Some Notes on My Father’s Cousin, Joseph Roth
At 19, in 1948 shortly after World War II ended I arrived in Paris as a student from New York. I tried to imagine what the world would have been like without Hitler. Would I have ended up living in my Spanish/French world in Paris? Would I have perhaps lived a bit in Vienna? Would I have learned German instead of French and Spanish? Would I have fallen in love with a dark-eyed, young Jewish intellectual, to whom I would have given my heart, whom I would have adored, whom I wasn’t destined to meet, because he was among the already dead? I ended up knowing a tremendous amount about Hitler and the Nazis. But there was the missing existence that never got lived out. I knew nothing about the European Jews before Hitler—I got myself stuck with Hitler, though Hitler, other than murdering members of my family, of murdering everyone, had nothing to do with what should have been my historic and cultural legacy.
My father was born in Vienna in 1894; his father, Nathan Probst, persuaded my grandmother Clara Roth to the shock of their mutual Jewish families to divorce her first husband and run off to America with her second husband, the feckless Nathan Probst. In a letter my cousin Shlomo Naor wrote while he was in Israel, he mentioned that his mother first knew my father’s cousin, the writer Joseph Roth, in Vienna. He then later met her in Holland and Belgium where he was a journalist. She mentioned to her son Shlomo that Roth was not a very happy or joyful person. She told Shlomo that Roth’s father Nahum suffered from deep depressions.
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