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Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939

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A true gift for anyone that loves writing, observation, and life, and an absolute gem for anyone that has ever been to or loved France. Heartbreakingly intelligent, perceptive, and compassionate writing from a master. Get this for yourself and all those you love (since you won't want to part with your copy).

I thought I knew the full range of his gifts. I've been singing his virtues as one of the great fiction writers of the 20th C, the skeptical, ironic observer in his novellas of the collapse of the old European culture following World War 1, virtually unmatched in his ability to narrate sorrow in the simplest language. I've been awed by the Prophetic Roth. Now I find, especially in his travel writings, another Roth, a troubadour poet capable of lyrical joy when the subject is suited to poetry. That subject, above all, was France -- French history and culture, French freedom and tolerance, French grit and resilience, all in marked comparison to the state of society in the Germany sinking ever deeper into the muck of Nazism. On his first visit in 1925, Roth wrote of his first impression of 'southern/Roman' France:

"It takes eight hours to get from Paris to Lyons. On the way there is avery sudden change in the landscape. You come out of a tunnel into an abruptly southern scene. Precipitous slopes, split rocks revealing their inner geology, a deeper green, soft, pale-blue smoke of a stronger, decidedly cerulean hue. A couple of clouds stand idly and massively on the horizon, as if they weren't haze but dark stone. All things have sharper edges; the air is still; its waves don't flatten forms. Each has its unalterable contours. Nothings hovers and havers here. There is perfect conviction in everything, as if the objects were better informed about themselves and the position they took up in the world. Here you don't wonder. You don't have a hunch. You know."

But don't suppose that Roth will always romanticize Romance, that is, the Romance culture of ever-Roman France. He can and will notice what's sordid and false there also, especially among those French who are inclined to accommodate the worst in Germany. Joseph Roth has been widely misperceived as an author of Nostalgia, with a conservative yen for the hallowed verities of pre-War Hapsburg Austria-Hungary. It just isn't so. Roth was bitterly disaffected from many aspects of 'modernity' -- and who could fault that, considering that his 'modern times' were the 1920s and 1930s in Germany, the vilest era in human history -- but if he craved a different time, his nostalgia was for a better Future, not a mummified Past. Visiting Avignon, one of his visionary "white cities", he declares precisely what it is that he desires:

"Will the world ever come to look like Avignon? The ridiculous fear of the nations, and of the European nations at that, that they might lose this or that 'characteristic feature' and that the colorful humanity might mix into a gray mush! But people aren't pigments, noris the world a palette! The more mixing, the more characteristics! I won't live to see the beautiful world in which every individual can represent in himself the totality, but even today I can sense such a future, as I sit in the Place de l'Horloge in Avignon, and see all the races in the world in the features of a policeman, a beggar, a waiter. That for me is the highest stage of human evolution..." In other words, the world Roth craved was forever a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic world. Later, in a nother essay, he bravely and enthusiastically advocates a 'unified Europe' -- in essence an even more "common market" of mingling cultures than our piffling current EU -- but one that can only be achieved by the exclusion/quarantine of the Third Reich and the renunciation of all stenches of nationalism.

This volume, Report from a Parisian Paradise, is not a book assembled by Joseph Roth himself. It's a very skillful translation, by Michael Hofmann, of a congeries of newspaper columns, letters, diary entries, and unpublished essays, assembled by a German editor in 1999. Frankly, the collection as a 'whole' is not exactly equal to the sum of the parts; I'd suggest disarticulating its sections and reading them separately for maximum impact. The centerpiece of the volume is Roth's unpublished (perhaps unfinished) travel account called "The White Cities, a 72-page essay in travel writing that I think would/should stand alone, and that seems to me a preview of the superb travel-structured books of W.G. Sebald.

