"Joseph Roth - A Life in Letters," Edited by Michael Hofmann - NYTimes.com The novels of Joseph Roth, with the three-generation family saga "Radetzky March" in the forefront, have enjoyed a remarkable resurgence of interest in recent years, so much so that Roth is now often mentioned in the same breath as Kafka and Robert Musil as one of the greatest German-language writers of the 20th century. But in the absence of a biography Roth the man has remained largely an unknown to readers, at least in the English-speaking world. One of the many merits of "Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters" is that it helps fill in some of the blanks in the troubled and abbreviated life led by Roth, who was born in the northeastern corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1894 and died in poverty in Paris in 1939. Equally to its credit, though, the book also provides an absorbing portrait of the political and intellectual currents that shaped European literary life between the world wars and Roth's often prescient assessment of what was going on around him. Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and André Gide all make cameo appearances, and Roth was tickled to learn that Marlene Dietrich called him her favorite writer. "Perhaps she'll buy one of my novels," he wrote. "Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters" contains 457 letters, only a small number of which are to family or close friends or comment on his novels as he was writing them. Most are to fellow writers, especially Stefan Zweig, who in the 1920s and 1930s was one of the most popular authors in the world, or to translators and colleagues at The Frankfurter Zeitung and other newspapers for which Roth wrote essays, reviews and sketches. In his personal affairs Roth is querulous here to the point of annoyance. He complains about everything: his health, his squabbles with editors, the shabby hotels where he lived, the bad translations of his work, his problems with women and, most of all, his unending financial woes, some of them self-inflicted by the penchant for drink that contributed to his early death. "I am full of anxieties and very unhappy," he writes to his French translator in one typical lament. I cannot write. One catastrophe after another befalls me. In the larger sphere, though, Roth's dyspepsia often takes on an angrily prophetic tone, especially as the political and economic situation in Europe deteriorates. His first novel, "The Spider's Web," written in 1923, mentions Hitler by name, and when Hitler took office as chancellor of Germany a decade later, Roth immediately began warning his correspondents that a world of unremitting savagery was about to be unleashed. "It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe," he writes to Zweig, like Roth an Austrian Jew, two weeks after Hitler comes to power. Quite apart from our personal situations - our literary and material existence has been wrecked - we are headed for a new war. I wouldn't give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns. In that context the brief biographical footnotes of the cultural figures who Roth mentions or writes to, provided by the book's translator and editor, Michael Hofmann, who has also translated several of Roth's novels, are unrelievedly poignant. Cousins, friends and colleagues - as well as Roth's mentally ill wife, whose care at expensive sanatoriums are a constant source of worry and guilt to him - are gassed by the Nazis once World War II starts or flee into exile, where they die decades later in places like Santa Monica, Calif., or Tucson, far from the language and the culture that nurtured them. Roth's tone turns even more ominous and apocalyptic as Nazism takes root in Germany, but he has little to offer in the way of practical alternatives or prescriptions. He hoped for restoration of the Habsburg monarchy, for which he fought in World War I (though exaggerating his military service record), and a handful of letters here detail that quixotic effort to recreate what Roth called "my fatherland, the only one I have ever had." That nostalgia for an unrecoverable past makes Roth an anti-Zionist who is at times prone to asides that sound anti-Semitic and professedly indifferent to his origins. "My Jewishness never appeared as anything else to me but an accidental quality, like, say my blond mustache," he writes to Zweig. Essentially, though, the Roth of these letters is a contrarian and a curmudgeon. He leans left, signing some of his early dispatches "Red Roth," until he visits the Soviet Union in 1926 and recoils in disgust at what he finds. But he is also contemptuous of democracies: the Weimar Republic, Britain and what he derided as "sentimental Americanism" all come in for pointed criticism. Only France is spared, more for his love of its language, culture and people than its politics. Roth's extensive correspondence with Zweig dominates the second half of the book, with some letters from Zweig to Roth also included. Zweig would flee first to London, then to New York and finally in despair to Brazil, where he and his wife committed suicide in 1942. Their exchanges are fascinating but make for unpleasant reading: Roth's tone alternates between the wheedling and the resentful as he constantly importunes Zweig for the money to keep himself afloat. Those letters, written from hotels in a half-dozen countries, underline what is probably the central fact of Roth's life and art: his rootlessness. Early on he acknowledges "the feeling of not belonging anywhere, which has always been with me," and in a 1930 letter to his publisher, an exercise in fabulism that Mr. Hofmann describes as "the only thing even resembling a CV that we have from Roth," he provides what even now can stand as an appropriate epitaph. "Nowhere, in no parish registry or cadastre is there a record of my name or date of birth," he wrote. I have no home, aside from being at home in myself. Wherever I am unhappy is my home. I am only ever happy abroad. If I leave myself even once, I will lose myself. Therefore, I take great care to remain within myself.