What young Ukrainians will learn from reading Joseph Roth
As Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, Volodymyr Zelensky’s ministry of education has just announced changes to the national curriculum that include removing almost all the Russian authors on the foreign literature syllabus. In last week’s Spectator, Svitlana Morenets revealed the new names: we see Robert Burns, whose inclusion may be a nod to Britain’s support during the conflict. Then there is Joseph Roth, a master of German prose, whose writing about interwar Europe speaks to Ukraine’s modern upheavals. Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a town that now stands in western Ukraine but then lay in what was known as Galicia, the eastern Austro–Hungarian crownland. He left as soon