Hotel Savoy

December 1, 1986
Released from a Russian POW camp at the end of WW I, a former soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army puts up at the gigantic Hotel Savoy on his way home. He tells the beautiful Stasia that he wanted to be a writer but the war intervened and now he sees no point in it. "I am a solitary person,'' he says, ``and cannot write for the public.'' Joseph Roth (18941939) might have said that of himself. As a journalist, he was a public person, and highly visible as an anti-Nazi exile living in France. But as a writer, he left behind at his death a large unpublished oeuvre of 13 novels and numberless stories and essays. Only in recent years have his translated novels been appearing here. In the current miscellany, consisting of the title novella and two stories, the Savoy is the way station for the chaotic postwar world. In this swarming pageant of drifters, money is the universal obsession, while the Bolshevik revolution explodes in the background. Roth's considerable gift lay in sketching myriad personal convulsions in that time of conflagration.