, of course.

But in terms of the bit that you just read, the precision and plainness of the language is such an incredibly difficult thing to pull off. Yeah, I found it incredibly powerful. Very powerful. That sense of about to end, of almost coming to the end of things. The other brilliant thing he does, in the three very different books I've read,

and Job in particular, is you do not know. You have a hunch where it's going to end up, but you could not predict the way he takes you there. And that's why he's so good at a sentence-by-sentence level, the way he builds the story right to the very end. I read three times the last five pages of this novel to try and see if I could figure out what was happening. And it's still mysterious.

Before we go, because we've nearly run out of time, for goodness sake, we've got one more version of the Rudetsky Marx to squeeze in. Before we hear that, I know, Samanthaantha you wanted to read a bit of the journalism and the journalism has all these qualities of of it of its own it is extraordinary in its own right quite apart from the fiction so it might be nice to hear that before we go um so so this is 1937 parrot uh roth is in paris uh he had been living in a hotel called the hotel foyer and um i mean everything ends in roth the hotel gets demolished right so he's you know he's

lost his empire he's lost his family he's lost his wife and then he gets to paris and he's found the hotel gets demolished um and you know but what i sort of love about it is that instead of kind of going off to drown his sorrows he sits in the bistro opposite and writes about it and then you know sells that piece to a paper for money he has a brilliant piece of writing i mean there's a little bit about it um so he'd seen three of the walls reduced to rubble and then there's the fourth is still visible on which I could still see the wallpaper in my room, which was sky blue with a fine gold pattern. Then yesterday they put up a scaffolding against the wall and two workers climbed up on it with pickaxe and sledgehammer. They attacked my wallpaper, my wall. And then when it was reeling and decrepit, the men tied ropes around the wall.

The wall was to be put to death. The workers climbed down, dismantling the scaffolding as they went. The two ends of the rope hung down on either side of the wall. Each man took hold of one end and pulled. And with a crash, the wall came down. Everything was obscured by a dense white cloud of plaster dust and mortar. From it emerged, all coated in white dust like great millers who grind stones, the two men. They made straight for me. The younger one gestures back over his shoulder

with his thumb and says, it's gone now, your wall. They have a drink together. The workers were demolition men. Knocking things down was their job. They would never think of building anything. And quite right too, they said, everyone does the job they do and gets paid the going rate. And this man here is the king of the demolition men, said the younger man. The older one smiled. That's how cheerful the destroyers were. And I with them. Now I'm sitting facing the vacant lot and hearing the hours go by. You lose one home after another. It doesn't even frighten me anymore. And that's the most desolate thing of all. And I just think it's that sudden left turn.

You know, you're laughing. He's boozing with a demolition man. And you sort of go, this man has been made homeless again and again and again. And he's sort of laughing at this thing. You know, he sees his wallpaper, you know, being bulldozed. And then suddenly he just pulls you back into what is actually going on in his heart. It's so fascinating. It's about listening to everybody, read the novels, read the journalism.

I can't wait for the biography, Kieran. Yeah. Well, thank you. Have you got must finish in three weeks written? Because if not not why not I'm going to rice it up on my wall in front of my desk listen everybody Listen, everybody, that is an incredible 303

Acid House version of the Redesky March. If you subscribe to our Patreon, I'll be playing all one and a half minutes of that on the next episode of Locklist. Not if I can help it. Yeah, I don't know. Right, even miracles have an end to them. Not if I can help it. Yeah, I don't know. Right.

Even miracles have an end to them. Huge thanks to Kieran and Sam for leading us through the rich complexity of Roth's life and works. And to Nikki for weaving our wanderings into a rich and comforting hole and to Unbound for the barley soup and candles. You can download all 130 previous episodes plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at backlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter and Facebook and now in

sound and pictures on Instagram too. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted we aim to survive without any paid for advertising so your generosity helps us do that all patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early and for a fistful of rubles they get two extra lot listed a month in our cabin on the edge of town where we sit in the sunshine listen to to frogs, play songs, read books and talk to the moon. Who wouldn't want to subsidise that? A lot of listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's batch of names are... Jonathan Morgan, Anne Phillips, Lynn Russell, Vicky van der Luit, Connor, Luke Turner, former guest. Thank you, Luke. Howard Fairbrass, Mark Hazel, Claire Rose,

Mark Ruff, Bridget Luffhead and Thomas Cotter. Thank you, Kieran. Thank you, Samantha. Kieran, I asked you when we were preparing this episode if there was a piece of music that you felt would be appropriate um you didn't say do you have an acid house version of the radetzky march that you could squeeze in i didn't and i don't know why it didn't occur to me but in marked contrast you suggested this beautiful beautiful piece of music do you want to say something about the song and then I'll introduce who's singing it? So this is a song that's one of Roth's oldest friends, a fellow writer called Soma Morgenstern, played him in his kind of final weeks or months, I think.

And Roth found it incredibly moving. It's a song called Doodly, and it's a song of the old Eastern Jewish world, really. And in Soma Morgenstern's memoir about his friendship with Roth, he describes playing this song and the song moving Roth to tears because it reminded him of the old world that they had both grown up in and had both left behind. Well, here is a recording from exactly 100 years ago. This was recorded in 1921 by, and you're going to hear the voice of Mordecai Hirschman, by, and you're going to hear the voice of Mordecai Hirschman, the Vilna State singer.

This was recorded while Joseph Roth was alive. Thanks for listening, everybody. Thank you, everybody. See you in a fortnight. Thank you so much for having me on the show. Thanks, James. Reboy, Neuscheleule, Reboy, Neuscheleule, Reboy, Neuscheleule. Reboy, Neusche Leule! Riboi, neusche Leule! Ich will dir ad Dudel singen. If you prefer to listen to Backlisted without adverts,

you can sign up to our Patreon. It's www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. As well as getting the show early, you get a whole two extra episodes of what we call Locklisted, which is Andy, me and Nicky talking about the books, music and films we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight.