Joseph Roth — writer with roots in the Russian Empire
Joseph Roth was an Austrian novelist and journalist born in Brody (Galicia, on the Russian-Austrian border) who became one of the finest German-language writers of the 20th century. His masterpiece The Radetzky March (1932) — an elegy for the dying Austro-Hungarian Empire — is considered one of the greatest novels ever written.
Tracing the roots — Brody (Ukr border)
Born in Brody in 1894, a town on the border of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires and a major centre of Eastern European Jewish culture, Roth grew up in a world where Russian and Austrian civilization overlapped. His writing is saturated with the borderlands — the Jews, the Poles, the Ukrainians, the Habsburg officials navigating the empire's twilight.
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Brody (Ukr border). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.
A career defined by ambition
"I am one of the last descendants of that vanished Europe."