Joseph Roth, the Jewish Literary Genius Who Mourned the Austrian Past and Foresaw the Coming Doom

The Habsburg empire, that awkward and anachronistic multiethnic conglomeration sometimes called Austria-Hungary, produced some of 20th-century Jewry’s most outstanding figures: Theodor Herzl, S.Y. Agnon, Martin Buber, Sigmund Freud, and a bevy of ḥasidic rabbis, like the first Satmar rebbe Joel Teitelbaum—to name but a few. Thus it may not be surprising that this empire’s greatest elegist, the novelist Joseph Roth, was himself a Jew. Considering several recent books about the Habsburgs and their domain, David Pryce-Jones turns his attention to Roth: