May 27, 1939

Joseph Roth, (September 2, 1894 to May 27, 1939), was a novelist, and journalist whose work was highly regarded by other western writers. The regard for Roth by Coetzee, Brodsky, and others, can be evaluated with a volume of his letters recently published: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, (translated and annotated by Michael Hofmann). It is in the Letters that we find mention of a cat: Roth and his girlfriend were housesitting, (I think,) for a fellow writer, Albert Ehrenstein. The note, dated December 29, 1932 from Frankfurt am Main, says, about Ehrenstein's cat, (a tomcat):

"Lio has become a strong and stubborn critter. Mrs. Manga Bell sends you her gratitude and best wishes. She's (rightly) fonder of the cat than of me.

Here is a publisher's blurb for the Letters volume:

The monumentality of this biographical work further establishes Joseph Roth—with Kafka, Mann, and Musil—in the twentieth-century literary canon.Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life—his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris.Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”

1939, soon we will all forget what it might have, must have, been like.