14 Facts About Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Joseph Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born.

In 1916, Joseph Roth broke off his university studies and volunteered to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front, "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor".

Joseph Roth lived for years in a sanatorium and was later murdered in the Nazis' Aktion T4 programme.

Joseph Roth's husband had returned to Cameroon while she and their children stayed in Europe.

When Joseph Roth met her, she was editor of the Ullstein magazine Gebrauchsgraphik.

Joseph Roth spent most of the next six years in Paris, a city he loved.

Joseph Roth's essays written in France display a delight in the city and its culture.

Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, in February 1933, Joseph Roth wrote in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig:.

From 1936 to 1938, Joseph Roth had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun.

In 1918, Roth returned to Vienna and began writing for left-wing newspapers, signing articles published by Vorwarts as Der rote Joseph.

Joseph Roth has been referred to as one of the novelists who helped the emergence of what isadays called the Habsburg myth.

From 1930, Joseph Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned, and began to evoke a melancholic nostalgia for life in imperial Central Europe before 1914.

Joseph Roth often portrayed the fate of homeless wanderers looking for a place to live, in particular Jews and former citizens of the old Austria-Hungary, who, with the downfall of the monarchy, had lost their only possible Heimat.