What I See

I've been reading a collection of stories by Joseph Roth in a book called What I Saw. Roth was an Austrian journalist and novelist living in Berlin in the 1920s - he moved to Paris in 1925 and stopped coming to Berlin in 1933, reasoning, correctly, that the life of a left-wing Jewish intellectual wouldn't be worth much under the new Nazi regime - and he wrote prolifically, churning out at least 19 books and innumerable newspaper pieces during a career that barely lasted two decades. The stories in What I Saw aren't really stories but rather vignettes (or feuilletons, as his translator calls them), short pieces describing tiny little corners of Berlin life: a seedy bar, a visit to a barbershop, a stroll through the Jewish quarter. At his best Roth uses these settings to sketch a tantalizing picture of the rough edges of Weimar-era Berlin - the outcasts and the dispossessed, barflies, call-girls, street sweepers, the same people who would later populate Joseph Mitchell stories and Tom Waits songs - and at his worst he comes across as a surly old curmudgeon, griping about the newfangled elevators in the department stores or the glowing fluorescent lights in a diner.

I had never heard of Roth until my brother and I stumbled into the Joseph Roth Cafe in Berlin last summer. Okay, we didn't exactly stumble into it - we collapsed into it after a long and very tiring search for a decent dinner spot near Potsdamer Platz, a search that only ended after we found the Joseph Roth in our guidebook and, giving up on Potsdamer Platz, hiked across town on aching legs in search of it. It was, under the circumstances, the best possible solution to our problem - a ragged, homey, divey sort of place with Roth quotes on the walls, a collection of his books, and the coldest beer and warmest Schnitzel I've ever tasted. It made for Roth, deservedly or not, a permanent warm spot in my heart, and it looked like this:



I bring up Roth because his Berlin vignettes are inspiring me to return to my original goal for this blog, or at least one of my original goals, which was to provide a glimpse of what life here in the Happy Valley looks and feels like. I'm aware that I've strayed from this goal a bit - I got a little distracted by the whole London thing, and then I keep finding fun stuff on the internet that I want to share, and now there's all this grody February weather, which has me a bit down and makes me not want to go outside or to take much interest in the things I encounter when I'm out there. But February's about to end, the gritty 3-month-old snow is about to melt, and, though the next several weeks will still be slushy and cold, the world will slowly begin to look alive again. And as it does, there are many, many things that I'm going to need to tell you about, from Calvin Coolidge and Sylvester Graham to butterfly gardens and french toast.

It's gonna be great. Like, obscure-Austrian-writer-who-died-alone-and-alcoholic-in-Paris- in-1939 great.

In the meantime, in this season of renewal, please allow your spirit to be transported by the following rendition of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy":