Zipper and his Father (1928) and Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933) are a kind of intriguing coda, a foray into yet another emotional range suggesting the kind of writer Roth might have become in another age, living another kind of life. Not that one would wish him any different.

Roth was a Jew in a time of growing persecution that drove him into exile, but as a writer he retained, as in relation to politics, his right to present whatever he perceived. Jewish tavern keepers on the frontier fleece deserters. There is a wry look at Jewish anti-Semitism. In Flight Without End a university club has a numerus clausus for Jews carried out by Jews who have gained entry and in Right and Left—a novel Roth seems to have written with bared teeth, sparing no one—there is a wickedly funny portrait of the subtleties of Jewish snobbism and anti-Semitism in Frau Bernheim; she concealed that she was a Jew but, as soon as someone at dinner seemed about to tell a joke, she would “fall into a gloomy and confused silence—afraid lest Jews should be mentioned.” On the other hand, Old Man Zipper, like Manes Reisiger, the cabby in The Emperor’s Tomb, is a man with qualities—kindness, dignity in adversity, humor, love of knowledge for its own sake—and, yes, endearing Jewish eccentricities and fantasies, portrayed with the fond ironic humor that was inherited, whether he was aware of it or not, by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Fallmerayer, the country station-master, conceives a passion for a Polish countess who enters his humble life literally by accident (a collision on the railway line). It is an exquisite love story whose erotic tenderness would have had no place—simply would have withered—plunged in the atmosphere of Roth’s prison camps or rapacious postwar Vienna and Berlin. It takes place in that era, but seems to belong to some intimate seclusion of the creative imagination from the cynicism and cold-hearted betrayals that characterize love between men and women in most of Roth’s work. Helping to get the injured out of a train wreck, Fallmerayer comes upon a woman on a stretcher, in a silver-gray fur coat, in the rain. “It seemed to the stationmaster that this woman… was lying in a great white island of peace in the midst of a deafening sea of sound and fury, that she even emanated silence.”

The central works, The Radetzky March and The Emperor’s Tomb, are really one, each novel beautifully complete and yet outdoing this beauty as a superb whole. The jacket copy calls them a saga, since they encompass four generations of one branch of the Trotta family in Radetzky and two collateral branches in The Emperor. But this is no miniseries plodding through the generations. It is as if, in the years after writing Radetzky, Roth were discovering what he had opened up in that novel, and turned away from, with many dark entries leading to still other entries not ventured into. There were relationships whose transformations he had not come to the end of: he had still to turn them around to have them reveal themselves to him on other planes of their complexity. So it is that the situation between fathers and sons, realized for the reader with the ultimate understanding of genius in Radetzky, is revealed to have an unexplored aspect, the situation between son and mother in Emperor. And this is no simple mirror image; it is the writer going further and further into what is perhaps the most mysterious and fateful of all human relationships, whose influence runs beneath and often outlasts those between sexual partners. We are children and we are parents: there is no dissolution of these states except death.

No theme in Roth, however strong, runs as a single current. There are always others, running counter, washing over, swelling its power and their own. The father-son, mother-son relationship combines with the relationship of the collection of peoples in the empire to a political system laid as a grid across their lives; and this combination itself is connected to the phenomenon by which the need for worship (an external, divine order of things) makes an old man with a perpetual drip at the end of his nose, Franz Joseph, the emperor-god; and finally all these currents come together in an analysis—shown through the life of capital city and village—of an era carrying the reasons for its own end, and taking half the world down with it.

2

Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.

How unfailingly Roth knew how to begin! That is the fourth sentence in The Radetzky March. His sense of the ridiculous lies always in the dark mesh of serious matters. Puny opposition (alone person) to the grandiose (an empire): What could have led to the perversity of the statement? And while following the novel the reader will unravel from this thread not simply how this memory was obscured, but how it yet grew through successive generations and was transformed into a myth within the mythical powers of empire.

The outstanding deed is not recounted in retrospect. We are in the battle of Solferino and with Trotta, a Slovenian infantry lieutenant, when he steps out of his lowly rank to lay hands upon the Emperor Franz Joseph and push him to the ground, taking in his own body the bullet that would have struck the Emperor. Trotta is promoted and honored. A conventional story of heroism, suitable for an uplifting chapter in a schoolbook, which it becomes. But Captain Joseph Trotta, ennobled by the appended “von Sipolje,” the name of his native village, has some unwavering needle of truth pointing from within him. And it agitates wildly when in his son’s first reader he comes upon a grossly exaggerated account of his deed as the Hero of Solferino. In an action that prefigures what will be fully realized by another Trotta, in time to come, he takes his outrage to the Emperor himself, the one who surely must share with him the validity of the truth.

“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “… But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”

“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”

These are some of the most brilliant passages in the novel. Is honesty reduced to the ridiculous where “the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness”? Trotta turns his back on his beloved army, and estranged by rank and tide from his peasant father, vegetates and sourly makes of his son Franz a district commissioner instead of allowing him a military career.

The fourth generation of Trottas is the District Commissioner’s son, Carl Joseph, who, with Roth’s faultless instinct for timing, enters the narrative aged fifteen to the sound of the Radetzky March being played by the local military band under his father’s balcony.