The Quest for Redemption

The Quest
for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares
Piloiu fills an
important gap in Roth scholarship, placing Roth's major works of fiction for
the first time in the context of a generational interest in religious redemption
among the Jewish intellectuals of Central Europe. In it, Piloiu argues that Roth's
challenging, often contradictory and ambivalent literary output is the result
of an attempt to recast moral, political, and historical realities of an
empirically observable world in a new, religiously transfigured reality through
the medium of literature. This diegetic recasting of phenomenological
encounters with the real is an expression of Roth's belief that, since the self
and the world are in a continuing state of crisis, issuing from their
separation in modernity, a restoration of their unity is necessary to redeem
the historical existence of individuals and communities alike. Piloiu notes,
however, that Roth's enterprise in this is not unique to his work, but rather
is shared by an entire generation of Central European Jewish intellectuals.
This generation, disillusioned by modernity's excessive secularism, rationalism,
and nationalism, sought a radical solution in the revival of mystical religious
traditions-above all, in the Judaic idea of messianic redemption. Their
use of the Chasidic notion of redemption was highly original in that
it stripped the notion of its original theological meaning and applied it
to the secular experience of reality. As a result, Roth's quest for redemption is a quest for a salvation of the individual
not outside, but within, history.