Hotel Savoy

The war has ended. Soldiers and survivors of prisons are straggling out of Russia toward the West. One of them, our narrator, reaches a squalid industrial town between here and there, and finds himself stranded, coaxing nothing out of his rich uncle except an elegant hand-me-down suit. He takes a room at the Hotel Savoy, an immense indefinite structure that seems to expand and contract like an accordion, though 'we' never scale higher than the seventh floor. There are luxurious quarters on the lower floors, or at least so it seems, but our narrator lodges on the fifth floor, just below the exotic dancer Stasia, who has managed at least not to become one of the naked bar girls who fawn on the rich industrialists in the bar of the Hotel Savoy. The elevator operator, Ignatz, has odd powers of intimidation -- may in fact be Death -- and keeps everyone's luggage locked somewhere until the room charges are settled, which of course can never happen. There's a strike underway among the factory workers, and everyone is waiting for "Bloomfield", the native of the town who has become filthy rich in America, to reinvent their businesses. Unquestionably, the "revolution" is near ... The Austrian Jewish writer Joseph Roth (1894-1939) amazes me with his ability to compress an entire genre of writing into each of his highly original novellas. "Hotel Savoy" is a blend of Baroque allegory with post-Freudian surrealism, as if Eramus's "Ship of Fools" had been updated by Vlad Nabokov, with stylistic accents from Franz Kafka and Robert Walser. I'm reminded of the great paintings by Pieter Brueghel, of soldiers and beggars carousing while the plague fires burn. Obviously the 'hotel' is the whole of European civilization in debacle. Terrifying as Roth's vision is, this novella is fiercely funny, a carnival foxtrot of despair, a purgative bonfire of the vanities. Joseph Roth is one of the 20th Century's most outstanding writers. I've also reviewed his 'Biblical' novela "Job" and his profound novel-of-generations "The Radetsky March." Now I think I'll move on to his extensive journalistic reports on the Hitlerian nightmare he observed during the intermission of the 20s and 30s. Catch the wave, fellow readers! Roth is on the rise.

Gabriel Dan comes from war and he stays at Hotel Savoy in an unknown industrial town Eastern Europe -as a matter of fact is Lodz, now in Poland. It's the summer of 1919. The First World War has finished and destroyed many things, and one of them was the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that encompassed lands from Russia to the Mediterranean sea, Slavonic people from the North (Ukraine, Russia) and from the South (Slovenia, Croatia), Hungarians, Germans, Jewish... When Joseph Roth misses that Empire that was destroyed with the war, giving birth to many little National countries, he did not really miss the crown and the Habsburgs but a State in which people from different religions, from different nations and languages could be together. He's not only a wandering Jew, but a wondering citizen and European. And that loss of a common ground is showed in this book. People from many places arrive to that hotel, in which they're located depending on the money they have: the higher floors belong to sad, poor people, that die "among the steam of bleaching"; the lowers ones to rich men that entertain themselves with the beautiful but poor girls of the bar. Prisoners of war, Jewish that come from Russia, displaced citizens, revolutionaries... they all arrive there and there's really no other place to go. They expect the important and rich man from America -called Bloomfield, née Blomenfeld- to arrive and solve all their economical problems. But he comes and goes... and the only solution is the Revolution. Remember, this novel -very entertaining, indeed, but confusing if you don't understand the ethnical and political complexities of Eastern Europe- was written in the 1920s, and the Socialist revolution was the only hope in those days. The sadness, the poverty, the anguish and the displacement that the war created are difficult to bear. And Joseph Roth has a special gift to transmit those feelings, and a great great imagination to create metaphors, so poetic, that even translation improves his lyre.