Le Léviathan de Joseph Roth. La problématique juive et le shtetl

Abstract

The Jewish motif plays a major role in Joseph Roth’s works. In The Leviathan, a strange and complex novella written during his Parisian exile and the last years of his life, the author returns to the theme of the Ostjuden: the plot is set in a Jewish-Russian townlet (shtetl). The “hero”, Nissen Piczenik, is a coral merchant. A very interesting osmosis occurs between the man and his corals. In his eyes they are living animals which, put around the necks of peasant women, instil life, beauty and love. Through folkloristic or midrashic motives – the coral’s apotropaic power or the sea monster that watches the oceans until the coming of the Messiah – and through alchemy – water and fire – Joseph Roth leads the reader into a man’s inner world in which he is stuck. Comes the day when, like the corals fished in cold or warm waters and brought to the mainland, an “oceanic feeling” wells up within him and awakes his desire to know their world. A sailor takes him onto his battleship, and from then on, he lives between two worlds, the world of delusion and the world of reality: he lets himself be seduced by the false coral his concurrent offers him and mixes it with the real one. He replaces, thanks to drunkenness, the mainland by the rough sea, until he decides to burn the false coral and to keep only the real one that comes from the water. Then he leaves for Canada and embarks on the “Phenix”. The ship casts away and Nissen lets himself sink into the abyss of the ocean, a coral amongst corals.