This is one of those collectors-only literary novelties. Both in form and in substance. What the great writer Joseph Roth it could have been saved as a sketch for a book to narrate his hard childhood has led to this final presentation long after his death at the dawn of World War II, a victim of his addiction to alcohol.
Roth is one of those myth authors, cursed by History and its circumstances, rather than cursed by his own choice. A Jew in pre-Nazi Europe and a victim of various family problems in his childhood and also in his maturity, he has come to this day covered in a dense fog about the reality of his life.
The creator's childhood is made up of certain contrasted data and possible fictions narrated by himself. For this reason, perhaps Strawberries could be the definitive work where its readers can find some light on the author's life between his own prose and his ability to fit all kinds of characters in extremely lucid situations that heralded the decline of Europe between ideals and hate.
His vision of the child that was serves to advance in a plot drenched by the nostalgia of a happy childhood that was never such. Thus, bitterness and fatalism ends up ruling everything. His pen outlines characters from that interwar Europe that was approaching the other extreme part of this fateful period.
Brody is the town where Joseph wanted to have been the happy kid. It is true that he lived and grew up there during his first years of life, and from there he may have gotten the idea of many of the characters who peered into his main creations, but the city of Brody was really the cradle of his long-term sadness. throughout his life and transmitted in his detached, shameless and melancholic writing.
You can buy the book Strawberries, the unfinished biography of Joseph Roth, here: