Perlefter

‘One of the most significant European authors of the twentieth century' –
Sunday Times

‘Roth has earned his place among the giants of modern German literature.' –
Jewish Chronicle

‘A concise, powerful writer who brilliantly evoked the social, political and intellectual turmoil of his era' –
Publishers Weekly

‘Roth is a very fine writer indeed.' – Angela Carter,
Guardian

Now available for the first time in English,
Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois
is a novel from between 1928 and 1930 discovered among Joseph Roth's papers decades after his death.

Alexander Perlefter is a well-to-do Austrian Jewish urbanite with whom the narrator, his relative Naphtali Kroj, has come to live after being orphaned. In the Perlefter household Kroj finds a colourful cast of characters that includes Perlefter's emotionally fragile wife, his four children (foolish Alfred, hapless Karoline, flamboyant Julie and flighty Margarete) and a pretty maid with whom Kroj becomes hopelessly smitten. Kroj watches with amusement as Perlefter tries to advance his career, marry off his children and fend off a newly arrived distant cousin, the brusque ex-wrestler Leo Bidak.

Perlefter
represents Roth at the very peak of his literary powers, penned just after
The Silent Prophet
and just before his masterpieces
Job
and
The Radetzky March.
Rich in irony and exemplary of Roth's keen powers of social and political observation,
Perlefter
is an important addition to the Roth canon in English.

Joseph Roth,
c.
1932

JOSEPH ROTH was born in Brody, Galicia – then part of Austria-Hungary and now in Ukraine – in 1894. He served in the Austrian Army between 1916 and 1918 and worked as a journalist from 1923 to 1932 in Berlin and Vienna. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he emigrated to Paris, where he drank himself into an early grave in 1939.

Roth also wrote
The Antichrist, The Hundred Days, Weights and Measures, Flight Without End
and
The Silent Prophet,
which have also been published by Peter Owen, as well as
The Radetzky March, String of Pearls
and
The Legend of the Holy Drinker.

While I was hard at work translating Joseph Roth's
The Hundred Days
I vowed it would be my last Roth translation. But all the while the question lurked in the back of my mind – dare I attempt one final challenge? Should I take on
Perlefter?
Was it a worthwhile endeavour? Indeed, it existed in German, but the effort required by Kiepenheuer & Witsch to publish it was limited to deciphering and transcribing Roth's longhand. Translation is another story entirely.

Was this partial manuscript, one that Roth had abandoned ten years before he died, one that was probably between halfway and two-thirds completed, worthy of publication in English? It helped somewhat knowing that Roberto Bravo de la Varga had deemed it a worthy project to translate
Perlefter
into Spanish (published in 2006 together with
Strawberries,
which, incidentally, also features a character named Napthali Kroj). Was there anything inherently wrong with translating an unfinished work?

The first thing that came to mind as I considered the latter question was Franz Kafka, who had instructed that all his manuscripts be burned after his death. Max
Brod ignored his instructions, and only because of that do we have Kafka's rich literary legacy available to us today. But Roth, unlike Kafka, was a successful writer during his lifetime, with many books to his credit and an established literary reputation. Would
Perlefter
contribute anything positive to the existing Roth
oeuvre
in English? I began to read the book, and I soon discovered that the answer was a resounding yes.

It is impossible to know how much refinement and revision the existing chapters of
Perlefter
would have gone through had the book been finished. The mere fact that it remained unfinished means that the previous question may be moot. A sort of ‘what-if' line of questioning that can only lead to frustration. In effect, every translator is an editor, negotiating the nuances between two languages and making the transition as smooth as possible. But a translator's challenge is even greater than usual with such a manuscript. A translator must strive to bring a work into its new language with elegance and style to make it readable and digestible without completely rewriting or changing the meaning. So any curt or cryptic moments had to remain so. The published German book as it stands is certainly surprisingly cohesive, but there are clearly moments when the narrative feels rushed and dismissive or lacking in detail, as if parts of
Perlefter
were more or less an outline. I have not crossed any lines here, in the translation of this unfinished book. I have approached the project the
same way that I approached my other two Roth translations – to create the English version of Roth's distinct voice.

I would like to thank Peter Owen and Antonia Owen for their belief in this important project, as well as Simon Smith, my excellent editor, and Michael O'Connell.