In "The White Cities", Roth is more explicit and lucid in expounding his social vision than in any of his other writings. However, Report from a Parisian Paradise also includes several dozen of Roth's pungent and/or poignant brief articles written for the Frankfurter Zeitung in the 1920s and for various less prepossessing journals in the 1930s. Roth was a fabulously successful, highly-paid newspaper feature-writer, until he was forced into exile and silence for his sharp criticisms of the rising Nazi party. There is an excruciating difference in tone between the playful wit of his pieces from '25 and '26 and the eloquent anger of his writings in the 1930s. Only the unfailing literary brilliance of the 50 pieces in this book binds them together; otherwise, they are as discontinuous as the years of Roth's life and the places where he passed those years. His "Parisian Paradise", by the way, was a dingy dance club, a downstairs dump with taxi-dancers, cheap drinks, and a determination to survive life.

We are in the midst of a Roth Renaissance--no, not Phillip, but Joseph, who in an all too brief career from 1921-1939 established himself as the greatest newspaper correspondent of his age.

His reports from and about Weimar Berlin (1921-1933), "What I Saw" are minutely observed, sharply etched portraits of the "demimondaine" life of a city that boasted 120 newspapers, 40 theaters and great symphonies--a magnet for the aspiring composers, actors and journalists living side-by-side with the emerging Nazi monster.

As the goosesteps of the black-booted Nazis became progressively louder, the wary Jewish journalist exiled himself to safety in France in 1925. Fifty of his Parisian gems, written between 1925-1939 can be found in "Report From A Parisian Paradise"

As an ardent Francophile you will appreciate Roth's letter to the editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung newspaper almost immediately upon arriving in Paris in which he explains that he is in "complete control of his skeptical intelligence" and though risking "sounding moronic",

"Paris is the capital of the world and you must come here. No one who hasn't been here can claim to be more than half human. Every cab driver here is wittier than our authors. I love all of the women here, even the oldest of them to the point of contemplating matrimony."

Even when describing the aftermath of unimaginable horror in this description of Maisonette, 'the most terrible battlefield on the Somme his poetic voice is resonant:

"The earth was turned over, spattered with chunks of limestone, and with mud that oozed up from the depths. There wasn't a blade of grass or vegetation. Millions of shells rained down. A division clung for months to a hillside. And in the distance they saw the silver water of the Somme, and behind it the shining red roofs of Péronne, and on the left the green, blooming land--the other country, enemy country, that they yearned for as for a woman.

Now larks fizz through the air; the rain has stopped; the wind has blown away the clouds. Anyone who didn't see the war would think this was peace. But I can sense red blood running through the veins of the surviving trees, though the clumps of earth, in the delicate filaments of the leaves... Bent over the landscape, like a general over a map, is God. Unapproachable as a general; remote as a general..."

Back in Paris he observes children at play in the Jardin du Luxembourg and remarks that:

"French children behave with the ease and confidence of grown-ups. It's not so much a matter of race and blood as it is the consequence of the warm, loving, nurturing softness in the way they are brought up. The French pedagogical principle is not Spartan strictness but Roman freedom accorded to the individual disposition--it's not discipline but civilization."

And as a critic of the newly evolving film with sound he is smitten with René Clair's classic "Sous Les Toits de Paris (1930)" He writes:

"The action of this film emerges from the atmosphere of Paris in much the same way as a folk song is generated by a particular landscape. It's as though the tremulous, unresting fog over the roofs of Paris gave birth to the events that take place below."

Roth's ability to extract the essence of an event or scene and report it with elegant clarity would be exemplary in a seasoned reporter or novelist but remarkable in a man who did some of his best writing between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five--an old soul in a young body.

And when viewed from the prism of 2004, "Report From a Parisian Paradise" is even more astonishing for what it foresaw.

I don't know how I happened upon this book, knowing nothing of Joseph Roth, but WOW, am I grateful I did! It's beautiful, lyrical, vivid... It's transcendent and luminous. I don't believe I was dying to visit France until reading Roth's love letter to it. Now... I would bring the book with me. It's absolutely magical.

I'm trying to think who he reminds me of, stylistically. I keep thinking Jeanette Winterson. Sometimes Rainer Maria Rilke. Absolutely beautiful writing. I'm bewitched! :)