Reshapes of Roth

Peter Owen was one of that extraordinary generation of Jewish refugee publishers who fled central Europe in the 1930s and '40s. Born Peter Offenstadt in Nuremberg, he came to London in 1933 and founded his own publishing company in 1951 with £900 and a typewriter. His first editor was Muriel Spark. Owen published Spark as well as works by Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Hermann Hesse and half-a-dozen Nobel Prize winners. He died earlier this year, aged 89.

One of the authors Peter Owen championed was the Jewish novelist, Joseph Roth (pictured), now considered one of the great German-speaking writers of the 20th century. Owen published four of his novels including two short works, The Antichrist and Weights and Measures, now reissued (both Peter Owen paperback, £9.95).

The Antichrist was one of the first books Roth wrote in exile and, right from the start, has a dark, almost hysterical feel. When it was first published, reviewers didn't know what to make of it. Was it a novel or an essay or both? There are references to Roth's own life - the narrator serves in the First World War, works as a journalist and travels to the Soviet Union -but it is hardly autobiographical. The Antichrist is set between the Russo-Japanese war of 1904/5 and 1933. The protagonist, "J.R.", has been hired by an inscrutable media mogul and travels the world. Everywhere he goes, he sees signs of decline into moral and

political chaos.

Weights and Measures was also first published in 1934 but is much more typical of Roth's writing. Like so many of his novels, it is set in a small garrison town in Bosnia, on the eastern borders of the Austrian Empire. There are all the familiar features of Roth's world: taverns, smugglers and lowlifes, soldiers and state officials, peasants and Jews (especially in one scene that is a superb evocation of the poverty and piety of east European Jewish life). The border recurs throughout the book as a central image. The main character is Anselm Eibenschutz, a retired soldier, who is now Inspector of Weights and Measures. He is unhappily married and then he meets the exotic gypsy, Euphemia.

This is Roth at his best. He tells a love story that is full of drama and, with its sense of empty lives, also strangely modern. Above all, the book is full of fascinating characters and is a masterful evocation of the Habsburg empire before the fall.