Weights and Measures by Joseph Roth, translated by David le Vay

I didn’t know this story by Joseph Roth until I wrote his biography, which was published by Granta last year titled Endless Flight (oh, and I guess I should mention that it’s out in paperback this October…). This novella is one of his later works, published in 1937 when he was in an advanced state of alcoholism. As his mental health declined Roth increasingly retreated from his agonising present into a fictional world based on his childhood in a little town in the Austrian crownland of Galicia, now in Ukraine. His friend Stefan Zweig remarked with this book’s publication that it was a marvel his talent was so intact, and it ‘almost looks as if he could be saved’. He couldn’t; Roth would die two years later in Paris. This is one of his minor works, but still brilliant. As I say in my book: 

“Weights and Measures hasn’t the depth and heft of The Radetzky March nor the emotional clout of Job, but it is precise, lucid, immersive in its evocation of the little town and devastating in its depiction of a virtuous man’s collapse into drink-sodden obsession.”

Anselm Eibenschütz leaves his beloved Austro-Hungarian Army at his wife’s behest (by this stage in the increasingly misogynistic Roth’s life, his male characters’ lives are usually derailed by women), to become the inspector of weights and measures in the border town of Szwaby. The vacancy arose with the death of a well-loved inspector, held in such esteem by the traders because he was too drunk to do the job properly. Eibenschütz intends to bring law and order to this town of dubious traders, who defraud their customers by using false weights on their scales, and immediately meets with suspicion. He makes an enemy in tavern landlord Leibusch Jadlowker, and so the story proceeds to its gripping conclusion. This is Roth’s childhood world distilled into 100 pages with a superb lightness of touch.

First published in German as Der Falsche Gewicht, 1937. First published in English translation in 1982 by Peter Owen; currently available as a Penguin Modern Classic, 2017