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The Grace of Misery. Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile 1919–1939 confronts the life and intellectual heritage of the Galician-Jewish exiled journalist and writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939). Through the quandaries that occupied his mature writings—nostalgia, suffering, European culture, Judaism, exile, self-narration—the book analyses the greater Central European literary culture of the interwar European years through the lens of modern displacement and Jewish identity.
Moving between his journalism, novels and correspondence, Lazaroms follows Roth's life as it rapidly disintegrated alongside radicalized politics, exile, the rise of Nazism, and Europe’s descent into another world war. Despite these tragedies, which forced him into homelessness, Roth confronted his predicament with an ever-growing political intensity. The Grace of Misery is an intellectual portrait of a profoundly modern writer whose works have gained a renewed readership in the last decade.
The Grace of Misery. Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile 1919–1939 confronts the life and intellectual heritage of the Galician-Jewish exiled journalist and writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939). Through the quandaries that occupied his mature writings—nostalgia, suffering, European culture, Judaism, exile, self-narration—the book analyses the greater Central European literary culture of the interwar European years through the lens of modern displacement and Jewish identity.
Moving between his journalism, novels and correspondence, Lazaroms follows Roth's life as it rapidly disintegrated alongside radicalized politics, exile, the rise of Nazism, and Europe’s descent into another world war. Despite these tragedies, which forced him into homelessness, Roth confronted his predicament with an ever-growing political intensity. The Grace of Misery is an intellectual portrait of a profoundly modern writer whose works have gained a renewed readership in the last decade.
This essay presents a close reading of testimonies of Jewish victim-narrators in the wake of the White Terror, the counter-revolutionary violence that terrorized Hungary in the years following the First World War. It takes a narrative perspective to this remarkable set of sources by looking at how the immediate experiences of violence were narrated and placed into a larger discourse of Jewish national belonging to the Hungarian nation. As such, it brings to light the voices of unknown historical actors in the specific context of post-war Jewish Hungary, as well as in the larger history of anti-Jewish violence in the European diaspora.
This essay examines the state of the art in Hungarian Holocaust research by way of three studies that appeared recently: Budapest Building Managers and the Holocaust in Hungary, by István Pál Ádám; The Holocaust in Hungary: Seventy Years Later, edited by Randolph L. Braham and András Kovács; and Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide: An Intellectual History, 1929–1948, by Ferenc Laczó (all in 2016). It shows how these studies navigate the intentionalist versus functionalist debate in new ways, by zooming in on local, private, and ordinary Jewish Hungarians, as well as non-Jewish Hungarians, and their experiences of and role in the implementation of the Holocaust. Two main questions stand out: how to understand and come to terms with the complicity of non-Jewish Hungarians and the Hungarian state on the level of nationwide history politics, and how to grasp the relationship between the Holocaust and earlier periods in Hungarian Jewish history. In other words, was the catastrophic fate of Hungarian Jewry presaged by a lingering and deep-rooted antisemitism in Hungarian society, or was it an unprecedented and entirely unexpected occurrence that was out of step not just with Jewish life in Hungary, but with Hungarian society as a whole? By approaching the Hungarian Holocaust in the longer durée and from a transnational perspective, these studies succeed in illuminating the ways in which the catastrophe unfolded “on the ground” and how responses to it depended heavily on previous experiences and life stories based on class, gender, and political and emotional socialization.