II3I

Roth's ambivalence toward Western civilization led him increasingly to draw on the heritage of Eastern European, and particularly Jewish, storytelling that was familiar to him from his Galician Jewish background. In Hiob (I930; Job) he self-consciously presents the afflictions visited upon an Eastern European Jewish family in legendary rather than realist terms, offering a story of sufferings endured-and eventually dispelled as if by a miracle-as a model of truth-to-self on the level of simple piety. In Tarabas (I934; Tarabas) he develops a story he found in a Ukrainian newspaper into a self-consciously religious account of the ambivalences of the human condition, presenting the title figure as a ruthless military commander who also develops the potential for becoming a pentitent and a holy fool of the kind familiar from Russian literature. Roth's Die hundert Tage (I936; The Ballad of the Hundred Days) shows us a Napoleon who renounces the aspiration to power after learning to recognize his own human frailty, while Das falsche Gewicht (I 9 3 7; Weights and Measures) tells of a weights-and-measures inspector in the borderlands of the Tsarist Empire who experiences both intense emotional disappointments and the emptiness of a life dedicated wholeheartedly to duty ("out of a fear of fear," as the text makes explicit), and who ends up imagining that he will be prosecuted for "false weights" in heaven, as he has prosecuted others on earth. Die Kapuzinergruft (I938; The Emperor's Tomb), which is a sequel to The Radetzky March, shows Roth responding to the National Socialist takeover in Austria with an expression of true nostalgia for the Hapsburg dynasty. Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (I939; The Legend of the Holy Drinker) conveys a self-ironic impression of Roth's own condition in his last years, presenting the inveterate alcoholic as a disheveled but pure emblem of a kind of honor that can ultimately find refuge only in God's mercy.