Joseph Roth's (1894-1939) prodigious output included numerous novels, novellas, short stories and newspaper articles in the space of only sixteen years between 1923 and 1939. Born Moses Joseph Roth of Jewish parentage in the town of Brody, Galicia (present-day Ukraine), about fifty-four miles north-east of present-day Lviv (then called Lemberg), Roth was a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire who first lived in Vienna then moved to Berlin. After Hitler came to power in early 1933 Roth fled Germany permanently, spending the rest of his life living out of hotels in France and other locales in Western Europe. Generally speaking, his life before 1933 was happier than his life post-exile, although use of the word ‘happy' to describe Roth might be misleading. Burdened by financial worries and increasingly dependent on alcohol, he became an old man while still in his thirties (a fact he freely and frequently admitted and bemoaned) and died at the age of forty-four in 1939.

Much of Roth's fascinating
oeuvre
has been made available to the English-speaking world only in the past few decades. The last of Roth's completed works were
brought back into print in English by Peter Owen in 2010
(The Antichrist)
and 2011 (The
Hundred Days). Perlefter: Die Geschichte eines Burger,
a never-completed novel fragment discovered among Roth's papers decades after his death and first published in German in the 1970s, was until now the only book-length Roth work not available in English.
(Perlefter
is not the only unfinished Roth manuscript discovered and published posthumously;
Der stumme Prophet,
aka
The Silent Prophet,
which he worked on between 1927 and 1929, was not published for the first time until the 1960s.)

Although the incomplete
Perlefter
cannot compare to Roth's greatest masterpieces such as
Job
or
The Radetzky March,
it does offer a glimpse at Roth at the peak of his powers.
Perlefter
is rich in irony and humour. As in many of his best works,
Perlefter
touches upon some of his favourite topics: capitalism, Communism, monarchy, war, revolution and wealth/poverty. Not especially a plot-driven book,
Perlefter
is more of a character study, and Roth does an excellent job painting a portrait of an early-twentieth-century bourgeois man.

A product and representative of the increasingly complex modern upper-middle-class world in which he lives, Alexander Perlefter is an enigma of sorts. He is a brave coward and a wasteful miser; a calculating fool and a vengeful forgiver. He enjoys complaining about how miserable he is, and when he should be happy he seems miserable. What seem to be his most heartfelt emotions are actually just an act. He is ever
insecure, easily jealous and eager to please … himself. His uncertain eye colour says it all really. His eyes are distinct in their indistinction. They contain little flecks of every imaginable hue. This is a mysterious and indecisive man, one who does not like to commit, an Alexander the Not-so-Great in the narrator Naphtali Kroj's mind.

Kroj himself makes for an interesting character. At times he seems to be almost an omniscient narrator, but his detailed narration is more likely a product of his closeness to the Perlefter family than special powers bestowed upon him by the author. Kroj walks a fine line between neutral narrator and participant character. He lurks behind the scenes for a while and then emerges at the forefront several times – for example, during his scenes with Henriette, his argument with Perlefter on the legal system, his visit to the cobbler and his presence at key events such as Perlefter's flight. These infusions of Kroj are welcome; he may be the most likeable (and level-headed) character in the book. Although the other characters themselves are mostly blind to their own faults and the ironies of their middle-class lives Kroj seems to see through it all, expressing modesty and even disappointment about himself and revealing embarrassment when bringing up sensitive subjects such as Perlefter's secret desires. Kroj's relationship with the Perlefter household is fairly intimate. We must assume that after he arrived as a minor he lived with Perlefter for a few years and forged a bond with each member of the household. Kroj
reveals he had been at one time a messenger for Perlefter, that he had played with the Perlefter children and that as an adult he still visited the household regularly. He was trusted enough to have been asked to look in on the vacant house while the family was away.

Of the major players in the book, the one who is least clearly described is Frau Perlefter. We never even learn her first name. Neither do we get a physical description either (aside from ‘an awkward girl, no longer young and not pretty'); we get to see her personality mainly through her actions not through the narrator's or Perlefter's description. She seems to be quite weak and prone to outbursts; the only sign we get of her cunning is early on, via flashback, when Kroj mentions that Perlefter ‘fathered children against his will'. She lurks in the background through the rest of the book, coming forth to burst into tears once in a while or feel ill. Although Perlefter himself would like to claim the title, Frau Perlefter seems to be the family martyr. It is interesting to note that not long before Roth began writing
Perlefter
his wife began to exhibit the signs of the schizophrenia that would ultimately lead her being institutionalized. It is not inconceivable that some of Frau Perlefter's behaviour is drawn from that which Roth observed in his own wife.