The Krakow Post paints a detailed portrait of the great writer from Galicia. He passed away seventy years ago today, May 27th, 1939 at the age of 45, only months before the start of WWII:

Some have called Roth a poet of “Austroslavism,” owing to his longing for a peaceful coexistence of a multitude of nations under the formal roof of monarchy. “I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland,” he wrote of the Habsburg Empire, “and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and shortcomings.”